Prize for Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta flouts the smug conventional wisdom that the 1960s are behind us. She won't settle down and become an anachronism. The 72-year-old Huerta marched 165 grueling miles from Delano to Sacramento this year to demand that centrist Governor Gray Davis sign a mandatory mediation bill for farmworkers. Few insiders thought the bill had a chance. But when Huerta said she would start a hunger strike during the final days of the intense gubernatorial campaign, Davis did the right thing.

For that kind of moral commitment and savvy, Dolores Huerta is being awarded the $100,000 Puffin Prize by the Nation Institute, given annually to a social justice activist for a lifetime of sacrifice for a cause. The Nation community shares Huerta's commitment to justice for farmworkers and causes that are unseen by the powers that be. For example, the magazine's longtime editor Carey McWilliams became head of California's immigration and housing division in 1939 and wrote about the shameful condition of migrants in the very fields where Dolores Huerta grew up.

For Huerta, the notion of a "lifetime of sacrifice" means living to the fullest. When I asked how she planned to spend the $100,000--say, for example, on a car that works or clothes for her eleven kids--she already had a plan. "We need an organizers' institute" to train more Dolores Huertas for the future, she said.

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