Activist Huerta: 'We're all Africans'
By Kimberly Matas
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 01.20.2007
advertisementSocial activist Dolores Huerta told a Tucson audience Friday that people of different ethnicities all originated from the same continent: Africa.
"We are all related, and we are all Africans of different races and colors," she said, referring to the theory of human origins that says all people come from a small group that migrated from Africa 40,000 years ago.
"We should tell the Minutemen, the Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK: 'You're Africans. Get over it,' " she said.
Huerta was the keynote speaker at a Midtown lunch organized by Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona to mark the 34th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion.
Huerta, the mother of 11 children, started off talking about women's reproductive rights, but quickly segued to the topic of illegal immigration and called racism a "cancer."
Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union with César Chávez, made national headlines in April when she told students, in a speech at Tucson High Magnet School, that "Republicans hate Latinos." State lawmakers summoned Tucson Unified School District officials to Phoenix and TV pundit Bill O'Reilly even weighed in during the controversy that ensued.
"Now it's very popular, fashionable to attack Mexicans. We are the new enemy," Huerta said Friday, calling it ironic to build a wall along the Mexican border to prevent illegal entrants when the Canadian border, a known terrorist entry point into the U.S., is left unfenced.
Huerta ended her remarks by circling back to Planned Parenthood.
"I want to say a big old 'viva' to Planned Parenthood — long live," she said.
"Can we continue our roll for equality for races and people of different sexual orientations?" she asked the crowd. "Sí se puede — yes we can," shouted Huerta, who was joined by audience members in chanting the rallying cry of the farm workers' protests.
Gov. Janet Napolitano also spoke at the luncheon, and said Arizona schools need more informative sex education programs.
"In our state and other states, we are hamstrung by laws about what we can teach our young people," Napolitano said. "I think it's time to go back to the drawing board and get medically accurate information in schools."
The governor said young people must be taught about "healthy relationships" and receive sex education so they can make informed decisions.
U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., was recognized with the Morris K. Udall Public Policy Award for his support of women's reproductive rights. Grijalva was in Washington, D.C., but his daughter, TUSD board member Adelita Grijalva, accepted the award on his behalf.
Tucson attorney Dean Brault was given the Sarah Weddington Warrior Award for contributing the most pro bono hours representing young women in abortion-bypass hearings — judicial proceedings for minors who want to terminate pregnancy without telling their parents.
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/165478.php
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."
Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
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