Mass mobilization

'I Think the ‘60s Are Back’

Legendary labor activist Dolores Huerta sees history repeating itself in the mass mobilization against President Trump.

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

Dolores Huerta, the famed labor leader who marched with Cesar Chavez and coined his rallying cry, is still mad as hell—and she was spitting fire when I asked her about President Trump’s plans to stop protecting undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as kids.

“This is a step up above slavery,” Huerta says, in the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “The Republican plan is to deport all of the people that you have here that are undocumented, and bring in folks here under foreign labor contracts.”

She doesn’t much care, either, whether the president is personally a racist—it’s enough that Trump engages in racist rhetoric, in her reckoning, and “gives license to all the racism that already exists in the United States of America.” She ticks off ideas he’s considering or already enacting: Extending provisions for contract workers, who come in for labor without rights. The border wall. Accelerated deportations. And now Trump is going after the 800,000 people who signed up for two-year work permits under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA.

And all the while, Huerta says, Trump and other wealthy people like him benefit more than anybody from the sweat of immigrant labor, without ever appreciating it.
“I think it’s mean. I think that he’s got this obsession, a fixation, against people of color. You know, the way that he keeps attacking Mexicans,” she says. “I’m a Mexican American. And my great-grandparents were here before his were, I’m sure. And his grandfather came from Germany.”

In Trump, Huerta, who’s now 87, sees everything she’s been fighting since the 1950s. The exploitation and discrimination is just clearer now, she says. In a lifetime in activism that stretches back to her time as Chavez’s forgotten partner organizing farmworkers in the 1960s, Huerta’s had a knack for saying things that stick, from when she first came up with “Si Se Puede” by chance as part of a heated conversation with organizers in Arizona in 1972, to when she lit a media explosion in 2006 by telling an Arizona high school, “Republicans hate Latinos.”

Looking at the president and the politics he’s encouraging, Huerta quotes Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset on power going to the greedy and powerful, and says America is “approaching” mob rule, exposing the racism, sexism and classism that she feels like she’s been battling ever since she got her start in activism by joining Stockton’s Community Service Organization in 1955.

“We see that it’s really very visible that people who before maybe were racist but didn’t declare themselves as such now feel that they have license to do so,” Huerta says. “It’s good that the racism is so visible, because then this means that we have to do something about it.”

So she’s thrilled to see the marches, like the one planned for Tuesday to start in front of the White House and go to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement main office, starting a five-day hunger strike, or the many other protests expected across the country in the days ahead, building on the Women’s March and others that have taken off since Trump’s inauguration.

Huerta’s is a singular figure in the history of American politics. A prominent female labor leader at a time when women were barely factors in the labor movement at all, she came later to the women’s rights movement (though she came to embrace it). A central enough political force that she was standing just at Bobby Kennedy’s right when he declared victory in the 1968 California primary minutes before he was assassinated, she’s become almost anonymous in the decades since. (Chavez even usually gets the credit for Si Se Puede.)

A mother of 11 who barely saw many of her children for sometimes years along the way because of how much she threw herself into the organizing work, she’s clearly frustrated by how she’s been overlooked, how Chavez is a household name and hers is generally known only to those steeped in the lore of labor activism’s heyday.

Trying to recalibrate the record, she’s eagerly participated in a new movie about the history of her life, Dolores, but in promoting it, she knows that she can’t escape grappling with the present. That includes the present of Trump and his relationship with Latinos, but also the present of a labor movement in crisis. Membership has been dropping for decades, and now panic is setting in about how the Supreme Court will rule on laws restricting organizing for public-sector workers. Labor strategists who a year ago were well into plans for how they were going to try to nudge a President Hillary Clinton to the left are still catching up with how to approach a White House in which they have no real point of entry. Leaders find themselves less in touch with their members than they’d thought, unable to explain how endorsements for Clinton from the top squared with so many members pulling the lever for Trump on Election Day, and unsure how to re-establish that bond. Members who wanted Clinton are depressed. Many fear that, for a labor movement in crisis, the future will be even worse.

And meanwhile, technology is automating job after job, the well-paying manufacturing work of yesteryear isn’t coming back and other than the death of the Trans Pacific Partnership, America’s trade policy remains the same approach that labor leaders have been decrying for decades. Huerta talks about refusing to use the self-checkout line at CVS, but knows that kind of quiet action is barely a drop within a drop, and that the real revolution that she wants isn’t anywhere near happening.

On the contrary—the upheaval and radicalism of the 1960s ended with Richard Nixon’s election and presidency, in some parallel to the politics that elected Trump: beyond the most passionate supporters at the rallies, a quieter majority in enough states, many of them snapping back against cultural and economic elites they felt had disrespected and ignored their concerns.

Nixon, of course, was elected to two terms, which is more than many people with Huerta’s politics can conceive is possible for Trump.

“I love to quote the poet Pablo Neruda, who said, “They can cut all the flowers, but you can’t hold back the spring,” she says. “And I do believe that we are the spring. We are the ones that are going to go forward. We’re going to sow those seeds of justice and they’re going to sprout. And we’re going to be a lot stronger.”