Dolores Huerta,the United Farm Workers,and people power: Rhetorical participation in Latina/o/x suffrage and social movements

ABSTRACT

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, was and still is involved in a number of social justice causes, including voter participation. Since her days working at the Community Service Organization in the 1950s, she has long advocated for registering and organizing voters as part of a broader strategy to enfranchise Mexican, Mexican American, and other historically marginalized groups. This essay explores a few brief examples of her calls to get out the vote and participate in social movements more broadly to address the deep-seated problems of “citizenship excess” that face Mexican, Mexican American, and other immigrant communities (as well as many others) in the United States. In addition, Huerta has strongly advocated for “people power” as a way to get marginalized people into activism, especially those with intersectional identities related to race, ethnicity, gender, class standing, sexuality, and political orientations.     

Balancing Mystery and Identification: Dolores Huerta's Shifting Transcendent Persona

The present analysis explores Dolores Huerta's use of a shifting transcendent persona to balance the sense of mystery surrounding her accomplishments with a performance of normalcy and audience identification. We find, first, that Huerta leveraged her borderland experiences and ideology as rhetorical resources that functioned to facilitate the amalgamation of personae exemplifying her advocacy, and, second, that her shifting transcendent persona's balance of mystery and identification hinged as much upon the manner in which she positioned audience members to perceive themselves as it did upon the manner in which she positioned them to perceive her own exceptional normalcy.     

Rhetorical Functions of Letter Writing: Dialogic Collaboration,Affirmation, and Catharsis in Dolores Huerta's Letters

This essay focuses on the letters that Dolores Huerta wrote to César Chávez in the 1960s and 1970s to better understand her role in the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and the functions of letter writing for individuals such as Huerta, who faced constraining ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Huerta used these letters to establish dialogic collaboration with Chávez. These letters also had a more personal function through affirmation and catharsis, enabling Huerta to affirm her role within the UFW by noting her accomplishments and sacrifices for the union and by expressing both her personal and professional problems. These rhetorical functions of her letter writing contributed to Huerta's identity consciousness, enabling her to build an identity that emphasized social justice issues related to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender.