‘Dolores’

This in-depth portrait of the activist Dolores Huerta explores her fight for racial, gender and labor justice for more than 60 years. 2017

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While assembling material for the documentary, the director Peter Bratt came across an old cassette tape of Huerta recalling how family members fought in American wars, including a great-grandfather who served in the Union Army during the Civil War. On the tape, Huerta says that as a young girl she was proud to be an American and to be part of a democracy where people could organize and make real change. But as she watched Black and Brown people killed for demanding their civil rights, she goes on to say, she had a devastating realization that in her birthplace she will always be perceived as a guest or a threat. “I will never be an American,” she declares. Bratt said that “even though the sound quality of the tape was poor, we knew this had to be in the film. It captures what so many of us who were born and raised here continue to experience, but are often unable to articulate.”