Today, Dolores Huerta turns 96. She has spent a lifetime, nearly a century, fighting for farmworkers, for the people whose labor feeds this country and whom this country has never adequately loved back. Dolores embodies the work of justice: as an ongoing practice of care, of persistent rage, of an unwavering refusal to let the world stay exactly as cruel as it wants to be.
For many of us, Dolores is not a symbol. She is a feeling. The specific feeling of knowing that no matter who you are, no matter how little the system was built to protect you, there is someone out there fighting for you. That is what matriarchal leadership actually looks like, not a title or a monument, but a body that keeps showing up, a voice that keeps calling, a woman who at 96 is still leading us.
Dolores co-founded a movement, raised eleven children, survived what she was asked to keep secret for sixty years, and kept organizing anyway. Her legacy is not something that is simply handed down. It is something that gets practiced, daily, stubbornly, with full knowledge of what we are up against and how it’s needed now more than ever. Right now, she and the Dolores Huerta Foundation are calling for the shutdown of California City Detention. At 96. Still pointing toward the feminist future most of us can only begin to imagine.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and this year, that fact that is hard to separate from her birthday. We are sending love to survivors everywhere, to those who work in the fields and feed a nation, to those who care for our sick and our elderly, to our friends and family members and loved ones, to the people who lead our movements and have been asked, over and over, to swallow their pain in service of the cause. We see you. We believe you.
Patriarchy is extraordinarily good at one thing: making the people it harms responsible for protecting it. The silence it demands, the stories it buries, the truth it asks survivors to carry alone in the dark for decades if necessary. At 96, Dolores is showing us what it looks like to finally put that weight down. And what it looks like to keep going anyway.
This month, we signed onto the Solidarity Sign-On: Letter to Men in the Movement from Women, Trans, and Gender-Expansive Leaders, organized by Young Women’s Freedom Center. Because Dolores’s story is not singular. Because our movements cannot keep asking the people most harmed by patriarchy to be the ones who shield it.
The most faithful thing we can do for her legacy is invest in what she has always invested in: the people who will carry this work forward. Applications for our Solís Policy Institute Youth fellowship, a 9-month program for young women, trans, and gender-expansive youth ages 14-18, are open now and close April 16th. If you know a young person ready to step into their power, please reach out to them.
This Sexual Assault Awareness Month, here is how to take action:
-
Believe and support survivors in your life and movement spaces
-
Read and share Young Women’s Freedom Center’s Solidarity Sign-On Letter
-
Support the Dolores Huerta Foundation and their call to shut down California City Detention
-
Apply or spread the word about SPI Youth, deadline April 16th
Happy birthday, Dolores. We love you. Thank you for your work, and for trusting us to carry it forward.