Community Organizing Fellow 2023-24

ALVARO HUERTA: Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Alvaro Huerta. And I'm an Organizing Fellow here at the Harvard Divinity School. And I come to you with a simple question. It's a profound question. How can those of us with privilege, in this country privilege it's about speaking English, being a citizen, going to university. So how can those of us who have privilege use that privilege for the benefit of those on the bottom, the marginalized, the dispossessed?  

So this is something that is very interesting to me, because I come from that background. I come from the bottom, but I also have university education at the bachelor's, master's, and the PhD level. So one day, I was at a party. And a friend of mine who's a gardener, a landscape gardener, a Mexican immigrant with no formal education, came up to me and challenged me. He said, Alvaro, since you're a big time organizer, and you do all this for the community, why don't you do something for us, the gardeners?  

And I was like, OK. What do you need? And he was like the city of LA wants to ban leaf blowers, and they want to send us to jail for six months. And they want to charge us $1,000. And then there's a charge, a criminal charge, a misdemeanor. And I was so outraged that I contacted my fellow organizers that we met at UCLA in the 1980s, when we were organizing. And so we came together and united literally two classes, the Mexican-American educated class, which is myself and five other activists, and then the Mexican immigrant class, in this case, the gardeners. Which was like my mother, like my father, and my siblings.  

So in bringing these two groups together that are pretty much, while they had the same ethnic background in terms of class, there's a big disparity. So by us joining together and mobilizing and utilizing the networks, the migrant networks of the gardeners, we were able to successfully overturn this ban, this inhumane, illegal, or immoral ban. While something is legal, in this case just like slavery was once legal, that doesn't mean that it's moral.  

So our challenges or our challenge to the city of LA, was that why are you picking on the hardest working people in this country, which is the immigrants? Why aren't you looking now for those who steal from us, who rob us, who try to turn the country with sedition? Why are you picking on us?  

And so we were able to utilize what we learned at the university, the theory, and put it into practice. And then now with that theory and that practice, which Pablo Freire refers to as praxis, I'm able to use that knowledge to the classroom, and teach here, and mentor graduate students at one of the best universities in the world, so that they too can use that privilege and to benefit those on the bottom. So like we say in East LA, muchas gracias.