Washington, Sep 15 (EFE).- Dolores Huerta, who broke gender and ethnic barriers by leading strikes and boycotts to win better pay for farmworkers, has set her sights on demolishing another barrier, the one President Donald Trump wants to build on the US border with Mexico.
A “wall of progressivism” is what the United States, she told EFE.
“Our wall will be made of people, representatives in Congress, strong and progressive people. We don’t want people to be lukewarm or weak,” the 87-year-old activist said.
Huerta’s goal is to challenge Republican control of Congress in the November 2018 mid-term elections, when one-third of Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be at stake, and she wants to see Hispanics play a major role in that effort.
“We need to support good candidates, and if there aren’t any, we need to become candidates ourselves, starting at the local level,” she said. “Right-wingers start at the local level and that’s what we need to do.”
In the 1960s, Huerta and the late Cesar Chavez founded what later became the United Farm Workers of America to fight for better pay and labor conditions for laborers in the fields.
When the mostly Filipino grape-pickers in Delano, California, initiated a strike in 1965, the organization led by Huerta and Chavez went on strike in support, marking the first time farmworkers of different nationalities banded together in struggle.
The documentary “Dolores,” which opens Friday in select theaters across the country, tells the story of “a true heroine” who has not been given proper recognition because she is a woman, according to director Peter Bratt.