Obituary

 

Dolores Huerta inspired generations with three words: “Sí, se puede”—“Yes, we can.” In her hands, those words became a rallying cry for workers, women, immigrants and people fighting for justice around the world. She gave people the courage to recognize their own power—and showed them how to use it. Through historic labor contracts, groundbreaking legislation and campaigns that helped women claim political leadership, she turned a declaration of possibility into lasting change.

Huerta, the pioneering labor leader, feminist and environmental justice advocate who co-founded the United Farm Workers and transformed the possibilities of Latina leadership in America, died today, October 28 at home in Bakersfield surrounded by her close family. She was 96.

She came of age at a time when women, especially Mexican-American women, were rarely expected to lead political movements, negotiate with powerful businessmen, or challenge elected officials. Dolores did all three. She did not wait for permission. She became one of the most powerful organizers, negotiators, and advocates of the modern civil rights movement.

Her fight began in the agricultural communities around Stockton, CA. She began her career as a teacher, where she saw children coming to school hungry and without proper clothing because their parents worked long hours in the fields for poverty wages. She decided she could do more to help them by organizing their parents than by teaching their children.

Through the Community Service Organization, she registered voters, challenged discrimination and learned how to turn community demands into political pressure. By the late 1950s, she was lobbying in Sacramento, a young Mexican American woman confronting a political establishment overwhelmingly controlled by men.

One of the few women lobbyists of her era, she became a formidable advocate for people who could not afford one. Her legislative victories included a California measure allowing driver’s license examinations in Spanish, the extension of Aid to Families with Dependent Children to California farmworker families, and disability insurance protections for agricultural workers.

In 1960, she helped establish the Agricultural Workers Association with Larry Itliong. In 1962, she joined Cesar Chavez in building the National Farm Workers Association, which merged in 1966 with the Filipino-led Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Mr. Itliong, to form the organization that became the United Farm Workers.

The decisive call to strike in Delano came from Filipino farmworkers. On September 8, 1965, workers organized through the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, with leaders including Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, walked out of the vineyards. The National Farm Workers Association joined them that month. Their organizations merged in 1966 to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, which later became the United Farm Workers.

Dolores became a principal architect of the union’s power.

During the Delano strike and nationwide grape boycott, she helped turn the struggles of California farmworkers into a national moral and economic confrontation. She enlisted consumers, unions, religious communities, and civil rights allies. She helped make the purchase of grapes a public decision about the treatment of the people who harvested them, which made 17 million people stop buying grapes.

Dolores was often the only woman in the room and almost always one of the few women with real power. She was also a Chicana working in a culture, an industry, and a labor movement dominated by men.

At the bargaining table, she translated that pressure into binding agreements. As a leading union negotiator, she secured gains that reached beyond wages to health care, retirement, job security and safer working conditions. The protections she helped win changed what growers could demand of workers—and what workers could demand in return.

She became a tough and highly effective negotiator. During the Delano grape strike and the nationwide grape boycott, she helped organize workers and consumers nationwide and sat at the bargaining table with some of California’s most powerful growers. She negotiated historic contracts that gave farmworkers better wages and protections they had never had before.

She also became a force in Sacramento, Washington, DC, and other state Capitols. Her advocacy helped win passage of California’s landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, giving farmworkers the right to organize and bargain collectively.

Dolores was also an environmentalist who placed workers and their families at the center of environmental protection. She understood that the dangers of agricultural chemicals began with the people required to work among them.

She fought pesticide exposure through organizing, boycotts and contract negotiations. The union sought restrictions on hazardous chemicals and protections for the workers handling the nation’s food. Her environmentalism connected the workplace to the surrounding community: the health of a farmworker, a child’s drinking water and the safety of the food supply belonged to the same struggle. The Smithsonian later recognized her among the figures who shaped American environmentalism.

Her authority came at considerable personal cost. She endured arrests, threats and violence. In 1988, a San Francisco police officer severely injured her during a demonstration

Dolores’ path was not easy, and neither was the movement she helped build. She faced sexism both inside and outside the union. She challenged deeply rooted ideas about what women should say, how women should behave, and whether women should lead. She also lived through painful contradictions within a movement led by imperfect people, including sexual violence she experienced herself. In March 2026, Dolores disclosed that Cesar Chavez had sexually assaulted her in the 1960s. She chose to speak publicly after other survivors came forward, saying she had kept the secret for decades because she feared the truth could damage the farmworker movement.

Dolores did not emerge from that history by retreating from leadership. She pushed further.

Dolores’s feminism grew from a lifetime of exercising authority in places where women were expected to defer. She negotiated while men expected her to remain quiet, led while others expected her to follow, and raised a family while helping build a national movement.

By the 1970s, she was increasingly becoming an outspoken force about the sexism she saw around her and about the ways women themselves had been taught to accept it. Her feminism grew out of her own experience: negotiating while men expected her to remain quiet, leading while others expected her to follow, and raising a family while helping build a national movement.

A decade later, Dolores took that experience directly into the women’s movement. After hearing her speak at a National Organization for Women convention, Feminist Majority founder Eleanor Smeal recruited Dolores to join a national effort to get more women elected to office.

She traveled the country encouraging women to seek political office, with a special focus on Latinas and other women of color who had rarely seen themselves represented in government. She recruited women, helped them win endorsements, knocked on doors and campaigned alongside them. That work contributed to the growing political power of women that helped produce the historic “Year of the Woman” in 1992.

Her influence can be seen in generations of women who followed her into public life, including Hilda Solis, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Lee and Maria Elena Durazo, among many others who have looked to Dolores as a model, mentor and ally.

Dolores helped expand the meaning of feminism itself. She showed that the fight for women’s equality could not be separated from the fight for fair wages, immigrant rights, racial justice, reproductive freedom and political power. 

She also allowed her own thinking to evolve. Raised in the Catholic faith, she became a forceful defender of reproductive freedom. Devoted to the labor movement, she challenged its sexism. Deeply connected to Mexican American communities, she confronted expectations that limited women’s independence. Her willingness to question institutions she loved, learn from others and reconsider her own assumptions was part of her strength.

That was sometimes complicated. Dolores was a mother of 14 and a practicing Catholic who became a strong defender of reproductive freedom. She came from a traditional Mexican American community but challenged many of its expectations for women. She loved the labor movement while refusing to accept the sexism she encountered within it.

She was willing to change and to challenge her own community as well as those in power.

That courage carried into nearly every major fight for justice of the past 70 years.

Dolores helped fight for the 1986 immigration reform law that gave legal status to millions of undocumented people, including hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. She fought California’s Proposition 187 and marched for comprehensive immigration reform. She stood with Black leaders in the fight to preserve affirmative action and challenged the unequal treatment of Black and Latino communities by law enforcement.

She marched with young people demanding action on climate change and environmental injustice. She defended LGBTQ+ equality. She remained an outspoken defender of a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.

And throughout her life, Dolores fought to protect democracy.

She understood voting not simply as a right, but as a source of power for people who had historically been denied it. She spent decades registering voters, knocking on doors and reminding women, immigrants, workers and people of color that democracy only works when they participate in it.

Even in her 90s, Dolores could still be found at rallies, walking precincts, speaking to young organizers and urging people to vote. She loved to listen to jazz and other music and went out dancing as often as she could.

In 2003, Dolores returned to the place where her organizing life began: California’s Central Valley. With her three daughters, Camila Chavez, Lori de Leon and Alicia Huerta she created the Dolores Huerta Foundation to teach a new generation the organizing lessons she had spent a lifetime learning.

The Foundation works from a simple idea that has guided Dolores since she was a young organizer: the people closest to a problem should have the power to solve it. It helps parents, workers, young people, and community members organize themselves, speak to elected officials, serve on local boards and commissions, and fight for better schools, cleaner air and water, safer communities, and a government that listens to them.

In the quarter century since the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF) was created, it has trained thousands of community members, mostly from farm worker families in the Southern San Joaquin Valley, to win school, water, environmental, and civil rights fights in their own communities. Dolores especially saw the importance of organizing and empowering youth and, through DHF, trained hundreds of young farm workers, developing leaders who went on to be community activists and college graduates, and who in turn continue to organize their peers and younger counterparts. Through establishing and growing DHF, Dolores’ legacy of training and mentoring organizers will live on and flourish.

In 2012, Dolores received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.  President Clinton honored her in 1998 by presenting her with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights and President and Mrs Clinton honored her in 2022 with the Clinton Global Citizen Award. Today, at least 11 schools across the country bear Dolores Huerta’s name, along with research, labor and community centers, civic education programs and scholarships created in her honor.

In 2027, the Foundation plans to open the Dolores Huerta Peace and Justice Cultural Center in the Central Valley, creating a permanent home for the work and the organizing tradition Dolores began more than 70 years ago.

Dolores represents something that was once exceedingly rare: a Latina whose leadership has stretched across nearly the entire modern history of American movements for social change.

Perhaps the most important part of her legacy is not simply that she was ahead of her time.

It is that she helped change the times.

She challenged the idea that leadership belonged to men. She challenged the idea that workers without money or political connections were powerless. She challenged her own culture, her own movement and sometimes her own assumptions. And as she gained power, she used it to help other women, workers, immigrants and young people find their own.

Dolores is survived by 14 children, 24 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren, 7 great-great-grandchildren, and a large community of organizers who continue to follow her roadmap for change, believing that Si Se Puede will mean they too can fight for and see change.