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Politico
7 days ago
- Politics
- Politico
What It Will Take to Get U.S. Citizens to Work the Farm — According to Dolores Huerta
And the 95-year-old Huerta has seen a lot. She first began lobbying the California legislature on farm labor issues when she was just 25, and she founded an agriculture workers union soon after. In her early 30s, she partnered with civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to create the National Farm Workers Association, now the United Farm Workers. For years, she and Chavez worked in tandem, delivering major victories to protect farm workers from exploitation and exposure to dangerous pesticides. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins' recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. 'I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,' Huerta joked. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The Trump administration has launched farm raids targeting undocumented immigrants, which has sent a chill through the labor force and industry. You've advocated for farm workers for decades. Does the current climate feel familiar, or are we in a really different place? Oh, it's a very, very different place. Because in the past, in the '50s, when we had this 'Operation Wetback,' they were not putting people in jail. They would repatriate people. They would deport them, take them to the border. Somewhere along the way, I think during Newt Gingrich's time, they started putting people in jail, but then they would let them go. It was not putting people in prisons, like we're seeing right now. The kind of brutality, the horror, the kidnapping, endangering people's lives, separating the families — the way that Trump did in the last administration, and they're doing now, leaving all of these missing children — it's an atrocity, what they've been doing to the immigrant community. Many of those people that they have been picking up and arresting are farm workers. Here in Bakersfield, California, we were the first city to be hit. When Border Patrol came in, they arrested [78] people, and only one person had any kind of criminal record. And when they talk about a criminal record, it could be a traffic stop. It could be just that they came in, and they were deported, and came back in again. These are not violent crimes that we're talking about. They are, you might say, civil infractions, and yet they're being treated like they were criminals. This administration says it wants to get to a '100 percent American workforce.' It also has discussed rapidly expanding migrant visa programs, like H-2A. Do you see those two goals in conflict? How might that play out? Well, I think it would be really great to have American workers to work on farms. Farm work has been denigrated for so many years by the growers themselves, and they did this because they never wanted to pay farm workers the kind of wages that they deserve. Farm workers were essential workers during the pandemic. They were out there in the fields. So many of them died because they never got the proper protections that they needed. But they were out there every single day, picking the food that we needed to eat. Farm workers don't get the same kind of benefits or salaries that others get. We just recently did a study with the University of California Merced. Their average wage is $30,000 a year, $35,000 a year. And on that, they have to feed their families. A lot of them, unless they have a union contract, they're paid minimum wage. They're not respected. The whole visa program, the H-2A program, it's always been there. Cesar Chavez and I, when we started the United Farm Workers, one of the first things that we did was end the 'Bracero Program,' which was a similar [guest worker] program. Now they've increased these H-2A workers in agriculture. This is a step above slavery. They can't unionize. They don't get Social Security. They don't get unemployment insurance. Farmers save money by having these H-2A workers. They cannot become citizens. There is no way for them to even get a green card. If you were trying to get to a 100 percent American workforce, what's the solution here? Does it start with paying more competitive wages for workers? Or is it something else? Well, right now, we're trying to stop a detention center here in California City, which is up here in the Mojave Desert. They are offering the people to work in that center $50 an hour. In California, our minimum wage is $16. That's what a lot of workers get. Let's offer farmworkers $50 an hour, the same kind of a salary that you offer the prison guards, and you'll get a lot of American workers. We have very high unemployment in the Central Valley. We have the prison industrial complex, where a lot of our young people are going to prison. So many of these young people don't have to go to prison if they were paid adequately. I'm sure a lot of them would go and do the farm work, especially if they had good wages to do it. And we still have a lot of young people here in the valley that go out during the summers and they do farm work to help their families. I'm sure a lot of people that we now see that are homeless on the streets and that are able to work would go to work if they were paid $50 an hour. So it's just a matter of improving wages? And training, too. Because farm work is hard work. I mean, you've got to be in good physical shape to be able to do farm work. Why are undocumented workers such a large part of the agricultural workforce? Is it just that these are low-paying, hard jobs that Americans don't want to do, or is there more going on? Well, like I said earlier, the growers have denigrated the work so much that people don't realize that this work is dignified. Farm workers are proud of the work that they do. They don't feel that somehow they're a lower class of people because they do farm work. They have pride in their work. If you were to go out there with farm workers, you would be surprised to see that they have dignity, and they care about the work. They care about the plants. When we started the farm workers union way back in the late '50s and early '60s, you would be surprised how many American citizens were out there. Veterans were out there. The Grapes of Wrath was filmed here. All of those workers in that camp were white. It was the 'Okies' and 'Arkies,' the people that came from Oklahoma and Arkansas and those places to work in the fields. They were all white workers. There were some Latino workers, and then over the years, you had the Chinese, you had the Japanese, and different waves of immigrants that came in to do farm work. When did it change? Well, the growers always fought unionization, as they still do to this day. I'll give an example. There's a company called the Wonder Company. When you watch television, you see all of their ads for pistachios. They're billionaires. The United Farm Workers just won a recognition election, and they refused to recognize the union. When you have a union out there, you have a steward out there in every single crew, and their job is to make sure that there's a bathroom out there in the fields, which farm workers never had before. We had a big movement to get farmers just having toilets in the field and hand washing facilities, cold drinking water, risk periods, unemployment insurance, et cetera. This is the thing that we fought for, and the growers fought against it, right to the end. The Farm Bureau Federation fought against all of these improvements for farm workers, and they continue to fight. You supported the 1986 Reagan amnesty, when 1 million farm workers received legal status. The Trump administration has been adamant, for political purposes, that there will be 'no amnesty.' Do you think the administration could get to some sort of mass legalization for farm workers? If not, what happens next? The problem with this administration is, they're so racist. Racism rules, fascism rules with this administration. I don't know, I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work. What about pesticides? You've long fought against pesticide use in agriculture because of the effect of exposure on farm workers. Now, there's this 'Make America Healthy Again' push to get rid of pesticides. What do you make of that? Well, I think maybe that's one good thing that Robert Kennedy Jr. might do. His father was a champion for the farm workers. The pesticides — we should have gotten rid of those a long time ago. We didn't have pesticides until after World War II. There's a pesticide called paraquat. Paraquat is banned in Europe. It's banned in almost every country except the United States of America, and it is used right here in Kern County in California. It causes cancer. It causes leukemia. It causes Parkinson's disease, and we cannot get it banned in California. We know that when plants are planted, when food is planted, the pesticide is already in the seeds. We were trying to stop that in Washington, D.C., and were unable to. We were even just trying to get them to put information on it, so when you go in to buy your fruit, it would have a sticker on it that said, 'This particular fruit or vegetable has been treated with this pesticide.' It's in the fruit when you eat it. Just recently, we had about four or five young people in their late 40s, early 50s, all have died of cancer, and they're from Delano, California. Are these farm workers? No, but when they spray this stuff, it also goes into the towns. So nobody's really safe from it. Is this pesticide issue something you could collaborate or find some common ground with the Trump administration? Yeah, we would love to. But you know what? It's not going to happen, because pesticides really come from the petroleum industry. Have you discussed this with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or would you be open to meeting with him? I know his father was a friend of yours and a great champion of your cause. I imagine, maybe, when we talk about this issue. I wouldn't agree with Robert Jr. on the issue of vaccinations, or fluoride in our drinking water, et cetera, and some of the issues that he espouses. I know him. I've known him for many, many years. I haven't spoken to him. He did try to contact me when he was running, and I didn't respond. I knew that the family, that Kerry and Ethel and the rest of them, were not happy about his supporting Trump. But you haven't spoken to him since he became HHS secretary? No. I know people that have spoken to him. The labor movement as a whole has an unusual relationship to Donald Trump, who claims to champion the working class. Do you think union leaders have more to gain by working with Trump, or by opposing him? What explains his appeal to many union members? Well, I can't speak for the Teamsters. I think there was a kind of a betrayal of the working people, because I know the majority of the labor unions went against Trump and endorsed Biden [in 2024]. I think that was very damaging. I think a good comparison is if you look at what they've done in Mexico with Claudia Sheinbaum and the president before her. They've done incredible work in Mexico right now because it has been very labor-focused, very working people-focused, in contrast with what's happening here in the United States, where we are very billionaire- and millionaire-focused. And so you can see in Mexico they've been able to increase pensions, increase the minimum wage, increase benefits for the working people. I'm a vegetarian, and I just stay busy. I think you just have to stay busy.
Yahoo
13-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'People have to rev up their bravery': Dolores Huerta shares lessons from a lifetime of organizing
Apr. 13—Dolores Huerta is a legendary labor organizer and feminist activist. In 1962, she and César Chávez cofounded the first union for farmworkers in the United States, the National Farm Workers Association, which later became United Farm Workers. Over the years, she has collaborated with women's rights organizations, including the Feminist Majority Foundation, and served as an honorary co-chair of the 2017 Women's March in Washington, D.C. Since 2002, she has served as president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which promotes participatory democracy, social justice and civic engagement. On April 4, the eve of New Mexico's 32nd Annual Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta Celebration, Huerta sat down with the Albuquerque Journal at the National Hispanic Cultural Center to discuss the current political situation in the U.S. and lessons learned from a lifetime of organizing. You are a legend. There were no farmworkers unions before you created one with César Chávez. People thought you couldn't do it, but you did. What would you say to people today who are feeling discouraged and powerless? What I like to say to people, since I'm an elder, about to turn 95 years old (on April 10), is that I was born during the Depression, and that was a very dark time in the United States of America. The economy had collapsed. People were out of work. But out of that came the New Deal, right? We got workers' rights, the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security — things we didn't have before. Then we had another dark period of the '60s. We had the Vietnam War. The country was divided. Students were being killed by our own National Guard. And what came out of that? We had the Civil Rights movement, the Chicano movement, the environmental movement, the LGBTQ movement, a big surge in the women's movement. Now we're going through another dark period. So, we have to start planning for the future. What kind of future do we want? Do we, as a country, want to continue with corporate governance? Because it's not working. Now that we have seen what corporate governance looks like, we know it's something our country does not want. I think people are already saying that with the election that they had in Wisconsin recently, that we're not going to have that. So it's going to take a lot of organizing and a lot of work to make sure that we change our economic system in our country. I feel like the last politician on the national stage who was really talking about that was Bernie Sanders. But at the time, you didn't endorse him. You endorsed Hillary Clinton. The reason I endorsed Hillary Clinton is — well, a couple of things. Number one, I knew Hillary. Number two, she had always been out there working for immigrants' rights. Bernie had not been working for immigrants rights, so I felt she was closer to our community than Bernie was at that point in time. It wasn't that I disagreed with his economic policies at all. And I do believe Hillary would have actually carried out some of the things that Bernie wanted to see. In practical terms today, what can people do? How should people be organizing? What people have today in terms of organizing tools — they have the internet, they have social platforms. We didn't have that back then. When we were organizing in the '60s, it was always person to person. You know, snail mail, telephones. Now you have all of these great tools at your disposal that you can use really, really rapidly to organize. Even as these tools are useful for activists, they're also useful for people who are trying to oppose activists. I mean, you had an FBI file, which people can read now ... Well, it's all redacted. But, I mean, we know they were monitoring you. And I think that's not gone away. The government is still suspicious of people who are trying to make life better for other people. How do you deal with that? I mean, how have you dealt with that in your personal life? Were you ever scared? Well, these are things that are going to happen. You just have to kind of ignore them, and keep your eye on the prize, keep working for what we're working for. And the other missing piece, I believe — what's missing in our society — there's just a huge lack of education. We have a country that is steeped in ignorance, where people don't know civics, and people don't understand science. And when I talk about science, I'm talking about a women's right to abortion, about transgender or LGBTQ people in our society, and about the science of global warming. We are now in danger of destroying humanity with global warming. And I don't know why people don't get that. Because every part of our country has either been beset with horrible heat waves, wildfires, tornadoes or floods — all of these terrible weather conditions. I don't understand why people can't see that or feel that, when they're actually being affected. It's harder to deny it when you can see and feel the physical effects impacting your daily life. I don't know how it happened that somehow in our society it's seen as not good to be educated. That it's OK to be ignorant. Certain people benefit when people are ignorant, right? That's true. But you would think that the majority of people would realize, hey, there's something wrong here. But people are going to have to reckon with it when it starts affecting their daily lives. Then again, when will they understand that the president has no control over the price of oil or gas, or the price of food, which people were upset about in the last election. Well, he has some control, if he's going to put tariffs on all these countries. Well, that's a whole new ball game that's coming. He called it "Liberation Day." That's kind of ironic, right? Yes. But we should also mention the rights of workers that have been stripped away from getting rid of the National Labor Relations Act. As it is, workers' rights have been diminished, and the laws have been weakened for workers' rights. So you have big companies like Amazon and Starbucks where workers had voted for a union, and yet they refuse to bargain with the workers. Labor laws need to be strengthened, because the majority of people in the United States are workers. I'm originally from Florida, and I know there was a big campaign with the Immokalee Workers for a while, who were picking tomatoes. They said if they raised the price of tomatoes by just one cent, then they could actually live. It took time, but they eventually had some success. With the United Farm Workers, we had contracts in Florida. As you know, Florida doesn't really have laws to protect the workers. Our contracts were with Coca-Cola (covering citrus workers with Coca-Cola's subsidiary, Minute Maid). But what they did is they moved the orange groves from Florida to Belize, I believe, in order to get away from the contracts. But the workers there that were under contract have pension plans. Many of them, even though they don't have their jobs anymore, they were able to collect their pensions It's good to remember those successes. I think if someone's a worker who doesn't have money, doesn't have privilege or if they don't have the right immigration status, they might be afraid to organize. How have you been able to convince people to risk what little they have, knowing that it could all be taken away? When we started organizing the union, we had learned some organizing tactics from a man named Fred Ross, who had done community organizing in Los Angeles and other parts of the state of California. Fred taught us how to do basic organizing, and that is family by family, to convince the workers that unless they stood up for themselves, that nothing would ever change, and that they could not expect anyone to come in from the outside to solve their issues. They are the ones that had to do it. It took us three years of organizing, from 1962 to 1965, to convince the workers that they could fight. It was difficult. Yeah, it was. It was a very slow method of organizing, but it was very effective. So, when the strike happened, the delegates were ready. The workers were ready. They were ready to make those sacrifices. We would say to say to them, if you don't make this sacrifice now, nothing will ever change. And I think that's what we have to say to people here in the United States of America now. We may have to make some sacrifices for the next couple of years, until we get through this dark period, but then at the end of the day, it's going to come out better. You're playing a long game. It's a slow process, building trust, building community. This type of organizing is very tedious, of course. And, unfortunately, there's only, I think, a couple of states in the United States that have collective bargaining rights for farmworkers. You knew Bobby (Robert) Kennedy, and you were there when he was assassinated. How do you think America would be different today if he had become president? There would never have been another war. I think there would not have been a war in Iraq, and definitely no war in Afghanistan, had Bobby Kennedy lived. It really set things back. Yes. His son is so different from him, right? Very, very different. (Laughs.) But who knows what trauma he went through, with having his father killed, you know? We have to wonder why he is who he is. But he does focus on some good issues — even in the area of medicine, about more natural, holistic types of medicine. Although I think you have to have a combination. Because you can use Indigenous types of medicine in some respects. But, as someone once said to me, you can't use Indigenous medicine to cure the ills that the colonizers brought to the Indigenous population. In order to cure things like cancer, you've got to have Western medicine. So many farmworkers from the fields in California have cancer. So many people who are now in their 50s and 60s are coming down with cancer, because of the continuous use of pesticides out there. You campaigned against pesticides. Weren't you responsible for getting DDT banned? Yeah, the United Farm Workers, we were responsible for that. Which is huge. But we had a dozen others. We called them the "Dirty Dozen" pesticides that were bad. Unfortunately, they're still being used. And with GMOs, they even put pesticides into the seeds of the plants. So, no wonder cancer is so prolific in our society. Sometimes when people think about these issues, it can be overwhelming. People can be overcome with anger or fear. But when I speak with great activists like you, it seems like you have such discipline. How do you deal with your own emotions? Are emotions like anger and fear useful? I think they are, because you can take the energy of anger, and you can turn that energy into the positive energy of actually going out there and doing something about it. You know, as Michelle Obama says, "Do something." And it comes back down to the basics, again, of people voting, of electing good people, good representation. If we can get good people into office in our Congress and our state legislatures, then we can change some of these things, like even banning some of these pesticides. We can do that through legislation. We've got to, number one, be cognizant of what's going on, then know that these are the solutions we need. These are the laws we need to pass to change things. It comes down to basic democracy. You might say it comes down to voting. People have to understand that not only do we have the right to choose our representation, but we have a responsibility to get involved. Not only ourselves personally, but making sure that everybody — our families, friends and neighbors — understands that we cannot have a democracy unless we participate. If you don't participate, it all goes away. But it's not just about voting. I mean, your organizing work goes beyond voting. It's voting and advocacy. I think that the farmworker movement is a good example of that, because even though the farmworkers were on strike for five years, we didn't win. We did not win until we had a national boycott. When we had a national boycott, and you had 17 million Americans that didn't buy grapes, then we won. Again, that shows you the power of the people — the power of the people that are united in taking collective action — and this is the way that we win. But we have to convince people. Because I think the biggest thing is, we have apathy. As Helen Keller said, "The biggest problem that we have with people is apathy." People don't realize that they have that power. How do you convince people that they do have power? We would just talk to them and try to get them involved. Once people participate, then they learn, and it becomes part of them. This is what we did with farmworkers, and what we still do in my foundation today. We go into communities, we have house meetings, we get them all together once we have the meetings, and then they decide what they want to improve within their community. And once they get involved, they go, "I can do this! I don't have to have a high school education. I can still go to a school board meeting. I can go to a city council meeting. I can make sure I get somebody good elected to that position." You know, in our foundation, one example is that, in Kern County, in Bakersfield, California, we have the largest high school district in the state of California. Well, our current high school district in Bakersfield had suspended 2,100 kids in one year, primarily kids of color. We filed a lawsuit, and from 2,100 expulsions, we got it down to 21. People got involved, and we got testimonies from people on what was happening to their kids. I can give dozens of examples of that. People got street lights, sidewalks, gutters, swimming pools, neighborhood parks — all by just coming together. Well, I'm amazed that it seems like you never stop. Your whole life, you've been fighting the good fight, and you're still doing it. Well, now more than ever! And more than ever, we have to have people understand their power. We just saw that in Wisconsin, where people rejected (Elon) Musk. There's $21 million that (Musk and his affiliated groups) put in there (to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court). But the people said, "No, you're not buying this. We're not for sale." So, people are waking up. I don't think anyone anticipated that it was going to be this severe when (Donald) Trump took office, how many people he was going to be able to hurt. It was shock and awe. He shocked the nation. And people are kind of stunned. But people are coming out of it, and once they realize that they have the power to change it, as with the example of Wisconsin, I think that's gonna save us. What do you think are the main issues we should be focusing on now? Right this minute, right now, I think it's elections — getting ready for the elections in 2026 to make sure we have a stronger Congress, with more people in the Congress to counteract the actions that Trump and the Republican Party are doing right now. And then, starting to think of the future. One thing we're seeing is that we do not want corporate governance. Something's wrong when we — the richest country in the world, the United States of America — when we do not have universal health care. There's no reason why we shouldn't have universal health care. And we don't have universal college education, which we should have. We should have pre-K daycare, as they have in the Scandinavian countries. We are the richest country in the world, and there's no reason why we can't have those benefits for the people here in the United States of America. I feel like certain politicians have been able to convince large swaths of people in America that if we make life better for everyone, it's going to take something away from them, that it's a zero-sum game. Well, these ugly policies that they have — the way that they have demonized immigrants, for instance, and people of color — I mean, we were making a lot of progress in terms of getting rid of racism and sexism and homophobia. But they've used all these culture wars to divide people. And that's very vicious. I like to remind people that the true immigrants to this country were like my great-grandparents, one of them came from Spain, one of them came from England, and then on my dad's side, we were here to greet them! So, who are the true immigrants to this country? The Europeans. And every group that came to the United States was legalized. They got the legalization status to be able to vote and to participate. So demonizing people, and calling all immigrants criminals is so wrong. That is straight, outright racism, and they need to be called out. And how they're attacking transgender people — they take the most vulnerable people in our society, and they start attacking them. That is vicious, and it's wrong. Some people have compared Trump to the fascists in World War II. Having lived through WWII, do you see parallels? Oh, absolutely. The word fascist means to hurt people. It's an Italian word. To hurt and to punish. ("Fascism" comes from the Latin "fascis," a weapon used to punish people.) For some reason, Trump thinks this is good. We know that he idolizes (Adolf) Hitler, and he's following his playbook. But people have to wake up and understand that. So, a lot of work in education needs to be done right now to get people to wake up. And to understand that it's okay to be educated. It's okay to be woke. When you're woke, that means you're educated. That's exactly what that means. And there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, because what's the opposite of being woke? Being asleep? Being unconscious? Right. Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to say? Well, one of the great things that's happening now is that our governors in our different states are fighting back. They're using their power. And we have judges and attorneys that have now become the Marines to save our democracy, you know? This is all happening, so we're not at a total loss. I think we will be able to prevent what happened in Germany to the Jewish population. And not only the Jews. It was the gypsies, the people who were disabled, people who were gay, etc. Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted. And when we look at Russia, the Jehovah's Witnesses are still being persecuted. LGBTQ people are still being persecuted in Russia, too. How can our president think that (Vladimir) Putin and the Russian policies are somehow something that we should imitate here in the United States of America? We're gonna call that out. People just have to rev up their bravery. If they never participated in a protest before, now's the time to do it. If they didn't engage in organizing others for elections, now's the time to do it. And I always brag about the fact that I'm from the state of New Mexico, because my father was an assemblyman here in New Mexico, and my grandfather was born here. And when we were kids, we would sit down and listen to (Franklin D. Roosevelt) when he did his Saturday night lectures. I'm very blessed, because I was raised in a family where we had very active civic participation. And that's what we want for everyone now. We want people to be civically involved. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@
CBS News
31-03-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
What's open and closed on César Chávez Day 2025 in Los Angeles?
César Chávez Day is celebrated to honor the legacy of American labor leader and civil rights activist César Chávez. March 31, which is Chávez's birthday, was proclaimed a U.S. federal commemorative holiday in 2014 by former President Obama, according to the Los Angeles County Library. Several states across the country, including California, observe the day. Chávez is remembered for his non-violent approach to help better the lives of farmworkers who were working in unsafe conditions for low pay in farms across California and the country. Chávez was born in Arizona to Mexican farmers. He saw firsthand the hardships and inhumane conditions workers were subjected to. In 1962, Chavez, along with activist Dolores Huerta and other organizations, founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became known as the United Farm Workers. One of Chávez's most infamous moments was when he led a 340-mile march from Delano, Calif., to Sacramento and a 25-day fast in 1968, according to the UFW website. In 1993, Chávez died in Arizona at the age of 66. In 1994, former President Clinton posthumously awarded Chávez the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the LA County Library website says. What LA city and county offices are closed in observance of César Chávez Day? Since César Chávez Day has not officially been declared a federal holiday, most stores and businesses remain open. Customers should double-check the local hours for different businesses before visiting.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Denver offices to be closed Monday to honor life of César Chávez
DENVER (KDVR) — Monday, March 31 is Cesar Chavez's birthday and Cesar Chavez Day, which will be marked in Denver with closed offices in honor of his life. Cesar Chavez Day was proclaimed a federal commemorative holiday in 2014 and honors the activist's legacy in the civil rights and labor movement during his life. Chavez formed the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which was later dubbed the United Farm Bureau. FOX31 Weather: View the latest Denver forecasts, maps and radar Chavez was also known for using boycotts, marches, strikes and other tactics to garner support and new members for farm labor unions in the U.S. He was also a sailor with the U.S. Navy during World War II, returning from war to fight for freedom in the U.S. agriculture industry alongside Dolores Huerta. Together, the pair of activists adopted the phrase 'Si, se puede,' as a rallying cry during a fast they conducted in 1972. The phrase means 'Yes, it can be done' in English and has been hailed as the crux of the pair's conviction to nonviolent tactics to enact change. On Monday, most Denver offices will be closed in observation, including the libraries, courts, clerk and recorder's office and motor vehicle title and registration offices. A full list of what is closed can be found here. Because it is a holiday, street meters in Denver will be free, but time restrictions still apply. Trash, recycling and compost collection will be provided as normal. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
