Dolores Huerta, Co-Founder of United Farm Workers and Civil Rights Icon, Dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, the labour leader and civil rights figure who co-founded the United Farm Workers union and gave the American protest movement the slogan "Sí, se puede," has died at 96. Family spokesperson Erik Olvera said she died of cancer on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, Calif., with her family around her.

Huerta stayed active well into her 90s, joining marches and urging activists to keep speaking out on race, poverty, and 2SLGBTQ+ and women's rights. In August she told the Associated Press that history seemed to be repeating itself, adding that people "have to stand up." The Spanish phrase she made famous means "Yes, it can be done," and reflects her conviction that people who act can bring about change.

United Farm Workers president Teresa Romero said in a statement that Huerta's life's work was to empower her community to face and overcome injustice. Romero said she left farm workers and the wider Latino community stronger and more organized than she found it. Huerta received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-president Barack Obama in 2012. Obama joked at the ceremony that she had let him off easy for borrowing her slogan in his 2008 campaign, "'cause Dolores does not play."

Earlier this year, Huerta revealed that César Chavez, co-founder of the farmworker movement, sexually abused her in the 1960s, resulting in the birth of two children. She had kept the secret for 60 years, long after his death. After her disclosure, Chavez's name was removed from streets and buildings, and the holiday honouring him lost its standing as a point of Hispanic pride. Huerta said she stayed silent because she feared speaking out would damage her life's work and undo progress for workers. She told Latino USA it was "my cross to bear."

Tributes came from across the political world. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton called her "a stalwart champion of working Americans" and a living legend who never stopped pushing for progress. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said his state would not be where it is without her "passion for justice and fairness."

Born Dolores Clara Fernandez in 1930 in Dawson, N.M., she was the daughter of a miner and union activist who won a seat in the state legislature. Her parents divorced when she was three, and her mother moved the family to California. Huerta became an elementary school teacher in the San Joaquin Valley, but grew frustrated by her students' conditions. "I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children," she said in a 2017 PBS documentary.

After meeting Chavez through a civil rights group in Stockton, she helped found the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which later became the United Farm Workers of America. She joined Filipino grape pickers on the picket line during the five-year Delano Grape Strike and negotiated contracts with large growers, winning the first health and benefit plans for farm workers. Her nationwide boycotts of grapes and lettuce in the early 1970s helped pave the way for California's first state law recognizing farm workers' right to collective bargaining.

Huerta volunteered for Sen. Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign and was on stage with him in Los Angeles moments before he was fatally shot. She was jailed 22 times for union demonstrating. In 1988, a police officer's baton left her with three broken ribs and a pulverized spleen during a protest against George H.W. Bush in San Francisco, and she later reached a settlement with the city. Afterward she turned to women's rights and encouraged Latino women to seek office.

She had seven children from two earlier marriages and four with Richard Chavez, César's brother, who was her partner from the early 1970s. Her son Emilio Huerta said it took "a lot of guts" to take on agriculture. In a 2025 documentary, Huerta said she hoped to be remembered as an organizer who fought injustice, and that the greatest inheritance for children is "love for justice."