Dolores Huerta, famed farmworkers leader, honored with first ‘Si Se Puede’ award by AFL-CIO

Legendary labor leader Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, urged hundreds of union leaders gathered in Minneapolis on Monday to look beyond their differences and remain optimistic despite unprecedented assaults on unions and immigrants.

“I do believe these terrible times that we’re living in right now, that we’re going to come out of it a lot stronger,” said Huerta, speaking at the AFL-CIO’s 30th Constitutional Convention. “Labor is going to be at the front … of the march to make that happen.”

Huerta, 96, was honored as the first recipient of the AFL-CIO Si Se Puede Award, named in her honor after the United Farm Workers slogan and union rally cry — meaning “Yes, we can!” — that Huerta created.

She is one of the most influential labor leaders in American history, having helped found the trailblazing agricultural workers union that won higher pay for tens of thousands of workers and enhanced the political power of Latinos nationwide.

In her 25-minute address, Huerta did not directly speak about the New York Times investigation that rocked the labor movement, revealing that labor giant Cesar Chavez sexually abused Huerta and underage girls while leading the United Farm Workers.

Huerta revealed for the first time in March — to the Times and in her own statement — that Chavez pressured her to have sex with him and later raped her in a vehicle in a secluded grape field in two sexual encounters that led her to give birth to two girls. She hid the pregnancies and arranged for the children to be raised by others.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta wrote in her statement. “The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”

Following the Times story, local and state governments moved to erase Chavez’s name from street signs and elementary schools. Minnesota and Arizona repealed state holidays named for him while California renamed it Farmworkers Day.

She did say on Monday that unions must “cleanse ourselves” in what could read as an oblique reference to Chavez’s abuse that went on in secret for decades or a more general call for unions to root out injustice and heal division in their own ranks.

“We’ve got to look at some of the things to get ready for battle, some of the things within our own communities, in our own organizations that we have to improve,” Huerta said.

Huerta began her remarks by thanking the people of Minneapolis for their bravery during Operation Metro Surge, which sent some 3,000 federal agents into the streets in an unprecedented immigration crackdown.

“The MAGA people assume that everybody in the country is racist. Well, they found out they’re not,” Huerta said. “They found out there are people who care about their neighbors, regardless of their immigration status, regardless of the color of their skin.”

She said Americans can overcome the racism that persists in the country by remembering that “we are one human race.”

“Our human race came from Africa … that means we are all Africans of different shades and colors,” she said. “​​To all the neo-Nazis out there, to all the white supremacists out there, get over it, you’re Africans.”

Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two Americans killed by federal agents in January, would not be forgotten, Huerta said. Pretti, who worked as a nurse at the Minneapolis VA, was a member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3669.

She also urged Americans not to forget the many other people killed in the fight for civil rights, naming the “martyrs who were hung because they fought for the eight-hour day,” a reference to the executions following the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in 1886 that is commemorated during International Workers Day on May 1.

Huerta rattled off a list of progressive policy ideals — universal healthcare, universal childcare, free college — and said they are possible if the labor movement sticks to the simple task of organizing.

“We know that we have to organize and organize and organize,” Huerta said.

She ended her remarks with a quote of optimism from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: “They can cut all the flowers, but they can’t hold back the spring.”