Dolores Huerta, the labour organizer and civil rights leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and spent more than six decades fighting for the men and women who harvest America’s food, has died at the age of 96. Her family announced that she died on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by loved ones. A family spokesperson said the cause was cancer. Memorial arrangements will be announced later, the family said, asking for privacy while noting that mourners around the world share their loss.
Within hours, the tributes measured the scale of her place in American life. Former President Barack Obama, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, called her a hero of his and said her calling had enabled thousands of migrant labourers working in brutal conditions to make their voices heard and demand something better. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who had planned to visit her on the very day of her death, said she represented the best of the country. In downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night, activists and politicians held a candlelight vigil beneath a mural of her painted earlier this year, filling the street with music, candles and roses. The United Farm Workers said the greatest possible tribute to her life would be for her work of organizing to continue.
From a Stockton Classroom to the Fields
Dolores Clara Fernández was born on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico. After her parents divorced, she and her siblings were raised by their mother, Alicia, a businesswoman who was active in their farming community in Stockton, California. Huerta trained as an elementary school teacher — and it was in the classroom that she found her cause. She watched children arrive at school hungry and without proper clothing because their parents worked long hours in the fields for poverty wages, and she concluded that she could do more for those children by organizing their parents than by teaching them.
She joined the Community Service Organization, a grassroots group working to improve conditions for Latinos in California, and rose to become its political director. Lobbying in Sacramento, she helped win measures including driver’s licence examinations in Spanish and disability insurance protections for agricultural workers. It was through the CSO that she met Cesar Chavez, a fellow organizer who shared her conviction that farmworkers — excluded by law from the federal protections that guaranteed other workers the right to organize — needed a union of their own.
Building a Union From Nothing
In 1962, Huerta and Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association, the organization that became the United Farm Workers. The obstacles were formidable. Farmworkers were among the lowest-paid people in the United States — in 1962, the year of the union’s founding, the average farmworker earned 93 cents an hour — and they worked amid routine exposure to dangerous pesticides, without the legal right to bargain collectively. Huerta, raising a growing family of her own, became the union’s engine room: its chief negotiator, a strike organizer, a lobbyist and, for nearly four decades, its vice president.
The movement ignited in 1965, when Filipino farmworkers walked off the job in California’s fields and the young association joined their strike. In March 1966, Chavez led a 300-mile pilgrimage march from Delano to the state capital in Sacramento while Huerta negotiated with industry leaders, and the union won its first major agreement. That same year, the UFW launched an international consumer boycott of table grapes that lasted four years: supporters picketed grocery stores and persuaded restaurants and shoppers across North America and beyond to refuse non-union produce. In 1970, the pressure produced the first table grape contracts, beginning in the Coachella Valley, where grower Lionel Steinberg broke ranks with his industry and negotiated. The contracts the union went on to win delivered what farmworkers had never had: job security, healthcare, retirement plans, a credit union, guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water and protections against pesticides. The union’s campaign against pesticide exposure also helped build the pressure that led Congress to ban DDT in 1972.
Huerta stood at the centre of national history as well. On June 5, 1968, she was beside Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he thanked California voters and farmworkers for supporting his presidential campaign. Kennedy, one of the movement’s most prominent champions, was shot moments later and died the following day.
‘Sí Se Puede’
Huerta’s most famous contribution may be three words. She began using the phrase “Sí se puede” — “Yes, we can” — whenever people told her what the union could not achieve, and it became the movement’s rallying cry. Decades later, a young senator named Barack Obama adopted its English translation for his 2008 presidential campaign. Obama never pretended otherwise: as he repeated in his tribute this week, he too often gets the credit, but Dolores got there first.
Her influence is written into the landscape. Schools in California, Texas and Colorado bear her name, as do housing developments for farmworker families; in 2025 she attended the opening of Dolores Huerta Gardens, an affordable housing complex in Oxnard. She remained, into her nineties, a presence on the lecture circuit and the campaign trail — registering voters, endorsing candidates and speaking out against the immigration policies of the Trump administration. In a foundation video posted barely twelve days before her death, she compared justice to a crop that must be nurtured and grown, and repeated the conviction that organized people can change the world.
The Secret She Carried for Sixty Years
Huerta’s final year brought a revelation that has permanently altered the movement’s history — and which must be reported as what it is: her account, given to The New York Times and never tested in court, concerning a man who has been dead for more than three decades and cannot answer it. Earlier this year, Huerta told the Times that in 1960, during a work trip, Chavez pressured her into sex when she felt unable to refuse the man who was her boss and the leader of the movement she had devoted her life to. She said that in 1966, at the height of the grape boycott, he drove her to a secluded field near Delano and raped her. Both encounters, she said, resulted in pregnancies, and the babies were raised by others. She said she did not report what happened because of police attitudes toward the movement at the time and because she feared no one in her own union would believe her; she had persuaded herself, she said, that the assaults were something she had to endure alone and in secret. Her silence, she declared, ends here.
Huerta was not alone in coming forward. This year, a number of other women also accused Chavez of sexual assault, in some cases alleging abuse when they were minors. The Chavez family told the Times they were not in a position to judge the newly revealed allegations, and said that as a family steeped in the values of equity and justice, they honour the voices of those who feel unheard and who report sexual misconduct. Obama’s tribute acknowledged this dimension of her life directly, noting that she fought for marginalized communities even as she herself faced sexism and abuse — including, as she revealed, from Chavez and others within her own movement. How the farmworker movement reckons with the two halves of its founding story — the contracts that transformed workers’ lives, and the harm its leader allegedly inflicted on the woman who built the union beside him — is now part of Huerta’s legacy too.
What She Leaves Behind
For decades, Huerta’s contributions were overshadowed by Chavez’s, and historians have spent recent years correcting the balance: she was, by wide agreement, one of the foremost women in American labour history, and the negotiator who turned protest into enforceable contracts. What she leaves is both tangible — the wages, water, rest and medical care written into agreements that still protect field workers — and a method: teach people that power comes from working together, and treat every moment as an organizing opportunity. Farmworkers gathering to organize today do so in a world she built. Sí se puede was her answer to every doubt, including, in the end, the doubt that her own story would ever be believed.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from CNN, Reuters, People and The Desert Sun.