What did civil rights icon Dolores Huerta tell students? “The Spirit of Madera” continues.

A few weeks shy of her 93rd birthday, civil rights advocate Dolores Huerta reminded Madera Community College students that her six-decade crusade isn’t finished.

Especially because of a recent, failed effort to ban a curriculum about United Farm Workers founder César E. Chávez at Bakersfield College.

“Could you believe that right there in your dream of California, where our movement started?” Huerta asked the students during a March 28 visit. “Luckily, the board did not listen to them, but we do have those extremist organizations throughout the Central Valley that are going to try to stop the teachings of the farmworkers’ union.”

Huerta, who will celebrate her 93rd birthday on April 10, called efforts to continue celebrating and supporting the farmworker movement “The Spirit of Madera.”

“The reason I’ve coined that term is because today you are celebrating the work that César and I did,” said Huerta, who left her UFW secretary-treasure post to launch the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2022.

During a 26-minute talk, Huerta covered politics, social justice and the future before posing for photos and autographing posters and other items.

Her Bakersfield-based foundation, said Huerta, “is trying to counter some of the hatred that is happening right here in the United States of America.”

She identified election deniers, efforts to cleanse people of color from history books, and restrict women’s rights.

“Education, I believe, is the only way that we are going to be able to counter this,” said Huerta. “As long as the people are educated, they won’t be ignorant.”

Huerta referred to José Ortega y Gassett’s 1930 book ‘The Revolt of the Masses’ in which the Spanish philosopher wrote “if you do not have an educated citizenry – as he put it – in a country, the powerful, the corrupt and the greedy will rule.”

Huerta, who has actively campaigned for progressive candidates, questioned why a rich country like the U.S. can’t afford free health care and education for all.

“When I talk about free college education and free health care, the countries in Europe (in Scandinavia) and Latin América (Cuba) have” those, said Huerta.

Huerta said Americans can do this by electing progressive people.

“We can change this picture of poverty,” she said. “It’s a shame that in the United States we have so many homeless people. This is a picture that we have to change.”

Huerta also commented on various subjects:

Activism: “When you become an activist, you make history. I am so happy in my life that I was able to learn how to organize. It was like I found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Feminism: “We as women, you know, face a lot of racial discrimination. We face a lot of sexual harassment and misogyny. When I learned that you could organize people and have them come together to take direct action, this is the way that we could change things.”

The movement: Fred Ross Sr. was “the father of the Chicano movement because he’s the one that taught us and myself and other organizers how to organize.”

Community power: “If you can convince people that they have the power to change the issues that are affecting their community, they have the power to do that. They don’t have to wait for somebody to come and do it for them.”

People power: Huerta noted two cases where residents came together to “get rid” of a principal in Weedpatch who wants to eliminate the breakfast program because “it was too much work,” and, passed a bond issue for a new gymnasium because the the air was too unhealthy for them to play outdoors.

In neighboring Lamont, Huerta said residents fought against a Texas company that ran their water system and “were going to charge them an exorbitant amount of money. “They got all the signatures and got rid of that Texas group, and now they run their own water,” she said.

Her foundation’s work: Huerta noted the foundation helped vaccinate more than 10,000 people against COVID, and proposed legislative district maps that were approved by the California Redistricting Commission. When the commission held hearings, said Huerta, “we had hundreds of people that went to all those hearings they had throughout the state. It’s all about people power.”

Pro-choice rights: “Some of those (Catholic) priests and (evangelical) ministers are telling us that having an abortion is wrong. Well, I am the mother of 11 children. My daughter doesn’t have any kids. I respect my daughter’s choice not to have children, and I think people respect my choice to have 11 children.

“No religious leader and no politician can tell a woman what to do with her body. The woman is the only who can decide what to do.”

Sexism: “I think right now in today’s world we see that people are fighting racism, but we actually have to do it without our own families and within our own friends. Not just the sexism but also the machismo. We’re tired of that machismo. We got to get rid of it.”

Immigration reform: “We need another legalization bill. How are we going to get it? We’ve got to get some more Congressmen, some more senators that will help us get another amnesty bill. Complaining isn’t going to help us at all; we’ve got to get our there and register people to vote.”