Rosario Dawson Pens Forceful Open Letter To Dolores Huerta (is that news?)

*I post this story about the Rosario Dawson letter to Dolores Huerta, and not the letter itself, for a specific reason. I’m not interested in what Dawson has to say. Neither am I interested at this point in pro-Hillary or pro-Bernie ideas. But I’m very interested in the place that celebrity holds in our political discourse. Especially Latin@ celebrities. I’m also interested in what you have to say. As I see it, celebrity provides a soapbox not afforded to private citizens – this is a media generated universe where corporations create the platforms that spawn celebrities that voice their opinions over the same media platforms. Then those opinions echo as news. Then again, we live in a world where anyone with a laptop or a mobile device and a connection to the internet is a media producer, so . . .  Is it that we’ve given celebrities permission to speak for us? Or is it that celebrities have as much a right to speak their mind as anyone else? I don’t think what she wrote to Huerta is a story, but the fact that it’s been covered as news is newsworthy and worth discussing.  VL

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By Yara Sinón, Remezcla

In 2014, Rosario Dawson portrayed labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in Cesar Chavez, the biopic about the co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association. At the time, Dawson said Huerta deserved a biopic of her own. “I hope with the success of this film that there’s an opportunity to tell her story, ’cause she’s still writing it, she’s still out there on the front lines doing the stuff,” she said, according to The Associated Press. “I did so much research about her and it was just impossible – a lot of the stuff that we filmed didn’t even make it onto the cut.”

This week, Dawson endorsed [Bernie] Sanders, and she came out swinging. First, she ripped the DNC a new one for not supporting grass-root campaigns, and today, she released an open letter to Huerta on the Huffington Post. She started off by acknowledging how much Huerta has done for Latinos, feminism, and workers’ rights before countering what Huerta wrote about Sanders point by point.

Click HERE to read more.

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[Photo courtesy of GirlTalkHQ]

Suggested reading

Feminism, Nation and Myth explores the scholarship of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who is said to have led Cortés and his troops to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. The figure of La Malinche has generated intense debate among literature and cultural studies scholars. Drawing from the humanities and the social sciences, feminist studies, queer studies, Chicana/o studies, and Latina/o studies, critics and theorists in this volume analyze the interaction and interdependence of race, class, and gender. Studies of La Malinche demand that scholars disassemble and reconstruct concepts of nation, community, agency, subjectivity, and social activism.

Contributors include Alfred Arteaga, Antonia Castañeda, Debra Castillo, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Deena González, María Herrera Sobek, Guisela Latorre, Luis Leal, Sandra Messinger Cypess, Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Amanda Nolacea Harris, Rolando J. Romero, and Tere Romo.  These academic essays are complemented by the creative work of Alicia Gaspar de Alba and José Emilio Pacheco, both of whom evoke the figure of La Malinche in their work.

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