Dolores Huerta says Trump's remarks about Mexicans ignore history

Dolores Huerta said President Donald Trump’s disparaging remarks about Mexicans showed he “does not know history,” and she pressed Latinos in California, Texas and other states to organize for the November elections.

The longtime labor activist, born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, has spent more than six decades in Latino labor and civil-rights organizing. She co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chávez in 1962, the group that later became the United Farm Workers, and helped lead the Delano grape strike that began in 1965, one of the defining organizing battles of the farmworker era.

Huerta’s criticism landed against the backdrop of Trump’s long record of harsh rhetoric toward Mexican and Latino immigrants. She framed the moment not as a passing political fight, but as a reminder that the country’s labor history has often depended on the work and organizing of Latino workers whose role has been overlooked even as anti-Mexican language remains a potent force in national politics.

That history, Huerta has argued, should now feed into election-season organizing. She has been publicly urging Texas Democrats and Latino voters to mobilize ahead of November, using her own legacy in the farmworker movement to push for turnout in states where Latino participation could influence results.

At the Texas Democratic Convention in Corpus Christi on June 26, Huerta called for a major local organizing push. The appeal matched the message she has carried across party gatherings and voter drives: that veterans of the labor movement are still trying to turn the lessons of the Delano grape strike and the early farmworker campaigns into electoral power in California, Texas and beyond.