Dolores Huerta

This past Tuesday night, six of us went to UNC to hear Dolores Huerta speak (Link 2, Link 3). I thought she was going to talk about her with with Cesar Chavez on farm workers’ rights, but it was an event for Women’s History Month. She is a firey lady, but she talked about so many different things that it was hard to follow her train of thought.

Here are a few loose quotes, paraphrases, shall we say:

The real “value issue” is poverty, instead of money going to war.

The U.N. convention on Women’s Equality has not been passed by the U.S. [Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women]

“Undocumented workers” should be used instead of “illegal aliens.”

We need to stop U.S. economic colonization.

On Sunday, April 29, we need to march for immigrant children who are left when their parents are deported. We should send postcards and emails to our political leaders’ district offices urging them to vote yes for legalization of undocumented workers.

Education is for service, not so we can exploit others. We need to make the world a better place. There’s nothing wrong with wealth; just use it to make the world a better place.

We are all Africans with different shades of color.

“Wozani” is a Zulu word that means “The people are coming together to fight for justice.”

We should make drug addiction a disease not a crime, like alcohol and nicotine addiction, and empty our prisons.

Politicians work for us. We pay their salaries. We don’t owe them something; they owe us something.

She also commented on the wall between the U.S. and Mexico, the Dream Act, a woman taking sanctuary in a church to avoid being deported, the Equal Rights Ammendment, abortion rights, the environment, self-defense classes, female cultural training, Venezualian health care, James Dobson and Ted Haggard, and I can’t remember what else. It really was all over the social action map.