Dolores Huerta is not a movie star or the lead singer of a pop band. She's a civil rights hero and recently visited Oxnard.
Her lifetime legacy of fighting for the rights of farmworkers, women, and marginalized communities has elevated her to superhero status.
Huerta, along with co-founder Cesar Chavez, got farmworkers to unionize, and reflected on what this collective power has meant for countless families.
"Once you organize people...you convince them that they have power and that they don't need to have somebody to come in from the outside to come and solve their issues, that they have the power, the intelligence to do it themselves. And all they have to do is come together, work in a collective manner, in a nonviolent manner. That they can make the changes that they need to be made, that they have the power to do that," Huerta told KCLU.
"You know, when you organize people, the end result of that is to get good legislation passed. And so the Amnesty Bill of 1986 was one of the accomplishments that I feel very proud of, because I spent four months in Washington, D.C., passing that law, and many hundreds of thousands of people got their legalization under that bill," she added.
In 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President Barack Obama, and now, even at 95 years old, Huerta is not slowing down in her fight for workers' rights.
"Things are rolling back very, very fast. We're right now living with a fascist president who is trying to really exert his power in a very mean and brutal way, especially against our immigrant community. So this is a time that people really need to come together and organize," said Huerta.
She said, "This was part of Mexico. This is North America and South America, populated by Indigenous people. So I have a great-grandmother who came from Spain, I have another great-grandfather who came from England. So they're the immigrants. The Indigenous people that populate both North and South America, this is their land," she said.
She said she's recently been picketing a detention center and is concerned about the mistreatment of detainees.
"The people have died in the detention centers. These are not places to have any human being," she said.
Does she ever feel frightened for her own safety when speaking up?
"I have been beaten by police. I have been jailed many, many times. Most of the time, I think I just get angry," she concluded.
Dolores Huerta's name lives on in a newly opened affordable housing community in Oxnard, which provides homes for farm workers, veterans, and low-income families in Ventura County and it’s a fitting legacy for someone who has worked for decades to empower the underserved.
