Dolores Huerta and the late Cesar Chavez are labor rights icons, credited with leading a movement that pushed farmers to negotiate for better wages and working conditions for farmworkers.
Their legacy is receiving new attention after allegations emerged that Chavez, who died in 1993, was in power. Sexual assault Huerta and other women and girls. Several celebrations honoring Chavez are scheduled to be held across the country later this month It has been cancelled.
Chavez and Huerta co-founded the National Farmworkers Association in 1962, which later became the United Farmworkers of America a few years later when it merged with the Farmworkers Organizing Committee.
The rise of the movement is one of the most important events in U.S. history, the most important event in U.S. Latino history, said Paul Ortiz, a professor of labor history at Cornell University. He said the United Farm Workers have made the most significant and sustainable changes to the working conditions of agricultural workers in the country’s history.
Agricultural workers “from Hawaii to Florida to New York to Southern California have tried to organize to improve their wages and working conditions, for centuries, going back to the time of slavery,” Ortiz said. “Almost all efforts have failed, some of them catastrophically.”
Chavez and Huerta are credited with efforts that led California to pass the state’s first law recognizing farmworkers’ right to collective bargaining.
They both have streets and schools named after them. Several states designated March 31, Chavez’s birthday, as a day to commemorate him, and former President Barack Obama declared this day a federal memorial holiday in 2014.
Here’s a look at their lives and legacy:
Chavez is known for his early stances Organization in fieldsHunger strikes, grape boycotts, and the final victory in convincing farmers to negotiate with farmworkers for better wages and working conditions.
Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, and grew up in a Mexican American family that moved around California picking lettuce, grapes, cotton and other seasonal crops.
Chavez protested against poor wages and often miserable working conditions. There were no toilets in the fields for the workers, and they had to weed the fields with short-handled hoes, forcing them to bend over for hours at a time.
The farmworkers’ movement raised workers’ wages, banned hoes and installed clean drinking water and restrooms in fields with state mandate, according to a National Park Service document supporting the creation of a national monument in Chavez’s honor.
In 1966, he led a march that began with a handful of activists in Delano, California, and ended in Sacramento with 10,000 people, according to a 2014 Obama ad. The ad said about 17 million people joined the grape boycott, forcing farmers to accept some of the first farm labor contracts in history.
The Cesar Chavez Foundation said on its website that Chavez created the first farmworker credit union, health clinics, day care centers and job training programs.
“To his people he was a Moses figure,” former President Bill Clinton said in 1994 when he posthumously awarded Chavez the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Chavez died the previous year in California at the age of 66.
The labor and civil rights leader secured higher wages, health benefits, pensions and pesticide protection for farmworkers during decades of organizing and advocating on their behalf.
Huerta, now 95, helped organize the 1965 Delano strike of 5,000 grape workers, and was the lead negotiator in the labor contract that followed, according to the National Museum of Women’s History.
Huerta, a single mother, gave up a stable teaching career to organize. She was imprisoned more than 20 times for protests and was seriously injured in 1988 while demonstrating. She later advocated for women’s rights, encouraged Latinas to run for office and founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation to combat discrimination, poverty and inequality.
She coined the iconic slogan “Sí, se puede” — meaning “Yes, we can” — in 1972 while mobilizing farmworkers in Arizona against a law prohibiting boycotts and strikes. She has challenged claims that it is impossible to organize there.
Huerta was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and in 1993 became the first Latina to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
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Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan and Fernanda Figueroa contributed to this report.