Interview: International Peace Award Recipients

Apostle Andrew Bolton recently interviewed the two recipients of the 2007 International Peace Award, which will be presented during this year’s Peace Colloquy. Dolores Huerta is a long-time advocate of farm workers’ rights, and has been arrested twenty-two times for participating in nonviolent civil disobedience activities and strikes. She is also the mother of eleven children. Virgilio Elizondo is a Catholic priest and considered the parent of U.S. Hispanic theology, which purposefully includes people of mixed race and culture, inspired by Jesus of Nazareth in his Galilean setting. He currently is professor of pastoral and Hispanic theology at the University of Notre Dame. We are pleased to present excerpts from those interviews here:

Dolores, in much of the public debate today over immigration, what often gets lost are the positive contributions made by immigrants during the last century.

Dolores Huerta: To hear much about that you have to practically go to college and take a peace studies course. Otherwise you would never know about the contributions of immigrants and people of color, as well as the constant discrimination. In 1935 when the U.S. Congress passed laws to give workers the right to organize, they left out the farm workers by adding three words, “except agricultural workers.” Farm workers are seven decades behind all other workers in terms of wages and benefits. And the reason they were left out was because they were “Mexicans and coloreds.” This is a direct quote from a past president of the Farm Bureau Federation. He said that at a press conference in response to a reporter’s question, “Why did you keep them out?”

From the beginning, nonviolence has been an important element in your work.

DH: Definitely. I speak a lot about how you can really make changes through nonviolence, like we did with the Farm Workers Union, and the way, of course, Gandhi did in India. A lot of Gandhi’s teachings are not that publicized. One of his sayings was that conflict isn’t necessarily bad because when you have conflict, truth is resolved. When you have conflict, each side has an issue that needs to be resolved. And when you have conflict, you can come to resolution. Sometimes it’s better to work harder until the truth can be resolved than to compromise when the truth is not resolved and the conflict stays.

Would you talk about faith, how Jesus has made a difference.

DH: It goes with the whole spirit of nonviolence that nothing’s tangible that you can see. I also compare it with love. Love is a very strong force. You can’t see it, but you can see the manifestations of it. The same is true with nonviolence. You’ve got to act solely on faith because you can’t see it; you can only see the results of nonviolence. This also has to do with patience. When we started the Farm Workers Union, people said “Farmer workers can never be organized. They’re too poor. They don’t speak English. How can you possibly ever do this?” Of course, the way you do this is with faith and hard work. But you have to really know that it can happen even if you can’t see it.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on how to sustain movements—how you start, sustain, and lead movements to victory.

DH: In society we have to be able to have peace for people to reach their aspirations and potential. So we have to create a safe haven, so to speak, or a safe society so that people can do this. And the only way you can do this is with peace. If we don’t have that, then people are kept behind, oppressed, live in poverty, and have to struggle just to survive. As a society we’re not doing what we are supposed to do, which is provide this safe, peaceful society so that people can function and society itself can function. That has to be the responsibility of everyone, not just those in governance, because we are the ones who put people in power to govern us. If we don’t hold them accountable then we can’t create this place. We individually and collectively have got to be more responsible and not just blame others for whatever is going on, especially this center of violence in society that we are creating.

You worked with Cesar Chavez in co-founding the United Farm Workers Union. Many people know about Cesar but not so much about you. Is that just a reflection of a gender issue?

DH: I think it always happens when you have women. That’s why they call it history. Women tend to be overlooked. And also because Cesar was the president of the union—I was the vice president, he was the spokesperson. And, too, thousands of other people also did a lot of work. I was the political director, I was the strike director, I set up the contracts for the union, so I had a major role.

And this was during the 1970s?

DH: We founded the union in 1962. We started as an independent organization—the National Farm Workers Association. Before that I had organized another farm worker organization called Agricultural Workers Association. I collaborated with a priest, Father Tom McCullough, in forming that group. That organization became AWAC (Agricultural Workers Association Committee). And they started working with the labor contractors, who were very damaging to the Latino community. I left, and Cesar in the meantime helped to form another group for the packinghouse workers union, and that one fell apart. It was at that point that we decided that we had to do it ourselves. So that’s when we started the National Farm Workers Association.

Virgilio, tell me about your call to ministry. How long have you been a Catholic priest? How did you perceive that call?

Virgilio Elizondo: I was ordained in 1963, at the beginning of a lot of movements in the country—the civil rights movement, the Chicano movement, the farm worker movement. I was a priest during the height of the Vietnam crisis. At that moment there was a lot of very healthy unrest. And yet in all those movements it was not a call to violence, but it was a call to change and to be willing to challenge—not a call for violence to eliminate violence. I think that was a very important thing that emerged. In my mind Cesar Chavez was as important as Martin Luther King Jr. for us Latinos, and he always objected to any type of violence. He went into a fast, he went into prayer, and so forth, but not violence. And there were all the ideas that were important for me, like those of Gandhi—he was more distant but nevertheless an important figure—and as a Christian, certainly Jesus himself, who accepted the cross rather than to call forth violence upon others.

I don’t think there’s any one moment where I had a revelation from heaven or anything like that. I think it gradually built up. I had a very healthy childhood church experience, where church was the center of activity, where we met people, and we enjoyed going to church. It was fun. I sometimes get in trouble telling people that church was the best carnival in town. There was always something exciting happening, whether it was a procession or a crowning or something. You didn’t have to tell people to go to church, they wanted to go. It was the center of life in our community.

What particular individuals influenced you in that setting?

VE: We had an archbishop, Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, one of my great mentors, who already back in the 1940s in San Antonio was working along with a Jewish rabbi, David Jacobs, and the Episcopal bishop, Everett Jones, for desegregation. Seeing those three—at a time when most religions didn’t speak to each other—to see these three great religious leaders working together on common issues was a great source of inspiration.

Rabbi Jacobsen became a close friend of mine. These three were great leaders, way ahead of their time. Way before the civil rights movement and they were already working for desegregation of the city and for just wages. In fact, Archbishop Lucey made a lot of enemies in Texas because he was calling for unionization and just wages.

You still serve as a parish priest in San Antonio. On the one hand you are an accomplished theologian while, on the other hand, you’re with the common people every weekend. Do you do theology informed by the pastoral conversations you have?

VE: Well, I think informed or rising out of them. To me, I really believe in theology in the classical sense, that theology is faith seeking understanding, and that faith exists primarily in the living faith community. Books are good and helpful, but the primary source of theology is the living community of faith.