On June 30, the City of Fresno broke ground for a new park in West Fresno, named for the iconic farm labor and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, who traveled up from Bakersfield with her daughter Alicia Huerta to attend.
As participants stood in the currently treeless, shadeless lot, the hot sun beating down on them, Huerta reminded everyone that farmworkers work all day in the heat.
The park stands adjacent to an elementary school named after John Steinbeck, whose epic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, brought attention to the suffering and exploitation of California farmworkers in the 1930s and was banned at the behest of growers in many Central Valley counties…