Dolores Huerta, the labor rights, civil rights, and feminist icon who passed away yesterday at the age of 96, spoke out, picketed, struck, marched, and relentlessly organized working people well into her 90s. She pushed them to fight for their own rights, their own dignity, and their own empowerment and was a relentless advocate for those same people to get involved in electoral politics and vote, from presidential elections down to city council elections.
In the late 1960s, in the middle of the United Farm Workers’ grape strike in Delano, Huerta and other members of UFW campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy’s run for president [not to be confused with his son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services].
“If people don’t vote, everything stays the same,” Huerta said in 2017. “You can protest until the sky turns yellow, or the moon turns blue, and it’s not going to change anything if you don’t vote.”
But Huerta’s synchronistic view that activism in the streets can change people's lives and that voting for political candidates can, too, isn’t universal among activists.
As this year’s midterms, statewide, and L.A. city elections come to a close, and people around the city consider how they can actually work to change the city for the better–such as putting a stop to ICE and CBP’s terror campaigns, housing the unhoused, and generally making the city a better place to live–L.A. TACO reached out to multiple activist groups to hear their thoughts on the relationship between activism and voting.