bending over could make farmworkers aged thirty look like they were forty.3
As an adult, Dolores told journalist Studs Terkel that she believed this system of degrading workers affected them more than the backbreaking labor itself. Some growers thought that their workers were inferior and humiliated them. Others were greedy or simply indifferent to what foremen did. “No one should have to endure this deliberate subhuman treatment designed to keep farmworker families down,” Dolores said. “This kind of treatment kills the spirit.”4
GROWING UP IN FARM COUNTRY
Dolores’s widowed grandfather, Herculana Chávez, helped watch Alicia’s children so she could find work. Herculana became an important figure in Dolores’s life. He encouraged his smart, chatty granddaughter, giving her the nickname “seven tongues” because she talked so much.5 Dolores learned early that speaking her mind and arguing about things that were important were good skills to cultivate.
Even with family to help her, Alicia found supporting her children difficult during the long depression. She needed to be especially clever and hardworking. She took two jobs just to put enough food on the table and build a small savings. She waited tables during the day and worked in a cannery by night. “My mother had a good head for business,” Dolores remembered later, “so she worked a couple of jobs and managed to open up a small business.”6
Farmworkers using short-handled hoes to harvest crops
UFW Collection, 244
Alicia treated her sons and daughter equally. She never singled out Dolores to do what was considered “women’s work,” like washing dishes, ironing clothes, or waiting on the boys. Dolores grew up believing that a woman’s voice was just as important as a man’s.
When Juan and Marshall grew old enough, they picked tomatoes on nearby farms. But here Alicia drew the line with her daughter. Alicia never allowed Dolores to work in the fields. She did not want her daughter to experience the hardships of farm labor and indecent treatment by foremen. When Dolores was a teenager, Alicia permitted her to work in the packing sheds, where she learned about the difficult labor involved in packaging fruits and vegetables, but Dolores never endured the brutal fieldwork. Later, Dolores would tease that her mother had stunted her education by not giving her experience as a field laborer.7
Alicia’s determination and solid business sense earned her enough savings to buy a little lunch counter. As the restaurant prospered, she expanded to a bigger restaurant. After marrying her second husband, James Richards, Alicia bought a small hotel in Stockton. Dolores soon had a half-sister.
WATCHING AND LEARNING
Alicia always welcomed working-class people and farm laborers, or campesinos, who came from the poor area near the hotel. She offered lodging to low-wage workers for one dollar a room, a small amount even in the 1930s. Sometimes she asked for no fee at all. Alicia understood the hardships that poor people endured. Dolores saw how her mother treated all her boarders with compassion and respect; she watched her mother become an involved and outspoken leader in civic organizations and the church.
Dolores’s neighborhood was more diverse than many other farm communities at the time. Her family’s home was near a Filipino pool hall and a Mexican-owned drugstore and bakery. Jewish families lived nearby. Dolores attended grade school with blacks, whites, Native Americans, and Italians, in addition to Mexican Americans. Her best friend came from a Chinese and Buddhist home, and they shared their family traditions. Dolores later credited the time in this barrio, or neighborhood, with teaching her to appreciate individual differences among people.
Together with her classmates, Dolores joined the Girl Scouts, a group where everyone was made to feel special. As her mother’s income increased, she encouraged Dolores and her brothers to take violin, piano, and dance lessons and to sing in the church choir. They joined a local youth organization. Dolores rarely knew discrimination among her classmates or from the school staff. Teachers were strict; they treated every student sternly. Dolores and her friends thought they were all mean.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF EDUCATION
When Dolores reached high school, however, she faced a different, more segregated environment. Rich students from the north side of town and poor teens from the south and east sides were thrown together. Some wealthier students bullied those from homes with less money to spare for the latest clothes and extra items. Minority teens were often excluded from high school activities. Many school social clubs charged fees for dances, knowing poor students could never afford to attend.
Although Dolores worked hard and received good grades for the most part, she also faced discrimination from teachers who routinely gave lower grades to Mexican American students. In one class, Dolores received an A on all her papers throughout the year, yet her teacher gave her a final grade of C. “I used to be able to write really nice, poetry and everything,” Dolores wrote later. “But the teacher told me at the end of the year that she couldn’t give me an A because she knew that somebody was writing my papers for me. That really discouraged me, because I used to stay up all night and think, and try to make every paper different, and try to put words in there that I thought were nice. It kind of crushed me. I was frustrated. You’re trying to go to school and yet you see all of these injustices.”8
Although Dolores won a contest for selling the most war bonds, she did not receive the trophy. Sponsors figured a Mexican girl could never have achieved so many sales. She began to feel like an outsider. Dolores believed later that she was treated differently because she was “poor, Mexican American, and a girl.”9
Alicia advised her bright daughter to just be herself. Alicia’s support helped Dolores deal with the slights she felt from not being accepted. Dolores stayed active in various groups throughout high school. She became a majorette. She helped start other social activities, including a teen center. Then the police closed the center down because some citizens objected to white girls and boys mixing with people of color. Always determined, Dolores formed another group. The police closed that one, too.
When Dolores was fifteen, attackers beat and stripped her brother Marshall at a party he attended to celebrate the end of World War II. The thugs said the reason for the attack involved what her brother wore—a zoot suit. Zoot suits, which included high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed trousers and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders, were popular with Chicano, African American, Filipino, and Italian men during the 1940s. The attack on Marshall was about race, not clothes.
Dolores saw discrimination and unjust treatment firsthand, but she learned from these experiences and tried to rise above them. Her teen years taught her the power of bringing people together, as she had with the teen center, to fight discrimination.
DID YOU KNOW?
During the 1940s, when Dolores was growing up, many communities followed written and unwritten rules to keep people of different races separate from each other. Certain neighborhoods banned Latinos, Jews, African Americans, and Asians from schools, libraries, and stores in areas dominated by whites. Some housing developments required buyers to sign whites-only property contracts. Businesses in southern towns and northern cities alike posted signs to indicate separate water fountains, restrooms, and seating in theaters. Interstate trains declared whites-only dining cars. In 1960, when President Barack Obama’s white mother and African father married, half the states in the country still banned marriages between people of different races.
