Question

Read this excerpt about activist Dolores Huerta. Throughout the twentieth century, strikes and efforts to unionize migrant workers had failed to achieve real change. But the civic activism that swept through America after World War II stirred the Mexican-American community, including Huerta’s family. In 1955, along with her mother and an aunt, Huerta became involved in grassroots organizing as a member of the Community Service Organization (CSO). She honed her organizing skills and became a lobbyist in Sacramento, helping set up voter registration drives and fighting for the legal rights of migrant workers. Which statement is the best summary of this excerpt? Dolores Huerta was an organizer during World War II who tried to change the migrant workers in California. Dolores Huerta was a member of the Community Service Organization and a registered voter. Dolores Huerta was part of the Mexican-American community and worked with her family in Sacramento. Dolores Huerta was a hands-on leader whose goal was to improve working conditions for migrant farm workers.

Answer 1

Answer:

Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta is one of the most influential labor activists of the 20th century and a leader of the Chicano civil rights movement.

Born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta was the second of three children of Alicia and Juan Fernandez, a farm worker and miner who became a state legislator in 1938. Her parents divorced when Huerta was three years old, and her mother moved to Stockton, California with her children. Huerta’s grandfather helped raise Huerta and her two brothers while her mother juggled jobs as a waitress and cannery worker until she could buy a small hotel and restaurant. Alicia’s community activism and compassionate treatment of workers greatly influenced her daughter.

Discrimination also helped shape Huerta. A schoolteacher, prejudiced against Hispanics, accused Huerta of cheating because her papers were too well-written. In 1945 at the end of World War II, white men brutally beat her brother for wearing a Zoot-Suit, a popular Latino fashion.

Huerta received an associate teaching degree from the University of the Pacific’s Delta College. She married Ralph Head while a student and had two daughters, though the couple soon divorced. She subsequently married fellow activist Ventura Huerta with whom she had five children, though that marriage also did not last. Huerta briefly taught school in the 1950s, but seeing so many hungry farm children coming to school, she thought she could do more to help them by organizing farmers and farm workers.

In 1955 Huerta began her career as an activist when she co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), which led voter registration drives and fought for economic improvements for Hispanics. She also founded the Agricultural Workers Association.

Answer 2

Answer:

Dolores Huerta, formerly Dolores Fernández, was an American labour organiser and leader who was born in Dawson, New Mexico, on April 10, 1930. Her advocacy on behalf of migrant farmworkers resulted in the founding of the United Farm Workers of America.

Explanation:

• After her parents' divorce, Huerta moved to Stockton, California, with her mother and brothers.
• She kept in touch with her father, Juan Fernández, and was proud of his progress from coal miner to the migrant worker to union organiser to an elected lawmaker in the state legislature of New Mexico to college graduate.
• She continued her education after graduating from Stockton High School, unlike many women of the time.
• Despite a brief marriage, becoming a mother, and a divorce interfering with her education, she eventually graduated from Stockton College with an A.A. She decided she could do more for the starving and barefoot farmworkers' children in her community after working a string of unfulfilling jobs.
• She obtained a teaching credential, but her teaching career was short-lived.
• By assisting their parents in obtaining more egalitarian working conditions, Huerta declassifies.
• As a representative of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a self-help group for Mexican Americans, Huerta pushed for the adoption of progressive laws such as old-age pensions for noncitizens.
• Huerta met Cesar Chavez, a CSO official who had the same interest as she did, in the late 1950s after becoming concerned about the treatment of farmworkers.
• When their efforts to draw the CSO's attention to the injustices affecting rural labourers were unsuccessful, both finally left that group.
• By 1962, they had helped create the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW).
• Through a grape boycott in the late 1960s, the UFW pushed grape growers to improve the working conditions for migrant farmworkers.
• As the organiser of widespread boycotts of Gallo wine, lettuce, and grapes in the 1970s, Huerta contributed to the national atmosphere that resulted in the 1975 passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first statute to recognise the rights of California farmworkers to collectively bargain.
• Huerta co-founded the UFW radio station in the 1980s and continues to advocate and collect money for several topics, such as immigration law and the health of farmworkers.
• Huerta served on the U.S. Commission on Agricultural Workers from 1988 to 1993.
• The commission was established by Congress to assess particular worker protections and labour markets in the agriculture sector.
• She started the Dolores Huerta Foundation, a community organising organisation, in 2002.
• Among her many accolades is her 1993 admission into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
• In 2012, she was also given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dolores Huerta, the subject of the documentary (2017).

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