Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers Co-Founder, Dies at 96
The labor leader co-founded the union that became the United Farm Workers, helped lead the Delano grape strike and boycotts, and gave the movement its rallying cry: “Sí, se puede.”
Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the union that became the United Farm Workers and spent six decades fighting for farmworkers, died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96.
Her family announced her death in a statement through her foundation. A family spokesman said the cause was cancer. Memorial arrangements will be announced later, the family said, and it asked for privacy as it grieves.
Huerta was born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, and raised in Stockton, California. In 1962, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez. The group later became the United Farm Workers, the nation's oldest enduring union for agricultural workers.
Huerta served as the union's chief negotiator, strike organizer and lobbyist, and as its vice president for nearly 40 years. She helped lead the Delano grape strike of 1965 alongside Filipino workers led by Larry Itliong, and the nationwide grape boycott that followed. The contracts the union won brought farmworkers job security, health care, retirement plans, guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water and protection from pesticides.
Those campaigns helped pass the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which gave farmworkers collective bargaining rights.
Huerta is credited with coining the union's slogan, “Sí, se puede” — “Yes, we can.” Barack Obama borrowed the line for his 2008 presidential campaign, and in 2012 he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Her activism came at a personal cost. She was arrested 22 times during labor demonstrations. In 1988, a San Francisco police officer beat her so severely during a protest that she suffered broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.
She founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002 and kept a busy schedule well into her 90s, marching in protests and speaking about race, poverty, women's rights and LGBTQ+ rights.
Earlier this year, Huerta told The New York Times that Chavez had sexually abused her in the 1960s, an account she said she kept private for decades because she feared it would damage the movement.
She had 11 children, seven from two earlier marriages and four with her longtime partner, Richard Chavez, Cesar's brother.
