Dolores Huerta, Farmworker Champion, Dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, the labor organizer who co-founded the United Farm Workers and spent more than six decades pushing for farmworkers, women and immigrants, died on October 28 at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96, according to the Associated Press. Her family said she died of cancer, surrounded by family, and asked for privacy as they grieve.

The death of Dolores Huerta closes a career that began in a California classroom and reached the White House. She was a negotiator, a lobbyist, a boycott strategist and, for much of her life, the most recognizable woman in the American labor movement. The Associated Press described her rallying cry, "Sí, se puede," as enduring, and it outlived every campaign it powered, turning up later in presidential politics and protest signs far from the fields where it started.

From a classroom to the fields

Dolores Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernandez in Dawson, New Mexico, in 1930, according to the Associated Press. Her father was a miner and union activist who won a seat in the state Legislature. After her parents divorced, her mother moved the family to Stockton, California, where Dolores Huerta grew up among Mexican, Filipino, African American, Japanese and Chinese working families.

She trained as a teacher and took a job in an elementary school in the San Joaquin Valley. The work did not hold her. She told a PBS documentary in 2017 that she could not stand seeing children come to class hungry and without shoes, and that organizing farmworkers looked like a better way to help than teaching their children. The Associated Press reported that frustration pushed her out of the classroom and into organizing.

Her early civil rights work led her to Cesar Chavez. In 1962, the two started the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers of America. Dolores Huerta served as a key leader and negotiator for years, and the Associated Press reported that she helped negotiate collective bargaining agreements and contracts with large growers, winning health and benefit plans that farmworkers had never had.

The strike and boycott that changed farm labor

The breakthrough came with the Delano grape strike, which began in 1965 and ran for five years. Dolores Huerta helped organize Filipino pickers alongside Mexican workers, and she directed nationwide boycotts of grapes and lettuce in the early 1970s. The boycotts put economic pressure on growers and built the political climate for California to pass the first state law recognizing farmworkers' right to collective bargaining, according to the Associated Press.

She also secured financial aid for unemployed farmworkers and disability insurance for California farmworkers, and she campaigned against toxic pesticides, for amnesty for immigrants in the country illegally, and against federal guest worker programs, the Associated Press reported. Her work moved between the picket line and the legislature, and she became one of the few women lobbying in Sacramento in the late 1950s and the years that followed.

Organizing cost her. She was jailed 22 times for union demonstrating, according to the Associated Press. In 1988, while protesting Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush's opposition to the grape boycott, she was struck by a police officer's baton in San Francisco, suffering broken ribs and a pulverized spleen. She later reached a settlement with the city. After a long recovery, she turned her attention to women's rights and to encouraging Latinas to run for office.

A public life that kept going

Dolores Huerta met Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 and volunteered for his presidential campaign, registering Mexican Americans in California to vote. Kennedy thanked her publicly after winning the California primary, moments before he was shot. The assassination devastated her, the Associated Press reported, but she kept organizing.

She campaigned for Democratic presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In 2012, Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, and joked that she had let him off easy for borrowing her slogan for his 2008 campaign, according to the Associated Press. She kept marching well into her 90s, urging activists to speak out about race, poverty and LGBTQ rights. "It seems like history continues to repeat itself," she told the Associated Press in August. "You see what is happening right now in our country, and we know that people have to stand up."

Tributes arrived quickly. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Dolores Huerta a stalwart champion of working Americans, according to the Associated Press. California Governor Gavin Newsom said the state would not be where it is without her passion for justice and fairness. United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero said Dolores Huerta left farmworkers and the Latino community stronger and more organized than she found them.

The revelation that reframed her story

This year, Dolores Huerta revealed a chapter she had kept private for 60 years. She told the New York Times that Chavez had sexually abused her in the 1960s, leading to the birth of two children who were raised by others, according to the Associated Press. She said she had feared that coming forward would compromise her life's work and unravel the progress made for workers. The Associated Press reported that Chavez's reputation soured after the disclosure, with his name removed from a holiday that had been a point of Hispanic pride.

The disclosure did not soften the tributes. It gave them a harder edge, a reminder that the movement's public history and its private costs were not the same story. Dolores Huerta had spent a lifetime asking other people to stand up, and her final public act was standing up about her own past.

Her family said plans to recognize and celebrate her life will follow. She is survived by 13 children, according to published reports. The Dolores Huerta Foundation, which she founded to carry on her organizing work, continues to advocate for farmworkers, women and immigrants. For readers following labor news, the recent Allegheny County paid parental leave decision shows the same kind of local policy fight she spent decades waging. Her story also sits alongside other recent reporting on violence against older women and protesters detained at demonstrations. The Associated Press obituary is available from AccessNorthGA, and a second report from Monterey County Now covers her Central Coast ties.