Activist Dolores Huerta says that the boycott of anti-immigrant businesses scheduled for May 1 will show the importance of the presence, contribution and consumer power of Latinos in the United States.

“The ideal goal for the boycott is to focus on businesses that support the anti-immigrant movement and that we know have donated money to the campaigns of the senators proposing anti-immigrant legislation,” said Huerta.

Huerta, who co-founded with César Chávez the United Farm Workers union – the largest union of farm workers in the United States – recognizes the difficulty of this goal.

“But we can work on it,” she said. “César always told us that marches are the best means of communicating, organizing, and participating, and that’s why they should never stop. We need to take advantage of the wonderful spontaneous citizen response that has happened.”

Huerta participated and led the hunger strikes and boycotts organized by Chávez against businesses that exploited farm workers, mostly undocumented, several decades ago, particularly in California.

“I think that Chávez, wherever he is, beside Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez and Rubén Salazar – a journalist murdered at the end of the 1960s during a revolt in Los Angeles – is excited to see how people have responded in favor of fair immigration reform,” she declared.

At 76 years old and with health problems, Huerta works tirelessly in favor of the poorest workers in the country as she did in the 1960s when she and Chávez organized the grape boycott in support of field workers.

At the head of the farm workers union, Huerta negotiated the first collective contract after the boycott’s success in 1966. Dolores Huerta was born in Dawson, New Mexico. When she began her union work in California in 1955, she left her job as a teacher because she was divorced with seven children (she had 11 in all).

“When you’re organizing, you can’t reach everyone, but what you can do is keep pushing the ones closest to you,” she said.

In a demonstration of farm workers in San Francisco in 1988, Huerta was beaten brutally by police who broke several of her ribs and her arm.

Together with César Chávez, she led protests and hunger strikes in support of grape and lettuce pickers, as well as others, and was jailed 22 times for acts of civil disobedience.

“When I left the classroom to dedicate my life to activism, many times I thought I had made a mistake, but one day I found a box of food outside of my house that someone had left for me for helping them. That was my inspiration to keep going,” she recalled.