More than six decades later, Huerta’s call for recognition and justice still resonates in debates over labor, immigration and who counts in America.
Excerpt adapted from All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches by Ben Rhodes.
In 1965, the National Farm Workers Association announced their decision to join the striking Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee on Sept. 16—Mexican Independence Day. The choice of date reflected the hybrid identity of Chicanos: straddling Mexican and American cultures, Spanish and English, rooted in the old country but with branches fully extended into the new one.
This was the identity Huerta embodied.
Huerta maintained a heavy bilingual speaking schedule to keep up morale. As dues dried up, the NFWA and AWOC relied on each other and donations from supporters. They were also buttressed by the AFL-CIO.
Ultimately, the NFWA and AWOC merged to form the United Farm Workers (UFW). In addition to the typical challenges of organizing, the farmworkers were standing up against bigotry and asserting their American identity—attaching their cause to the Civil Rights Movement. “Abajo con racism! Down with racism!” Huerta sometimes ended her speeches. “Viva la union! Viva la causa!”
By elevating the cause to the broader pursuit of dignity and inclusion, the union helped motivate the farmworkers. Drawing on the example of civil rights organizations, the union made alliances with religious leaders, activists and student groups and expanded to boycotts: If the farmworkers could persuade American consumers to stop buying grapes, they could increase their leverage. It was an audacious idea, nationalizing the kind of boycotts that King had led and counting on the solidarity of strangers across the country.
With the strike entering its seventh month, the NFWA decided to lead the march to Sacramento. It would dramatize their determination, showcase their power and capture the attention of politicians who traditionally deferred to growers but also had to be attuned to the demands of organized labor, the concerns of more liberal constituencies and the growing presence of Mexican Americans on California’s voter rolls.
As the marchers approached the state Capitol, they learned of a breakthrough: One of the major growers agreed to recognize the union, increase their wages, improve working conditions and allow workers to form a credit union. It was incremental progress—farmworkers were finally being treated more like American workers, and Chicanos more like Americans.
As she took turns with others speaking in front of the capitol, Huerta appeared confident and a bit tired. Interrupted occasionally by applause, she looked down and smiled, aware—perhaps—of how far she’d come.
The entirety of her speech does not survive, but the footage that does brings to life its message:
“Today our farmworkers have come to Sacramento. To the governor and the legislature of California we say you cannot close your eyes and your ears to us any longer. You cannot pretend that we do not exist. You cannot plead ignorance to our problems, because we are here and we embody our needs for you. And we are not alone.“
Huerta’s language foreshadowed the battles over immigration, identity and power that were to come. You cannot pretend that we do not exist.
Here was a Latina declaring, in front of the seat of state power, that the farmworkers understood the unfairness of their circumstances and were not going to allow the status quo to endure.
The marchers represented communities that had been in the United States for more than a century and others who were recent arrivals. And yet they had all been treated as foreign—constituencies that could be ignored. By contesting that, she was expanding the battleground of the civil-rights movement, linking economic objectives to demands for basic dignity. She was doing so as a young woman speaking in what was still a male-dominated society, and her speaking role demonstrated a respect for the participation and leadership of women, recalling the days of union-building in two excerpts:
” … giving them the confidence they needed through inspiration and hard work. Educating them for months to realize that no one was going to win their battle for them. That their conditions could be changed by only one group of people, themselves.“
Her voice found a raw style that combined vulnerability and empowerment. The marginalized farmworkers had to look inward to find the strength to make change: There is a direct line from her line, “their conditions could be changed by only one group of people: themselves,” to a line Barack Obama used in 2008: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Then Huerta looked to the future with specific demands.
“Support has been highlighted by people who have joined us here today. Furthermore, these groups are committing themselves to help us until total victory is achieved. The developments of the past seven months are only a slight indication of what is to come.
“The workers are on the rise. There will be strikes all over the state and throughout the country because Delano has shown what can be done and the workers know that they are no longer alone. The agricultural workers are not going to remain static. The towns that have been reached by the pilgrimage will never be the same.
“On behalf of the National Farm Workers Association, its officers and its members, on behalf of all of the farmworkers of this state, we unconditionally demand that the governor of this state, Edmund Brown, call a special session of the legislature to enact a collective bargaining law for the state of California. We will be satisfied with nothing less. The governor cannot, and the legislature cannot shrug off its responsibilities to the Congress of the United States. We are citizens and we are residents of the state of California, and we want the rules set up to protect us in this state, right here. If the rules to settle our economic problems are not forthcoming, we will call a general strike to paralyze the state’s agricultural economy. We will call a general strike to let the legislators and the employers know that we mean business. We will take economic pressure, strikes, boycotts, to force recognition and obtain collective bargaining rights.
“The social and economic revolution of the farmworkers is well underway and it will not be stopped until we receive equality. The farmworkers are moving. Nothing is going to stop them. The workers are crying for organization, and we are going to organize them. We may act in strange and unusual ways in our organizing, but we’re willing to try new and unused methods to achieve justice for the farmworkers.“
Huerta’s words were as simple and straightforward as they were radical. Here was perhaps the most marginalized faction of a marginalized ethnic group within the United States, making it known that they would do whatever it took to never be ignored again. Her speech does not soar into posterity like King’s—her legacy is more connected to her organizing than her oratory. But her voice endures as an exemplar of where politics and social movements were headed in ways that helped remake both the American left and the backlash to it.
For so much of American history, the marginalized communities of a composite nation had been cast into the shadows. There has always been an overlapping machinery of interests maintaining this status quo: a racial and ethnic hierarchy, fixed gender roles and plentiful cheap labor to fuel the engine of American capitalism.
Huerta challenged all of these interests in language that was fearless, direct and uncompromising. Here was a Latina declaring, in front of the seat of state power, that the farmworkers understood the unfairness of their circumstances and were not going to allow the status quo to endure.
“The developments of the past seven months are only a slight indication of what is to come,” she said, in the language of a threat. The workers were prepared to “paralyze the state’s agricultural economy” to achieve fairness.
The context lent weight to her demands. The Civil Rights Movement had already shaken the foundations of injustice in the nation, and the labor movement’s support for the farmworkers actualized the kind of multiracial, multiethnic coalition of the working class that Frederick Douglass had called for a century earlier.
The tactics of community organizing also introduced the kind of decentralized and localized empowerment that would be hard for authorities to co-opt or control. This was, she made plain, a revolution of consciousness that went beyond workplace demands.
“The workers,” she said, “know that they are no longer alone.”
Where King was soaring and aspirational, Huerta was grounded and intimate, trying to speak protest into policy.
The people in power, the ones who owned the companies that sold the food or wrote laws in the statehouse, had been able to ignore people like the farmworkers—the people who toiled out of sight to keep the system going.
Now, a crowd of people had walked across the state to watch Huerta declare: “We are here and we embody our needs for you.”
As subsequent history showed, that did not assure their success. But it did indicate that something had shifted—a consciousness had been awakened which would have to be reckoned with, one way or another.
From the book ALL WE SAY: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches by Ben Rhodes. Copyright © 2026 by Perry Merrill LLC. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
