¡Si, Ella Puede! The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers by Stacey K. Sowards (review)

Despite over fifty years of civil rights and worker’s activism, Dolores Huerta has only within the last ten years become a widely recognized subject of historical narratives and documentary film. Stacey K. Sowards’s ¡Si Ella Puede! The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers contributes to the increased attention to Huerta as a longtime labor and civil rights leader whose story has primarily been told through the lens of her role as the right-hand woman to Cesar Chávez in his leadership of the United Farm Workers (UFW). Drawing on archival materials such as Huerta’s speeches, journalistic interviews, and letters to Cesar Chávez, Sowards “seeks to understand Huerta’s rhetorical legacy and iconic status” as a public figure, cofounder, and organizer in the United Farm Workers movement (p. 3). That is, she sets out to evaluate Huerta’s “rhetorical legacy” as a powerful public figure of social justice in her own right.

Guided initially by constructs from the fields of rhetoric and communication, Sowards defines rhetorical agency as “how one uses communication to create space and social justice” (p. 12). She underscores the complexity of rhetorical agency as deriving from both constraining factors as well as enabling factors that may support an activist’s social justice aims and ability to participate. For Sowards, context is important to any critical analysis of agency so her first chapter provides a brief overview of the UFW as an organization. Then, her second chapter presents the elements of Huerta’s background that contributed to her “intersectional habitus” or the “gendered, racialized, and classed contexts” that influenced Huerta’s life (p. 32). Here Sowards affirms previous scholars who have described Huerta’s trajectory as an activist from her early experiences of relative economic stability, access to education, and a strong single parent figure, while also identifying constraints based on gender and race for Mexican American women in the 1950s such as norms of marriage and motherhood (norms that Huerta challenged in a variety of ways).

After providing a general introduction to the founding of the UFW and describing Huerta’s formative early years, a key chapter in the progression of the book (chapter three) centers on Huerta’s letters to Cesar Chávez as they organized the UFW. Sowards identifies documentation, collaboration, affirmation, and catharsis as primary ways that the letters expressed Huerta’s rhetorical agency. Through her reading of these letters, Sowards utilizes rhetorical analysis as a methodology for historical and social movement studies. She describes how the letters, written from one person to another in an assumed private communication, present examples of the nuts and bolts of organizing, such as building union membership, financial management, and requests for input on proposed actions. Throughout, she also foregrounds the personal challenges Huerta experienced around childcare and finances. The feminist movement of the time proclaimed, “the personal is political” and in that vein Huerta’s experiences, and her writing about them, remind us that she had to juggle the private/public spheres constantly in ways that male activists did not (p. 76).

Another significant contribution of Sowards’s study is her application of Chicana feminist theories to characterize Huerta’s rhetorical style and modes of activist expression. She weaves the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval into two of her chapters (four and five) as she applies the concepts of mestiza consciousness, haciendo caras, nepantla, and differential consciousness, to an understanding of Huerta’s verbal and embodied activist presentation. In what is an occasionally challenging path of analysis for the reader, Sowards proposes that Huerta’s emotionality in her advocacy for farm workers during contract negotiations effectively adopted gender norms in ways that also pushed beyond their limits, citing the resistant possibilities of “passion, disruption, and excess” (p. 85). From this discussion of emotion, Sowards then moves...