Dolores Huerta, labor leader & civil rights icon, dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of what became the United Farm Workers, died Wednesday of cancer at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96. To farmworkers, immigrants and undocumented families, she was more than a labor leader. She proved that the people society overlooked could organize and win.

She cared about working people from early on. Her mother sometimes housed and fed migrant workers for free at the family’s Stockton hotel. Huerta herself left a teaching job because “I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes.”

In 1962, she and Cesar Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association to defend migrant laborers. Those workers faced backbreaking hours, low pay, no job security and toxic pesticides. Skeptics scoffed, Huerta recalled: “They are poor, powerless immigrants. They don’t have any money and they can’t vote.”

She served as vice president for nearly four decades. In that role she coordinated strikes, negotiated groundbreaking contracts and organized a national grape boycott backed by 17 million households. Growers gave in by 1970. In 1975, California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed farmworkers the right to unionize and gave them access to medical insurance and pensions.

Her fight reached immigrants without papers too. She spent four months lobbying lawmakers for the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants. Male colleagues then left her out of the victory celebration.

She paid a heavy price. She was arrested 22 times, and one police beating broke her ribs and ruptured her spleen. After a 1988 attack, she used her $825,000 settlement to benefit migrant workers. She also carried a hidden wound. Only in 2026 did she reveal that Chavez had raped her, explaining her long silence: “I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”

Her rallying cry, “Sí se puede,” still rings out at marches, and her foundation keeps organizing communities. At 90, she said: “When people come together and take collective action … this is how we make change.”

To her 13 surviving children, 24 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren, seven great-great-grandchildren and everyone who loved her: we are deeply sorry for your loss. The world has lost a fearless champion, and you have lost a mother, grandmother and friend. We hope you find some comfort in knowing that millions of workers stand taller because of her.

Rest in power, Dolores.

Link: New York Times