Wichita gets rare chance to meet a living legend of labor. Here’s her advice | Opinion

Today, I want to take a few minutes to thank a grand lady for gracing Wichita with her presence last weekend.

Her name is Dolores Huerta, and she’s an icon of the labor and civil rights movements who co-founded, with Cesar Chavez, the union that became the United Farm Workers.

Energetic and engaging at 92 years old, Huerta wowed a standing-room only crowd at Exploration Place on Saturday night, sharing a message of how community organizing and civic engagement can change things for the better.

Huerta coined the slogan “Si Se Puede,” the rallying cry for a half-century worth of working-class Latinos fed up with mistreatment in farms and factories, legislatures and courts.

Americans often translate it, loosely, as “Yes We Can.” That association became stronger when Barack Obama adopted both slogans in his presidential campaigns.

The Spanish slogan was actually born during a hunger strike by Chavez over a 1972 Arizona law that gutted farm workers’ rights, and even allowed the state to put workers behind bars for striking and boycotting against agribusiness interests.

As Huerta tells it, she grew perturbed at local activists who kept telling her that fighting such a law might work in California, but in Arizona it was “No se puede,” — it can’t be done. Her response was “Si se puede,” — it can be done.

It’s probably worth noting here that by very narrow margins, Arizonans this month elected a senator who’s critical to keeping a Democratic majority in the Senate — and they rejected a nutty governor candidate who made commercials smashing televisions (she doesn’t like the media) and setting fire to COVID masks.

Si se puede, Arizona.

I never met Huerta before Saturday night, but I did know Cesar Chavez, when I was a young reporter in California covering the town of Moorpark for a long-since-defunct newspaper called the Thousand Oaks News-Chronicle.

Moorpark was the site of Egg City, the nation’s largest egg ranch, and UFW workers there declared a strike and boycott after a spate of wage cuts, layoffs and production-line speedups.

Chavez suffered from debilitating back problems from his younger days working in the fields, doing stoop labor with “el cortito,” a short-handled hoe that has since been banned from almost all American fields. His back specialist was in Thousand Oaks and when Chavez went to his appointments there, he would stop by Moorpark to meet with the striking egg workers.

And he always made time to talk to me.

Unlike most famous people of my experience, Chavez didn’t need publicists or handlers to tell him what to think or to run interference. He knew exactly where he stood and exactly what he wanted to say.

He was remarkably candid with me about what was working and what wasn’t working in the conflict. And those interviews have informed my coverage of labor disputes ever since. Huerta’s son, one of her 11 children, ultimately negotiated the contract with Egg City.

Her core message to Wichita was that while marches and protests can illuminate issues, it takes another level of hard work to turn awareness into votes and to turn those votes into laws. “If it’s not in the law, nothing happens,” she said.

And, she said, it’s not enough to just vote people into office. You also have to cultivate the relationship: “If we have a whole bunch of people like we have here, they’re going to pay attention.”

The loudest applause at Exploration Place came when Huerta thanked Kansas for being the first state in America to uphold women’s reproductive rights after Roe v. Wade was overturned, by voting down the anti-abortion “Value Them Both” amendment in August. She said that while she chose to have 11 children, it’s critical to equally respect the rights of women who choose not to have any.

Joining her in the hour-long panel discussion were Delia Garcia, a former Kansas legislator and state labor secretary, and Sedgwick County Commissioner Sarah Lopez.

The struggle continues.

Almost one in five Wichitans are Latino. But Lopez is the only Latino member out of 19 on the County Commission, Wichita City Council and USD 259 school board.

Maybe that will change at least a little bit for the schools, as a result of the Nov. 8 vote to elect board members by districts instead of at-large.

Si se puede.