Labor activist Dolores Huerta is the subject of a new documentary.
We all have inner voices, says musician Carlos Santana, now executive producer of the documentary “Dolores,” his first film. Some years back, one that ran through his head was that of his mother, Josefina Barragán de Santana, who died in 2009. She was insistent that her son shine a light on activist and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta so that the world would know who the 87-yearold Huerta is.
“I’m sure it was my mom that said, ‘You need to do this. You need to dig in your pockets, deep, and fund this so that women around the world will know who Dolores is and her strength and her superpowers.’ Dolores Huerta is the real Wonder Woman,” says Santana during a recent phone call.
The guitarist, 70, who grew up in the Mission, was first introduced to the UFW leaders Huerta and Cesar Chavez nearly 50 years ago. He and his eponymous band also played the Fillmore in those days, and he became friends with people like rock impresario Bill Graham and the musicians in the Grateful Dead. And he was getting quite an education.
“On the one hand, I was learning about B.B. King and Tito Puente and John Lee Hooker and this music that I love,” Santana says. “On the other hand, it was the Black Panthers and Cesar Chavez and Dolores and Martin Luther King. There were so many organizations. Everybody was involved. It was just one organism, the music and equal rights and all that kind of stuff.”
Years later, sometime in the 1980s or 1990s, Santana picketed with Huerta on Market Street at the base of Powell where the cable cars begin their journey uphill. He can’t remember the year, but he remembers his mother being afraid for him: “I said, ‘Mom, I have to do this. This is who you are, Mom, so why are you scared? You’re supposed to stand up for human beings and that’s what they’re doing.’ She goes, ‘Yeah, but that’s really dangerous.’ I said, ‘Mom!’ So I had to convince my mom that marching with Dolores and Cesar Chavez and
Dolores (not rated) opens at Bay Area theaters on Friday, Sept. 8. Dolores Huerta and director Peter Bratt will take part at select screenings, Friday, Sept. 8-next Sunday, Sept. 10, at Opera Plaza Cinema, San Francisco; Shattuck Cinemas, Berkeley; and Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael.
doing what we were doing, that it needed to be done, that we needed to bring a voice to the voiceless.”
But if he ignored his mother’s counsel then, Santana listened to that inner voice when he started hearing it about five years ago. What struck him about Huerta was that here was a powerful woman whom history had ignored. Though she was every inch Chavez’s equal and has remained a political force to be reckoned with in the years since his 1993 death, her name isn’t beside his in the history books. Huerta has an enormous legacy that has been largely ignored.
“What surprised me the most was that even the people that run the (United Farm Workers) don’t give her the credit, even though she was the real general,” Santana says. “It’s in the movie, she’s saying very graciously to Cesar, ‘Why do you argue with me? You get so angry. And then you wind up doing what I tell you to do anyway.’ That just busted me up, because she says it with such nonmalice or ego or anything like that.
“I think Dolores is a modern Joan of Arc. To motivate people in Toronto, Chicago, New York, all the way from Watsonville or Fresno or Bakersfield, before social media? That’s awesome. They boycotted Yuban coffee —which at the time was like Starbucks — Gallo, Safeway, grapes.”
But if Huerta’s name has been relatively unknown up until now, she has made an impact on the lives she touched. Santana approached Peter Bratt to direct “Dolores,” because he had been impressed with Bratt and his film “La Mission.” In addition, Bratt’s mother marched alongside Huerta when he was a child, and Huerta had helped him bring “La Mission” to audiences in Arizona.
When the “Dolores” team requested the rights to use James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud” on the film’s soundtrack, the man in charge of Brown’s estate readily acquiesced: He had picketed the Marina Safeway in San Francisco with Huerta back in the day. But people like these are rare. Santana aims to spread Huerta’s legend throughout the world.
“I would like to see Dolores Huerta parks, libraries, freeways, schools,” Santana says. “I would like her to have her own TV channel, running 24 hours a day.”