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Dolores Huerta is coming to Berkeley this Friday to advocate against the School of the Americas where Latin American soldiers are trained in torture techniques. 

Huerta, a dynamic speaker who energizes her audiences, has no time for despair.  

Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union with Cesar Chavez, she is a life-long organizer and lobbyist. Huerta urged others to join her in the struggle. 

It is imperative for people to connect “their street politics with electoral politics,” she said, “otherwise our representative government is not going to work.” 

When she went to the Peace March in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, she said she wished that even a few of the people at the march would become full-time activists. 

“Of the 200,000 people there, if only 5,000 or even 1,000 would go up to [Capital Hill] and start lobbying, we could have stopped maybe the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court,” she said.  

A mother of 11, she advises people to set their priorities by finding something that is really important and do it before thinking of all the reasons they can’t. 

“If cleaning the house is going to have an impact 50 years from now, then clean your house,” she said. “If going out to that demonstration to change some policy is going to have a better impact, then definitely go to that demonstration.” 

Winner of the Puffin Foundation Award for Creative Citizenship in 2002, she poured her $100,00 grant from the award into creating the Dolores Huerta Foundation Organizing Institute. Her youngest daughter, Camila Chavez, is the executive director of the Bakersfield-based foundation. 

The institute is setting up training for people interested in working full-time as organizers. But already there is a paid staff organizing against Proposition 73, the “notify parents before abortion” measure on this November’s special election ballot. Huerta said the prominence of issues like women’s rights and gay rights is sometimes used to obfuscate the fact that corporations are taking over our government. 

Even at 75, Dolores Huerta is so politically active it is hard to catch up with her. 

She just received the Pace e Bene Award for non-violent activism this month, and on Friday she will be at Berkeley’s St. Joseph the Worker Church talking with Father Louie Vitale against the School of the Americas. This military school, funded by U.S. tax dollars, and which has been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is responsible for deaths and disappearances throughout Latin America, Huerta said. 

“Every issue is interrelated,” she said. “What happens in Latin America affects what happens here. Father Louie Vitale and Father Bill O’Donnell have gone to prison over this issue. The United States should not be involved in training terrorists. This is a very just issue that people need to find out about.”  

Her own non-violent training began early, in the Catholic teaching of “turn the other cheek” and in reading about St. Francis and Gandhi. When her philosophy of non-violence met the reality of violence during the United Farm Workers’ strikes, Huerta said, it showed how effective the philosophy of non-violence was. 

“When we were on the picket lines, the growers came at us with violence and you saw the strikers were not violent, you saw how that really made the picket line stronger, it made the workers stronger,” she said. 

Even after being beaten by San Francisco police, she says her non-violent attitudes were reinforced.  

Huerta, who has negotiated several contracts for the U.F.W., offers advice to union negotiators, techniques she learned from people like Lou Goldblatt of the Longshoreman’s Union. 

She said, “First, when you negotiate you’re always honest both with the workers and the companies you’re bargaining with. Number two, the workers have to be involved in negotiations. A lot of people think you have to be an attorney to negotiate; you don’t have to be. Then, always be reasonable and try to come to a common agreement with the employer, not to make it contentious.” 

Huerta said she avoids feeling discouraged by looking for the good that can come out of something bad. 

“Katrina was a horrible disaster in terms of the people that got killed, but it is certainly showing the true face of our government in such a stark way, even those who had some confidence in this government are now starting to question it,” she said.  

After being very ill, Huerta says she has regained energy very slowly. Yet, as she speaks, she fulfills what her grandfather said of her, that she must have seven tongues because she speaks so fast. An unflagging organizer, she brings her audiences along with her, translating English to Spanish, urging agreement. 

With one fist raised in solidarity, she calls out “Si, Se Puede”—“Yes, We Can.” 

Dolores Huerta is scheduled to be at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St., Friday, Nov. 4, at 7 p.m. for a conversation with Father Louie Vitale regarding the School of the Americas.›