Dolores Huerta died on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96. Her family announced the death in a statement shared through her foundation, saying she died of cancer, surrounded by family, and asking for privacy while plans to celebrate her life are put together. “We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today,” the family said.
Huerta co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers, the first union for American farmworkers that endured. She did it in 1962 with César Chávez, starting as the National Farm Workers Association, and she stayed at the center of it for decades — as its chief negotiator, its lobbyist in Sacramento and Washington, and the organizer who turned strikes and boycotts into contracts.
She had not set out to be an organizer. Born Dolores Clara Fernández on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, and raised in Stockton, California, she taught elementary school in the San Joaquin Valley and quit after seeing what poverty did to her pupils. “I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she later recalled. The classroom gave her the cause; the fields gave her the fight.
The fight’s defining campaign began in 1965, when Filipino grape workers walked out in Delano and Huerta and Chávez joined them. The Delano grape strike grew into a nationwide boycott that forced growers to the table. The contracts that followed brought farmworkers things other American workers already took for granted: guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water, protection from pesticides, health care and retirement plans. The movement also helped end the exploitative Bracero guest-worker program, helped pass California’s 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which gave farmworkers collective bargaining rights, and later helped negotiate the 1986 Immigration Reform Act.
Out of that work came three words that outgrew the fields. In Arizona in 1972, Huerta recalled, someone told her that what the union had won in California could never happen there — in Arizona, no se puede, it can’t be done. She shot back: Sí, se puede. Yes, it can be done. The room took up the chant, and it became the union’s motto, then a rallying cry far beyond labor. Barack Obama borrowed it for his 2008 presidential campaign, and when he presented Huerta with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, he joked that she had been gracious about the theft. “I’m pleased that she let me off easy … ’cause Dolores does not play,” he said.
The work cost her. She was arrested 22 times at demonstrations, and once beaten so severely by a police officer that she suffered broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. She kept going into her nineties — marching, registering voters, speaking on college campuses — through the foundation she set up in 2002. California declared April 10, her birthday, Dolores Huerta Day in 2018. In June 2026 she celebrated her 96th birthday at a sold-out event in Los Angeles; in May she had attended the dedication of a Los Angeles mural of her, titled “Walking into History.” Asked by The Associated Press in August about the state of the country, she answered the way she always had: “It seems like history continues to repeat itself. You see what’s happening right now in our country, and we know that people have to stand up.”
Earlier in 2026, she revealed something she had kept private for 60 years. In an interview with The New York Times, she said Chávez had sexually abused her in the 1960s — pressuring her into sex during a work trip in 1960 and raping her in a secluded grape field in Delano in 1966. Both encounters, she said, resulted in pregnancies, and she arranged for the babies to be raised by others. She said she had not reported the attacks because she feared no one in the movement would believe her. “I have kept this secret long enough,” she said after the investigation was published. “My silence ends here.”
Tributes came within hours. California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered flags flown at half-staff and said the state and the nation would not be what they are today “without her resolute spirit, her passion for justice and fairness, and her commitment to those overlooked and forgotten.” United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero said Huerta had “left farm workers and the entire Latino community stronger and more organized than she found it,” adding, in a United Farm Workers statement: “The greatest possible tribute to her life is for her work of organizing to continue.”
That is why her death matters beyond one obituary. The workforce she organized still picks much of America’s food, still largely outdoors, still for low pay — and the union she built still bargains for thousands of farmworkers in California, Oregon, Washington and New York. Huerta’s method — a strike, a boycott, a slogan, a ballot — showed that workers with almost no leverage could still force an industry to negotiate. The slogan she coined in a single retort in Arizona now belongs to movements she never met. The organizing, as Romero put it, is the monument.
