Dolores Huerta is one of the most important Americans you may have never heard of. As co-founder of what is now the United Farm Workers union, and creator of one of the most recognizable campaign slogans across the world – “Sí se puede”, or what Barack Obama translated to “Yes we can”, Huerta’s public stature across the world has often been overshadowed by her male counterparts.

A new documentary, Dolores, aims to put Huerta where she belongs – alongside Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Gloria Steinem as one of the most important US activists and organizers of the 20th century. It tells the story of Huerta from her beginnings in central California, to a local politician and organizer, to co-founder of one of the most recognizable unions in the world. It also tracks her eventual separation from the union, her continued activism, and her decision at the second half of her life to stand up for her own legacy.

Huerta speaks in great torrents and illustrates her reasoning with practical examples she’s witnessed or been part of – from small victories at the driver’s license office to people who’ve been murdered agitating for a change in conditions for farm workers.

“The role of unions is still very important,” Huerta said over the phone recently. “Labor unions create the middle class, and we’ve seen in the United States of America that our middle class is shrinking, and that is very dangerous, because if you do not have a middle class, you do not have a democracy.

“That’s where we’re at right now: rich people are getting richer. And when you have the heads of these corporations getting multi-millions of dollars a year [in] salaries, and we have people who are having a hard time living on minimum wage, and there are people who have to work two, three jobs just to survive – this is wrong.”

Dolores Huerta poses at the Sundance Film Festival, Utah. Photograph: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP

Although initially shy, Huerta says her courage “came by gradually”, starting when she was a young woman as a dancer and as a participant in the Girl Scouts. Progressively becoming an organizer, in part after witnessing police brutality, Huerta would join the Community Service Organization advocating for the rights of Latinx people in California, while rubbing up against racial and gender discrimination herself.

Huerta tells the story of a disabled man she accompanied to the social security office. Unable to rightfully collect his disability payments, she was at first rebuffed by a claims agent. Instructed by a mentor to go back, “ask for a manager” and not take no for an answer, Huerta was able to get the disabled man what he was owed. A small victory, but it helped to teach Huerta about her own power, and the power of small triumphs that, when stacked atop one another, can become a worldview.

“Leadership is something that you really can’t teach in a classroom, but I think it’s something that has to be learned, and you learn leadership by getting involved, by getting engaged,” she said. “I found out that I can go out there, I can demand something and make it happen – that leads me to then being able to testify in front of an assembly committee or a congressional committee of the US Congress. I think all of that gives you what I call the emotional fortitude that you need to go out there and be able to sit at a table and negotiate with anyone.”

An astonishing long strike – and a victory

In 1962 Huerta co-founded the National Farmworkers Association with Chavez, a precursor to United Farm Workers, and just a few years later organized the first contract between farm workers and growers in American history – a staggering achievement considering the treatment of farm workers was often compounded by racism and immigration status, as well as a history of brutality towards farm workers and people of color in the American south-west.

In 1965, Huerta was a lead organizer on one of the most important and famous strikes in US history, the Table Grape Boycott. The strike – which lasted more than five years – began when the majority-Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee went on strike, and the National Farmworkers Association, mostly Latinx and helmed by Chavez and Huerta, joined them. Soon after, the organizations merged to create the United Farm Workers. They still represent workers today.

Dolores Huerta at a dinner at the Colorado Labor Council during her tour to line up boycott support for a strike by grape pickers against California table grape growers. Photograph: John Preito/Denver Post via Getty Images

The strike was perhaps the largest and most successful “commercial strike” in US history. Recognizing a field strike would probably be crushed, the union took its concerns directly to consumers: farm workers and representatives of the union traveled the country and put themselves directly in front of the American people, explaining their lives and working conditions, picketing grocery stores and other institutions and holding marches to raise awareness.

The workers were eventually successful, signing a three-year contract with growers, but the strike also led to broader protections for workers such as the Agricultural Labor Relations Act and the farm workers’ bill of rights.

Today, Huerta feels much work remains to be done. “We are not taught about the contributions of people of color building the United States of America. We have to include these in our schools – starting in pre-K, kindergarten – what the contributions are of the people of color,” Huerta said. “And as long as that isn’t taught in our school books, our children of color will never have the dignity that they deserve, they will always feel like second-class citizens. And our Anglo children will be tainted with this whole idea of white supremacy.”

When asked about sacrifice, Huerta lists off the many “martyrs” of this strike and others, people who were murdered advocating for the rights of workers. Always explicitly nonviolent, Huerta names a half-dozen nonviolent colleagues who were met with violence and paid for the rights of workers with their lives. She is always careful to mention they came from many races, ethnicities and religions.

“These are people who made sacrifices. There were a lot of farm workers that were beaten up, went to jail, people that lost their homes during the strikes that we had. These are major sacrifices that people don’t know.”

Huerta herself was severely beaten in San Francisco at a rally against the policies of George HW Bush, an incident that was caught on tape and left Huerta in the hospital for more than a month.

“As Coretta Scott King said, we won’t ever have peace in the world until women take power. And when I say the word women, I may as well use the word feminist. Not all women are feminists, but feminists are people that care about immigrants and workers and the environment and labor rights, and of course reproductive rights, LGBT rights.

“These I call feminist values, and of course there are many men out there that also have feminist values. These are the kind of people we want on our boards, in our public agencies and our organizations where decisions are being made about how our tax dollars are going to be spent, and policies that are going to affect us.”

Hillary Clinton embraces Dolores Huerta in 2016, during a workshop meeting at La Casa The Resurrection Project, a immigrant community center in Chicago. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Often the target of discrimination and cynicism based on her gender, even within the movement she helped found – “Sí se puede” is still often incorrectly attributed to Chavez – Huerta at the end of her life is standing up for her legacy and the legacy of women who have always been in movements right alongside their male colleagues advocating for change.

“We need to have women in civic life and we need to have women involved. Because women have a different sensibility, a different intuition, a different way of thinking. We look at problems differently than the way men do. Active women have a tendency to think more of a resolution and cooperation than conflict and domination,” Huerta said. “Women also set their standards for the family. If women are involved politically and in civic life, then the children and the family are going to be involved also.”

Today, Huerta continues her activism with a namesake foundation dedicated to organizing the grassroots and developing average citizens into leaders, politicians, and activists.

“Get involved,” she said when asked what people who feel hopeless by the current state of the world can do. “Get involved with organizations, every organization that is out there fighting right now, they need volunteers.

“Get involved in political parties if you don’t like the way it’s going. If it’s not progressive enough for you get involved in your local party and get your friends involved. Organize your friends to come, and take it over if you have to take it over, if they’re not doing what you think they should be doing.

“We can build our own wall – we can build a wall around the US Congress because every single person in the House of Representatives has to run for re-election. We have an opportunity right now in 2018 to get out there and elect progressive people to the Congress that are going to stop whatever evil comes out of the White House.”

Dolores will play in London at Bertha DocHouse starting 1 December and is currently playing in theaters in the US. More information can be found at Doloresthemovie.com