‘El Rojo Tocino’ – A Personal Reflection on the Life of Dolores Huerta

Renowned activist and organizer Dolores Huerta, who helped co-found the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and whose work on behalf of civil rights for farmworkers and migrant laborers won her international acclaim died Wednesday October 28. She was 96. Below, photojournalist and labor organizer David Bacon shares reflections and images from his interactions with Huerta, which span decades, from the early years of the Delano Grape Strike in the 1960s through to Huerta’s continued anti-war activism in the 1990s and beyond. (All images copyright David Bacon)

Three years ago I walked from Poplar to Delano, Calif., in honor of Larry Itliong, who started the 1965 grape strike and boycott there. I walked alongside Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the United Farm Workers (UFW). She was 91 then, and I had a hard time keeping up.

She sent me a note afterward that ended, “Sí Se Puede con El Rojo Tocino.” It was a beautiful joke.

“Sí Se Puede” are three words we all use now, but she invented this confident way of saying “Yes We Can!” “Tocino” was the nickname the union gave me in the years I worked as an organizer—it means “bacon,” my last name. And calling me “El Rojo,” or “The Red,” in this way honored my politics.

When I came back from a solidarity work brigade in Cuba in the 1970s, I landed in New York City with no place to sleep. I called Dolores’s daughter, Lori, a friend from California. Not only did I get space on the floor of the NYC boycott’s headquarters, but Dolores and her partner, Richard, César Chávez’s brother, took us out to eat.

Over pizza I enthused about the island. I had stars in my eyes, for both Cuba and Dolores, and still do.

I went to work for the UFW as an organizer a few months later. There was often tension in the union about radical politics, and being called a red was sometimes the route out the door. But for Dolores and Eliseo Medina, stalwart leaders of the union, being a good organizer was the bottom line—doing what the workers needed.

Over the years, long after I had left the UFW and worked for other unions and then as a photojournalist, I would see Dolores again and again. Going to Watsonville to cover the organizing drives of strawberry workers or to Salinas for the strikes in the vegetable fields, I knew she’d be there.

It was a profound experience to watch her in union contract negotiations—this diminutive woman facing off against the beefy growers across the table—and see the sense of power it gave workers.

Returning from Iraq, where I photographed workers after the 2003 US invasion, I took her picture in the front line of marchers against the war. When we were in Sacramento trying to stop the anti-immigrant, anti-affirmative-action, anti-bilingual initiatives, she was the first to speak out.

So when she called me El Rojo Tocino, I thought, “What a compliment!” I hope I live up to it.