Dolores Huerta, Farmworker Rights Pioneer, Dies

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers and spent decades pressing growers and lawmakers for better treatment of farmworkers, died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96. Her family announced the death in a statement and asked for privacy as they grieve, according to USA Today, and a family spokesman said the cause was cancer. The United Farm Workers said the greatest tribute to her life would be for the work of organizing to continue.

Dolores Huerta was one of the foremost women in American labor history. She served the union as chief negotiator, strike organizer, and lobbyist during its early decades in the Central Valley, and the contracts she helped win brought farmworkers job security, health care, and retirement plans, along with a credit union and field benefits as basic as guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water, and protection from pesticides, Reuters reported.

Dolores Huerta grew up in Stockton after moving there from New Mexico at age three with her mother, and she taught school briefly before the sight of hungry farm children in her classroom pushed her toward organizing. She went on to found the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization, which ran voter registration drives and fought for economic stability for Latino residents, according to the National Museum of Women’s History.

Born Dolores Clara Fernández in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta took her surname from her second husband, fellow activist Ventura Huerta. Her later campaigns reached beyond the fields: she pressed for equal rights for women and immigrants as well as for workers, and she kept showing up at rallies and on picket lines long after the grape contracts were signed. The boycott drew support from churches, unions, and civil rights groups across the country, and shoppers who had never set foot in a vineyard learned to check labels before buying grapes. In June, the foundation marked her birthday with a sold-out celebration in Los Angeles, a measure of how wide her audience remained.

The Delano strike and the boycott that followed

The campaign that made her name nationally began with the Delano grape strike in 1965, when Filipino and Mexican farmworkers walked out of vineyards to demand better pay and conditions. Dolores Huerta helped turn the strike into a national boycott of table grapes, carrying the workers’ case to shoppers, churches, and city councils far from the fields. The boycott ran for five years and ended with contracts that were unprecedented for farmworkers at the time.

The movement she helped build also changed California law. Its campaigns led to the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which established collective bargaining rights for farmworkers in the state, a protection most other private-sector workers had held for decades.

A slogan that traveled far beyond the fields

Dolores Huerta coined the union’s rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” which translates loosely as “Yes, it can be done.” The phrase later echoed through American politics when Barack Obama adopted its English rendering as a campaign slogan during his run for president in 2008, and it had already been chanted at large immigration reform marches a few years earlier.

President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and the foundation Dolores Huerta started in 2002 in Bakersfield kept up grassroots organizing and civic engagement work into her final years. She stayed on the college lecture circuit into her nineties, traveled the country endorsing candidates and registering voters, and spoke out against the immigration policies of President Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, Dolores Huerta told The New York Times that Cesar Chavez, the union’s better-known co-founder, had sexually assaulted her, describing one encounter during a work trip in the union’s early years and a second in a secluded grape field at the height of the boycott. She told the newspaper she had kept the episodes secret for decades because she feared no one in the union would believe her, and she said her silence ended with that account. Chavez died in 1993.

Her family said memorial arrangements will be announced later. The foundation she founded continues to organize in the Central Valley communities where she began, and her birthday is marked as Dolores Huerta Day in California.

Sources: USA Today and Legacy.com reported the details of her death and career.