Hispanic Heritage Month: Dolores Huerta

Scripture – Acts 2:44-45 (NASB)

And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.

Devotion

Dolores Huerta saw human need and her inner drivenness originated the famous phrase: Sí se puede (Yes, we can). With her faith and faithful activism, she became an American labor activist and civil rights leader and co-founded the National Farmworkers Association alongside César Chávez. As I look at Acts 2:44-45, I see Huerta embodying an active solidarity to change systems and structures that affected whether someone had plenty of food on their table. Particularly and ironically, she helped organize the Delano Grape strike in California in 1965. She cared about the rights of farm workers that were bringing food to other people’s tables, as well as the dignity with which they brought food to their own tables.

Huerta had an honorary and lengthy journey of activism to improve immigrant, women’s and farm worker’s rights. She was the first Latina to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. From a different angle, I see Huerta looking deeply into the systems and policies behind the food on one’s table. She has provocatively moved me to ask myself: Who made my food? Are they paid a fair wage? What are their working conditions? Mine has been a long journey of looking beyond my table into the invisible hands that help feed me. It connected my hands to their hands, my plate to their plate, their work to my work, their table to my table. Through brave and courageous leaders and activists like Huerta, I see the provision of God towards the lives of workers, such as the farm workers. I see a God who sees others through the way we care about the food on our table and the hands that cultivated it.

“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” ~Dolores Huerta, American Labor Leader and Civil Rights Activist

Reflect

Do I know the practices of the stores where I buy my food or establishments where I eat? Do any of them connect the work of selling food to the provision of food in my community?

Act 

Inform yourself of food insecurity in your nearby school systems and/or community. If you desire, join local community organizations actively working to change policy.

Pray

God of creation, you who created the garden for woman and man to cultivate and bring forth fruit and food, help us see the production of our food as holy work. Thank you for labor activists like Dolores Huerta whose work changed and improved the lives of thousands of workers to this day. Help us find our own Sí se puede. No act of labor and no act of love is too small in the seemingly small, faithful ways that we carefully buy and purchase food. Help our hands see the hands that have prepared our food, in grocery stores, in restaurants and coffee shops where we are served. May our hands honor their hands as we see that our hands are connected together. Grant us eyes to see our sisterhood and brotherhood. Amen.

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Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Commentary on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: A Just Community Is a Witness to the World (Acts 2:47; 6:7)