Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers Co-Founder and Labor Leader, Dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and fought for farmworkers for more than six decades, died on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96. Her family announced the death through the Dolores Huerta Foundation. "We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today," the family said. A family spokesman said the cause was cancer, USA Today reported.

From a classroom in the San Joaquin Valley

Huerta was born on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico. Her father was a miner and union activist who later won a seat in the state legislature. Her parents divorced when she was 3, and her mother, Alicia, moved the children to Stockton, California, where she ran a restaurant and a hotel. Huerta became an elementary school teacher in the San Joaquin Valley, then left the classroom after seeing how her students lived. "I couldn't stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes," she said in a 2017 PBS documentary.

Building a union

Her work with a civil rights group in Stockton led her to Chavez. In 1962 the two started the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers a few years later. Huerta served as the union chief negotiator, a strike organizer and a lobbyist. In 1965 she joined Filipino grape pickers on the picket line in what became the five-year Delano grape strike. The contracts the union won brought farmworkers job security, health care, retirement plans, rest periods, clean drinking water and protection from pesticides, Reuters reported.

Boycotts, bargaining and a slogan that travelled

By directing nationwide boycotts of grapes and lettuce in the early 1970s, Huerta helped create the pressure that led California to pass the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the first state law in the country to give farmworkers collective bargaining rights. She coined the union slogan "Si, se puede," or "Yes, we can." Barack Obama used the phrase in his 2008 campaign, and when he presented Huerta with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, he praised her as a tenacious leader and joked that he had stolen her slogan, The Associated Press reported.

Arrests, injury and a foundation

Huerta was jailed 22 times for union demonstrating, The Associated Press reported. In 1988, while protesting in San Francisco against the policies of presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, she was struck by a police officer's baton and suffered three broken ribs and a pulverized spleen, and she needed more than a dozen blood transfusions. In 2002 she founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, and into her 90s she kept marching in protests and speaking across the country on race, poverty and women's rights.

A secret kept for 60 years

This year Huerta told The New York Times that Chavez sexually abused her in the 1960s. She said he pressured her into sex on a work trip in 1960 and raped her in 1966 in a secluded grape field in Delano, at the height of the boycott. Both encounters led to pregnancies, Reuters reported. She said she kept the secret for 60 years because she feared no one in the union would believe her. In the 2025 documentary Seeds of Change, she said: "I hope that my legacy will be one of an organizer that organized to fight injustice."