A New Dolores Huerta Opera Brings a Labor Struggle to the Stage

A landmark labor struggle might seem like difficult terrain to explore in an opera, but Long Beach-based composer Nicolás Lell Benavides knew that he had a riveting tale to tell in Dolores.

Working with librettist Marella Martin Koch, he decided to focus on the roiling events of 1968, a year of dread and calamity from Prague and Paris to Mexico City and Memphis. It was also the third year of the grinding United Farm Workers strike led by Dolores Huerta, César Chavez and Larry Itliong, which gave birth to an international boycott of California-grown grapes.

Dolores covers the months between Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s embrace of the farmworker cause in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and the devastating aftermath of his assassination at the Ambassador Hotel. Huerta, who had helped turned out Latino and Asian American voters for him, stood by Kennedy’s side during his victory speech.

“I think there are a dozen operas about Dolores’ life that one could do, but I wanted people to focus and invest in one event and what it feels like to overcome what has to be to be one of the highest and lowest moments,” said Benavides in a recent conversation at Oakland’s Scottish Rite Center, where West Edge Opera presents the world premiere of Dolores on Aug. 2, 10 and 16.

Joining the conversation via video call, Huerta talked about the painstaking parallels between creating an opera from the ground up and building a movement. “When you think about that, you have to put people together not one by one, but one by four or five or six or seven,” said the 95-year-old activist. “You have to get small groupings of people so that you can inject into them the understanding they have the power to change things. Because people don’t believe that they do. Especially when you have conditions so entrenched like with the farm workers.”

Starring Peruvian American mezzo-soprano Kelly Guerra as Huerta, bass-baritone Phillip Lopez as Chavez, Filipino American baritone Rolfe Dauz as Itliong and tenor Alex Boyer as Kennedy, Dolores is already booked for the San Diego Opera, the Broad Stage in Santa Monica and Albuquerque’s Southwest Opera. Benavides isn’t surprised at the unusual interest in the new work.

“I was obsessed with this moment even before I became a composer,” he said, noting that he’s related to Huerta through his father, and that he spent a fair amount of time around her at family reunions in El Paso and Albuquerque while growing up. “She’s super family oriented and was always interested in talking with kids. Later, as I learned about Chicano history and civil rights and read about this moment, I thought anyone would have PTSD after that. Yet here she was so charming, smiling and telling stories.”

A Guggenheim Fellow whose previous operas with Koch include 2019’s acclaimed Washington National Opera production Pepito and the NEA-supported Tres minutos, which premiered at the Presidio Theatre in 2022, Benavides has long thought about writing an opera focused on Huerta.

When West Edge Opera’s Aperture program tapped him for its first full-length commission, the pieces began falling into place. The creative team includes Tulare County-raised conductor and music director Mary Chun, who also leads the San Francisco new-music chamber ensemble EarPlay; director Octavio Cardenas; and all the vocalists he most wanted cast.

“It’s very unusual for a composer to have that level of involvement,” Benavides said. “Everything fell into place at once, so it happened very slowly and then very quickly.”

Huerta, a life-long music lover, vividly recalls a banner weekend commuting from Washington D.C. to New York City to catch four productions at the Metropolitan Opera in between lobbying for the 1986 immigration reform act. In her view, Dolores arrives at a particularly propitious moment.

With masked ICE agents rounding up undocumented farm laborers, “I think we’re in such a desperate situation, with one set of bad news after another,” she reflected. “I think people are kind of in shock right now, saying what do we do next? The opera will be a source of inspiration.”

Benavides’ stylistically polyglot score draws on his full spectrum of influences, with electric guitar and saxophone included in the chamber ensemble “to give it some edge,” he said. “This piece runs the gamut, pulling out every stop. Sometimes the singing is operatic and sometimes more music theater. I grew up playing rancheras and corridos, so you hear that too. But also Gregorian plainchant, Viennese waltz and minimalism, a pulse that drives and organizes the music. Everything I’ve ever touched has entered this opera.”

The score amplifies the uncertainty and debate that took place among the three labor leaders as they navigated the rapidly shifting political landscape. Huerta notes that while she and Chavez were steeped in Gandhian organizing principles, Itliong was a labor contractor whose embrace of the union meant giving up power. While opera by nature creates larger-than-life characters Benavides leans into their disagreements and clashes, seeking to take them off their pedestals.

“A lot of historical figures, Dolores included, become deified in a bad way,” he said. “We think they’re here to save us, to do all the work for us. But really, I want people to realize we’re here to do the work ourselves. Those disagreements are good drama, but the more we read and researched we wanted to show that people could disagree and then make a plan and move forward and execute it. We thought that was a really powerful way for people to see themselves in Dolores and Cesar and Larry.”

‘Dolores’ premieres at West Edge Opera at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center on Aug. 2, 16 and 22. Tickets and details here.