Dolores Huerta, “Born-Again Feminist”
  October 29, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, This week, we mourn the loss of activist Dolores Huerta, who died yesterday at the age of 96. What Huerta gave so many of us simply cannot be measured—not in a hundred different obituaries. She was too big and encompassed so much of what it meant to be a mother, a leader, a survivor, and an unshakable force for all people. Today, we look back at Huerta’s specific relationship with feminism—a movement she once regarded with skepticism and later made her mark on. Sincerely, Shannon Melero  A feminist (r)evolution: In 2017, at the age of 87, labor activist and feminist giant Dolores Huerta took the stage at the women’s march during the Sundance Film Festival and led a chant of “We will not go back!” On the heels of Donald Trump’s first inauguration, she had a message for people fighting against “this creature”: “Feminists out there, men and women, we have to take the power.” In addition to being an iconic champion of workers’ rights and civil rights, Dolores Huerta is considered one of the 20th century’s most important feminists. Her life’s work was truly intersectional; she consistently intertwined women’s rights with other civil rights movements. But feminism wasn’t always a major part of her identity. In fact, when the women’s movement was first getting off the ground, Huerta was hesitant to embrace it at all.  HUERTA SPEAKING IN PARK CITY IN 2017. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) In the late sixties, when white, coastal, middle-class women began fighting for things like abortion rights and sexual freedom, Dolores Huerta had been working in the labor movement for a decade. She was already a key player in the United Farm Workers, leading the grape boycott on the East Coast. Like many other Chicanas, she saw women’s liberation as a movement that was unconcerned with the working-class women of color she organized alongside. As historian Ana Raquel Minian has documented, leaders of the UFW often decried birth control, homosexuality, and promiscuity in their speeches—largely, Minian writes, as a strategy to combat ugly stereotypes of oversexed, “overfertile” Chicanos. Huerta, who was personally against abortion and birth control due to her Catholic upbringing, was no exception; in several speeches, she and labor leader Richard Chavez chastised organizers for having “indiscriminate and shameless sex” that, in their words, “reflected bad on the Union.” But, as the ‘70s wore on, Huerta’s thinking began to evolve as she reflected on her own experiences. She faced criticism within the labor movement for being divorced twice, for being a single mother who left her children at home while she traveled, for “living in sin” with her partner Richard Chavez—“all criticisms that her male counterparts didn’t get,” says Stacey Sowards, a professor of communications at University of Texas-Austin and author of ¡Sí, Ella Puede!: The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers. Huerta observed that she and other women were denigrated in meetings and relegated to lesser jobs within the UFW. She began calling out the machismo of her fellow organizers and keeping a record of their sexist remarks. Today, we also know that since the ‘60s, she had been grappling with the fallout of sexual coercion and violence at the hands of her close collaborator, UFW president Cesar Chavez.  A PORTRAIT OF HUERTA IN 1975 (VIA GETTY IMAGES) By 1976, Huerta was affirming her feminism in an interview in Ms. magazine—albeit very much on her own terms. “I consider myself a feminist, and the women’s movement has done a lot toward helping me not feel guilty about my divorces,” she said. But she added that poor women, unlike more privileged women, didn’t have the luxury of doubt and insecurity: “When your survival is at stake,” she said, “you don’t have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.” In the decades that followed, she actively fought for women’s rights, calling herself a “born-again feminist” for the first (but not the last) time in 1985. While she was recovering from a brutal beating by a police officer at a protest in 1988, she took a leave of absence from UFW and traveled to eight states with the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Feminization of Power campaign to mentor women, particularly Latinas and other women of color, who were running for office. (That work helped usher in 1992’s Year of the Woman, when a record number of women ran and won.) And despite Huerta’s personal feelings about abortion, she became a full-throated pro-choice advocate, campaigning against personhood laws in Colorado in 2014 and calling access to abortion a “human right.” After the 2016 election, she became an honorary co-chair of the Women’s March in D.C. Paola Mendoza, an activist, producer and Women’s March’s 2017 artistic director who interviewed Huerta for a Meteor event in 2022, recalls feeling that as “a Latina [who was] organizing under the first Trump administration…having her presence there was profound.”  HUERTA IN CONVERSATION WITH LABOR LEADER CHRIS SMALLS, MODERATED BY PAOLA MENDOZA IN 2022 Throughout it all, Huerta saw these fights for justice as interrelated. Sowards remembers hearing her give a speech at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2006, during the height of immigration reform protests, during which she mentioned “the environmental movement, the women’s movement, gay rights…She could see the intersectionality of all of these pieces of oppression and injustice.” And then, earlier this year, she told the world that she had been sexually abused by Cesar Chavez. “As shocking as that was, I’m so glad that Dolores didn’t go to her death with that secret,” says Mendoza. Huerta “finally was able to put herself before the movement,” she says, and “reveal her truth.” Yet even in that painful personal moment, Huerta reaffirmed her devotion to the collective. “I will continue my commitments to workers, as well as my commitment to women’s rights, to make sure we have a voice and that our communities are treated with dignity and given the equity that they have so long been denied,” she wrote in a statement. “I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.” And on the topic of having a voice: Huerta, who also fought tirelessly for voting rights, leaves this plane right before a crucial election. Do it for Dolores.  MORE ON DOLORES HUERTA’S LEGACY
 FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
