Granting Standpoint as a Strategy for Promoting Social Justice Activism: An Analysis of Dolores Huerta’s Rhetoric

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines three texts in which Dolores Huerta, a highly influential yet understudied social justice activist, addressed privileged audiences of potential allies to the United Farm Workers movement. I argue that Huerta constructed farm workers as holding standpoint – privileged knowledge of power structures acquired through oppression – as a strategy for inciting audience action. Accepting farm workers as having standpoint served as a precondition for Huerta’s audience members to embody her constructed second rather than third persona. This analysis illustrates standpoint as rhetorically and politically valuable to social justice efforts while contributing to extant scholarship on Dolores Huerta’s rhetoric.