A young bilingual teacher in 1950s rural California looks out at a classroom of barefoot, starving children and makes a calculation: you cannot teach a child whose brain is consumed by hunger. So she leaves the classroom for the fields, to organize the parents instead. That pivot made Dolores Huerta one of the architects of the modern American labor movement, and this episode goes far beyond the textbook version. Raised in a Stockton hotel her mother ran as a haven for farm workers, she learned that economic survival is the prerequisite for dignity, joined the Community Service Organization (after first demanding the FBI background-check her recruiter as a suspected communist), and in 1962 co-founded what became the United Farm Workers.

Her tactical genius powered the 1965 Delano grape strike: when the Taft-Hartley Act blocked her dockworke ...