Existing comment:
Dolores Huerta with her brothers John and Marshall, c. 1937
Born on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, Dolores Fernández was the second of the three children of Juan Fernández and Alicia Chávez. Dolores was two years old when the marriage ended. Alicia Chávez moved with her children to Stockton, California, an agricultural center with a community of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Jewish, and Mexican families.
Chávez worked as a waitress during the day and at the canneries at night to provide her family with a middle-class upbringing. During World War II she was able to buy a lunch counter and a seventy-room hotel. She frequently gave free lodging to dispossessed migrant farm workers. Huerta had limited contact with her father, but she was proud of his union activity as a miner and of his work in the beet fields. |