Dolores Huerta, Influential US Labor Leader and Civil Rights Icon, Dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, one of the United States' most influential labor leaders, feminist activists and civil rights icons, has died at the age of 96. She co-founded the United Farm Workers union.

Her family said in a statement through her foundation that she died on Wednesday at home. The foundation is based in Bakersfield, California.

She kept a busy schedule well into her 90s, marching in protests and speaking in cities across the country about race, poverty, LGBTQ+ rights and women's rights.

Huerta coined the three-word Spanish slogan 'Sí, se puede!', which translates as 'Yes, it can be done' and became a widespread rallying cry, grounded in her belief that people could affect change.

Her decades of work earned her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. When President Barack Obama presented the award in 2012, he praised her as a tenacious leader and joked that he had stolen her slogan for his 2008 campaign.

Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernandez in 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico. Her father was a miner and union activist who went on to win a seat in the state legislature. Her parents divorced when she was 3, and her mother took her and her brothers to California, where her mother owned a restaurant and hotel.

She was a young elementary school teacher in the farm-rich San Joaquin Valley when she grew frustrated by her students' poor living conditions. In a 2017 documentary on her life she said she could not stand seeing children come to class hungry and needing shoes, and thought she could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.

Her early work with a civil rights group in Stockton led her to meet César Chavez. The two wanted to focus more on the plight of farmworkers, so in 1962 they started the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers of America a few years later, and she was a key leader and negotiator for the union for years.

She joined Filipino grape pickers on the picket line in what became the five-year Delano Grape Strike. With Chavez, she negotiated collective bargaining agreements with big growers, winning the first health and benefit plans for farmworkers.

She met US Senator Robert Kennedy during his visit to Delano in 1968 and became a volunteer on his presidential campaign. She was on stage with Kennedy after he won the California primary, and he publicly thanked her moments before he was shot. The assassination devastated her, but she kept organizing.

Huerta was jailed 22 times for union demonstrating. In 1988 she was seriously injured while protesting Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush's opposition to the UFW grape boycott in San Francisco: struck by a police officer's baton, she suffered three broken ribs and a pulverized spleen and required more than a dozen blood transfusions, later reaching a settlement with the city.

This year Huerta sent shockwaves through the Latino community when she revealed that she was sexually abused in the 1960s by the farmworker movement's co-founder, César Chavez, leading to the birth of two children — a secret she kept for 60 years, long after he died. She said she had stayed silent because she feared coming forward would compromise her life's work. From the early 1970s her life partner was Richard Chavez, César's brother, with whom she had four children; she also had seven children from two earlier marriages.

She learned the art of lobbying politicians, securing financial aid for the unemployed and disability insurance for California farmworkers, speaking out against toxic pesticides, pushing for amnesty for immigrants in the country illegally and fighting federal guest worker programs. By directing nationwide boycotts of grapes and lettuce in the early 1970s, she helped create the pressure that led California to pass the first state law recognizing farmworkers' right to collective bargaining.

She was the first Latina inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and received nine honorary doctorates from US universities. Schools are named in her honor in California, Texas and Colorado. In the 2025 documentary 'Seeds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Dolores Huerta', she said she hoped her legacy would be that of an organizer who organized to fight injustice, and that the greatest gift for children is a love of justice, not jewels, property or money.