Dolores Huerta, Who Co-Founded the United Farm Workers and Gave the Movement 'Sí, Se Puede,' Dies at 96
She died Wednesday of cancer at her home in Bakersfield, her family said - a Stockton teacher who left the classroom because her students came to school hungry, and spent six decades organizing the workers the country overlooked.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and gave the farmworker movement its enduring slogan, 'Sí, se puede,' died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96. Her family announced the death on Wednesday; a family spokesman said the cause was cancer, and memorial plans will be announced later. Houston Public Media's Houston Matters opened its Thursday episode with her legacy - one measure of how far her name reached beyond California's fields.
Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernández on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, and raised in Stockton, where her mother sometimes fed and housed farmworkers who could not afford it. Huerta earned a teaching certificate and left the classroom, she later said, because she could not stand seeing children arrive hungry and without adequate clothing. Through the Community Service Organization in the 1950s she met Chavez; in 1962 they founded the National Farm Workers Association. In 1965 she joined Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong in the Delano grape strike and helped run the nationwide boycott that followed - millions of Americans stopped buying grapes, major growers signed union contracts, and the contracts the union negotiated won farmworkers job security, healthcare, retirement plans, guaranteed rest periods, toilets and clean drinking water in the fields and protection from pesticides, as Reuters' obituary recounts. The movement's campaigns helped pass the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which established collective bargaining rights for farmworkers. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and the Bakersfield-based foundation she founded in 2002 carried her organizing work forward; she was still speaking and registering voters into her 90s.
Her last year brought a reckoning she chose herself. In early 2026, Huerta publicly accused Chavez - who died in 1993 - of sexually abusing her during their years in the movement, including raping her in a vehicle in a secluded grape field in 1966. She said she had stayed silent out of loyalty to the movement, distrust of law enforcement and fear she would not be believed: she did not want to hurt the movement, she said. The disclosures complicated the history of the movement both leaders built. The tributes this week kept to her work. United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero called her a tireless advocate for farm workers, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and all marginalized people, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state and the country would be in a different place without her resolute spirit and her commitment to those overlooked and forgotten. Thirteen of her 14 children survive her.
