Activist Dolores Huerta to Visit ISU

Date: 4/9/07
Contact: Kathy Beal

Illinois State University will host activist Dolores Huerta, who will present “Civil Rights and Social Activism: Sharing a Lifetime of Experience” on Thursday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. in 138 Schroeder Hall and “Feminism and Social Activism – Saving the Future with Gender Balance” on Friday, April 27, at 1 p.m. in the University Galleries. Both presentations are free and open to the public.

Huerta was born 75 years ago in a New Mexico mining town, and raised in Stockton, Calif., by her mother, Alicia Chavez, and grandfather, Herculano Chavez, a miner who became disabled in a mining accident. Huerta received a teaching certificate and initially taught at a grammar school, but said she “couldn’t stand seeing farm worker children come to class hungry and in need of shoes” and thought she “could do more by organizing their parents.” She was a founding member of the Stockton Chapter of the Community Service Organization and the Agricultural Workers Association. At the age of 25, Huerta became a lobbyist in Sacramento followed by a long and distinguished career representing and negotiating for farm workers.

Huerta co-founded the Robert Kennedy Medical Plan, Juan De La Cruz Farm Workers Pension fund and Farm Workers Credit Union - the first medical and pension plans and credit union in history for farm workers. They also formed the National Farm Workers Service Center which provides affordable housing throughout California, Washington and Arizona.

In 2002, Huerta received the $100,000 Puffin Foundation/Nation Institute Award for Creative Citizenship, which allowed her to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation’s Organizing Institute. The Institute focuses on community organizing and leadership training in low-income, under-represented communities.

Huerta is a Feminist Majority Foundation board member, secretary-treasurer emerita of the United Farm Workers of America and a member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She was awarded the American Civil Liberties Union Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty Award, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation Outstanding American Award, the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom Award and the Consumers Union Trumpeter’s Award. She was named one of three Ms. Magazine’s Women of the Year is 1998, the Ladies Home Journal’s 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century, and received the U.S. Presidential Eleanor D. Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Bill Clinton. Huerta has garnered six honorary doctoral degrees.