Dolores Huerta, influential labor leader, feminist and civil rights icon, dies at 96: NPR
Dolores Huerta is seen at the 2025 California Democratic Party state convention at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim on May 31, 2025.
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Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union to improve working conditions in the country’s fruit and vegetable fields and coined the phrase “Sí, se puede!” which became a widely used rallying cry, is dead. She was 96 years old.
Huerta’s family said in a statement through her foundation that she died Wednesday at her home.
She kept a busy schedule well into her 90s, participating in protests and speaking in cities across the country on race, poverty, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights on behalf of her Bakersfield, California-based foundation.
Huerta’s determination cemented her place in history as one of the country’s most influential labor leaders, civil rights icons and feminist activists. Its three-word slogan in Spanish – which translates to “Yes, it can be done” – was based on the belief that people can bring about change.
Dolores Huerta is seen at the 2025 California Democratic Party state convention at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim on May 31, 2025.
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His work over the decades has earned him numerous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. When then-President Barack Obama presented the award in 2012, he praised Huerta as a tenacious leader and joked that he had stolen her slogan for his 2008 campaign.
This year, Huerta sent shockwaves through the Latino community when she revealed that she had been sexually abused in the 1960s by farm worker movement co-founder César Chavez, leading to the birth of two children, a secret she kept for 60 years and long after his death.
Since the early 1970s, Huerta’s life partner was Richard Chavez, César’s brother, and together they had four children. She also had seven children from two previous marriages.
Huerta said she stayed silent for so long because she feared that coming forward would jeopardize her life’s work and undo all the progress made for workers.
Asked in a 2026 interview with the Latino USA news agency about the need to keep it a secret, Huerta said: “It was my personal pain, it was my personal problem and, you know, I think it was worth it because it was my cross to bear. I’ll put it that way.”
Local activism
Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernandez in 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico. His father was a miner and union activist who won a seat in the state Legislature. Her parents divorced when she was 3, and her mother took her and her brothers to California.
Immersed in a melting pot of Mexican, Filipino, African-American, Japanese and Chinese working families, Huerta learned from her mother – who owned a restaurant and hotel – independence, compassion and activism.
Huerta was a young, energetic teacher at an elementary school in the farm-rich San Joaquin Valley when she decided to take another call after becoming frustrated with her students’ poor living conditions.
“I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she said in a 2017 PBS Independent Lens documentary about her life. “I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their starving children.”
Dolores Huerta looks at a mural depicting the late Cesar Chavez during the dedication of the Cesar Chavez Monument on the San Jose State University campus in San Jose, California, September 4, 2008.
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Huerta’s early work with a civil rights group in Stockton led to his meeting with Chavez. The two men wanted to focus more on the plight of farmworkers, and so in 1962 they created the National Farm Workers Association, which a few years later became the United Farm Workers of America. She was a key union leader and negotiator for years.
She was among those who joined Filipino grape pickers on the picket line in what became known as the five-year “Delano Grape Strike.” With Chavez, she negotiated collective bargaining agreements and contracts with large producers, winning the first health and benefits plans for farm workers.
Chavez, who died in 1993, once described her as fearless, committed to the cause and tough in negotiations.
On the electoral campaign
She met U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy of Massachusetts when he visited Delano in 1968 and became a volunteer on his presidential campaign, registering Mexican Americans in California to vote. Huerta was on stage with Kennedy after she won the California primary and he publicly thanked her moments before he was shot.
The assassination devastated Huerta, but she continued to organize for farmworker rights.
Huerta was imprisoned 22 times for protesting against the union. In 1988, she was seriously injured while protesting Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush’s opposition to the UFW’s grape boycott during his visit to San Francisco.
Caught in the crowd, she was struck by a police officer’s baton, suffered three broken ribs and a pulverized spleen, and required more than a dozen blood transfusions. She reached an agreement with the city to settle her claims.
After a long recovery, Huerta changed direction and hit the road to campaign for women’s rights and encourage Latinas to run for office.
She also campaigned for Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton, Obama and Joe Biden. California Governor Gavin Newsom considered her a close friend.
Fueled by Courage
Emilio Huerta, one of Dolores’ 13 children, once highlighted his mother’s courage in an interview, saying it was one of the most important driving forces behind her life’s work.
“Dedicating your life to building the dream of a union for agricultural workers, to tackling agriculture, which is still a driving force today. … It took a lot of courage,” he said.
Huerta learned the art of lobbying from politicians. She won financial aid for the unemployed and disability insurance for California farm workers. She spoke out against toxic pesticides, called for amnesty for illegal immigrants in the country, and fought federal guest worker programs.
By organizing national boycotts of grapes and lettuce in the early 1970s, she helped create the economic pressure and political climate necessary for California to pass what would be the first state law recognizing farmworkers’ rights to collective bargaining.
His work has earned him numerous distinctions. She was the first Latina to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and has received nine honorary doctorates from American universities.
Schools are named in his honor in California, Texas and Colorado. Her image adorns many murals and streets are named after her, but she has not always won favor with more liberal activists.
In 2016, when she supported Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic presidential primary, actress Rosario Dawson — a Sanders supporter who played Huerta in a 2014 film about César Chavez — said Huerta had become “a tool of the establishment.”
Dawson and Huerta eventually reconciled.
Guitarist Carlos Santana later oversaw a documentary based on Huerta’s life after the pair had a late-night conversation about music in Hawaii. Santana, a fan of Miles Davis, discovered that Huerta was a big fan of bebop legend Charlie Parker.
“I even met Charlie Parker. That’s what I’m famous for,” Huerta joked in an interview with the Associated Press when she was 87 years old.
It was his work as a leader within the labor movement that reverberated throughout the United States and beyond, making his name synonymous with civil rights. In the 2025 documentary “Seeds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Dolores Huerta,” she recounted her decades-long activist journey and spoke of the inspiration she drew from the women’s movement in the 1970s, saying it confirmed that she, too, could take the stage with other labor leaders.
“I hope my legacy is that of an organizer who organized to fight injustice,” she said in the film. “We want to give our children a legacy of justice, of law, not of jewels or possessions or money, because they will just fight over that. So the main thing is to give them that love of justice – and that is the greatest gift any of us can receive.”
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