55 Top Dolores Huerta Quotes
Inside: Inspiring quotes from Dolores Huerta, organized by theme.
Dolores Huerta is one of the most famous Latina labor leaders in the United States.
Dolores Huerta is a living civil rights icon. She has spent most of her life as a political activist, fighting for better working conditions for farmworkers and the rights of the downtrodden, a firm believer in the power of political organizing to effect change.
– Dolores Huerta: The Civil Rights Icon Who Showed Farmworkers ‘Sí Se Puede’
Her most famous quote by far is, “Sí se puede,” — in English, “Yes you (we) can.”
Born in 1930 in New Mexico, Huerta grew up in California among migrant farm workers. She went on to become a teacher. Upon seeing the conditions among her student families, she left teaching to become an activist and founeded the Community Service Organization (CSO).
In the 1960s, Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers (UFW) with César Chávez, and together they fought for the rights of farmworkers in California and across the country.
She was instrumental in organizing boycotts, strikes, and other forms of nonviolent protest to improve working conditions and wages for farmworkers. The most famous boycott, perhaps, was the 1965 Delano Grape Strike that lasted 5 years.
Huerta has also been a fierce advocate for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice. Even in her nineties, Dolores continues to inspire and motivate people to fight for social justice.
She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, which is the highest civilian honor in the United States. Chavez-Huerta Day honors joint legacy of the two leaders.
Contents:
1. Quotes about About Farm Work
2. Quotes on Activism
3. Quotes on Social Justice
4. Quotes in Feminism
5. Reflections on Her Own Life
6. Quotes on Community Organizing
7. Quotes on Voting
Related: Dolores Huerta Lesson Plan and Resources
10 Dolores Huerta Quotes on Farm Workers
1. “Honor the hands that harvest your crops.”
– Dolores Huerta
2. “Professional farmworkers who know how to do a number of different jobs, whether it be pruning or picking or crafting, they see themselves as professionals, and they take a lot of pride in that work. They don’t see themselves as doing work that is demeaning.”
– Dolores Huerta
3. “The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time – 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn’t have toilets in the fields; they didn’t have cold drinking water. They didn’t have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.”
– Dolores Huerta
4. “Every single day we sit down to eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and at our table we have food that was planted, picked, or harvested by a farm worker. Why is it that the people who do the most sacred work in our nation are the most oppressed, the most exploited?”
– Dolores Huerta
5. “Why is it that farmworkers feed the nation but they can’t get food stamps?”
– Dolores Huerta
6. “As we’ve focused more on our food and where it comes from, people now have greater awareness of what’s being put onto our food, pesticides, labeling issues, and consumer health.”
– Dolores Huerta
7. “We need to keep ringing the bell, wake people up to get our democracy together. Farm workers are like a symbol, and it is good that people are paying attention.”
– Dolores Huerta
8. “People were so incredibly poor and they were working so hard. And the children were [suffering from malnutrition] and very ill-clothed and ill-fed. I said, “This is wrong,” because you saw how hard they were working, and yet they were not getting paid anything.”
– Dolores Huerta
9. “Well, the conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time — 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning.”
– Dolores Huerta
10. “If we don’t have workers organized into labor unions, we’re in great peril of losing our democracy.”
– Dolores Huerta
10 Dolores Huerta Quotes on Activism
1. “The thing about nonviolence is that it spreads. When you get people to participate in nonviolent action – whether it’s a fast, a march, a boycott, or a picket line – people hear you, people see you, people are learning from that action.”
– Dolores Huerta
2. “Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.”
– Dolores Huerta
3. “I think we brought to the world, the United States anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change.”
– Dolores Huerta
4. “I think the importance of doing activist work is to engage people and give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow. Hope that change is possible and that they can be a part of that transformation.”
– Dolores Huerta
5. “How do I stop eleven million people from buying the grape?”
– Dolores Huerta
6. Going door to door and talking to people, convincing them to vote, that’s what I call organizing 101.
– Dolores Huerta
7. “We just have to convince other people that they have power. This is what they can do by participating to make change, not only in their community, but many times changing in their own lives. Once they participate, they get their sense of power.”
– Dolores Huerta
8. “Once you see the outcomes and the results, and you see how many people are helped and benefitting, you want to keep on doing it because it’s so simple.”
– Dolores Huerta
9. “Once I learned about grassroots organizing, I got so enamored with it because I thought ‘Wow this is the way you do it!’
– Dolores Huerta
10. “People would say ‘Who is a leader?’ A leader is a person that does the work. It’s very simple. It’s a personal choice for people who choose to put in their time and their commitment to do the work. It’s a personal choice.”
– Dolores Huerta
10 Dolores Huerta Quotes On Social Justice
1. “We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things. That is what we are put on the earth for.”
– Dolores Huerta
2. “And so that became the slogan of our campaign in Arizona and now is the slogan for the immigrant rights movement, you know, on posters. We can do it. I can do it. Si se puede.”
– Dolores Huerta
3. “Giving kids clothes and food is one thing, but it’s much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.”
– Dolores Huerta
4. “I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.”
– Dolores Huerta
5. “Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.”
– Dolores Huerta
6. “The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.”
– Dolores Huerta
7. “Don’t be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for Justice. Viva the boycott!”
– Dolores Huerta
8. “Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.”
– Dolores Huerta
9. “There’s just so many facets, I think, of the ignorance in our society that have to be corrected if we’re really going to have a democratic society and a society that is just and that respects all of the members of this society regardless of who they are, what color they may be, what sexual orientation that they have or what gender, you know, they happen to be.”
– Dolores Huerta
10. “We can’t let people drive wedges between us… because there’s only one human race.”
– Dolores Huerta
5 Dolores Huerta Quotes On Feminism
1. “We as women should shine light on our accomplishments and not feel egotistical when we do. It’s a way to let the world know that we as women can accomplish great things!”
– Dolores Huerta
2. “That’s the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn’t.”
– Dolores Huerta
3. “We do need women in civic life. We do need women to run for office, to be in political office. We need a feminist to be at the table when decisions are being made so that the right decisions will be made.”
– Dolores Huerta
4. “A women’s place in history has never been given the attention that it needs to be given, and that’s why we have a lot of the misogyny in our society today.”
– Dolores Huerta
5. “Among our people, theres not any question about women being strong — even stronger than men — they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you dont have these questions about yourself like middle — class women do.”
– Dolores Huerta
10 Dolores Huerta Quotes Reflecting On Her Own Life
1. “It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‘dragon lady’ or something like it.”
– Dolores Huerta
2. I think that’s something that all mothers have to deal with, especially single mothers. We work, and we have to leave the kids behind. And I think that’s one of the reasons that we, not only as women but as families, we have to advocate for early childhood education for all of our children.”
– Dolores Huerta
3. “We had a lot of violence, definitely. And then I was beaten up by the police San Francisco [in 1988].”
– Dolores Huerta
4. “I quit because I can’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”
– Dolores Huerta
5. “My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.”
– Dolores Huerta
5. “My dad did farm work and also, along you know, I was born during the Depression. And my father had to migrate to the states of Wyoming and Nebraska and following the sugar beet crops, so when we were very small, we you know, went along with my dad and lived in the tar paper shacks and saw all of the life that a farmworker lives.”
– Dolores Huerta
6. “My mother was a dominant force in our family. And that was great for me as a young woman, because I never saw that women had to be dominated by men.”
– Dolores Huerta
7. “As a youngster and being a Latina, you see so much injustice.”
– Dolores Huerta
8. “I call myself an addicted organizer.”
– Dolores Huerta
9. “My mother was a very wonderful woman. When she and my dad divorced, she moved to California and worked two jobs in the cannery at night and as a waitress during the day. But she saved enough money to establish a restaurant.”
– Dolores Huerta
10. “What I’d like to share with people is that what we have to give to our children are values, not so much material, [but] a social conscience. You have to involve them at a very young age so they grow up knowing that this is something they can do that they have power to help people. And I think that’s the biggest thing I gave my children.”
– Dolores Huerta, AARP
5 Quotes On Community Organizing
1. “If we can just convince other people to get involved, this could make some major changes in our society. It’s very exhilarating.”- Dolores Huerta
2. “When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.”
– Dolores Huerta
3. “When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.”
– Dolores Huerta
4. “When you choose to give up your time and resources to participate in community work, that’s what makes a leader.”
– Dolores Huerta
5. “When a group of people get together, it’s collective power. You know that you’re doing it for the good.”- Dolores Huerta
5 Quotes On Voting
1. “I say that now we see a lot of hateful rhetoric against Mexicans and the Latino community, but we have a very powerful weapon. And that is our vote. This is the way we can get even with all of the politicians who are insulting us and saying terrible things about our community – by voting them out. And get the good ones. Vote them in.”
– Dolores Huerta
2. If people don’t vote, everything stays the same. You can protest until the sky turns yellow or the moon turns blue, and it’s not going to change anything if you don’t vote.
– Dolores Huerta
3. “We have to convince people that they have the power to elect people. The people they are electing are the ones making the decisions about how our tax dollars are going to be spent. Is it going to be for more jails, or for more schools? For more house services? It’s very important that people understand that, do their research and find out who to vote for.”
4. “Exercise your right to vote.”
5. “If you don’t know, your labor unions and community organizations, there’s somebody you can ask to guide you. A lot of people, especially in the Latino community, they have this big ballot and all these names and propositions on it, and they say ‘Oh my God’. They don’t know which of these to vote for, so they don’t vote.”
Image Credits for Dolores Huerta Quotes:
“Photo by Kelly Johnson Revolutionary Pho” (CC BY 2.0) by _99Rise_
“Dolores Huerta” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gage Skidmore
“El Super Rally Novembe-22-201653” (CC BY 2.0) by ufcw770
“El Super Rally Novembe-22-201621” (CC BY 2.0) by ufcw770
Did I miss any of your favorite quotes from Dolores Huerta? Let me know in the comments below.
