Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers Co-Founder, Dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers and gave the labor movement its slogan “Si, se puede,” died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96.

Her family announced her death Wednesday. A spokesman for the family said the cause was cancer. In a statement, her family said, “We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today,” and asked for privacy as they grieve. The family said memorial arrangements will be announced later.

From Stockton classrooms to the Delano grape strike

Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernandez on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico. After her parents divorced, she moved to Stockton, California, with her mother. She earned a teaching certificate and briefly taught elementary school before turning to community organizing, after seeing children arrive at school hungry and without adequate clothing.

In the 1950s, Huerta worked with the Community Service Organization, a California Latino civil rights group, where she met Cesar Chavez. In 1962, the two founded the National Farm Workers Association, a predecessor of the United Farm Workers. The defining confrontation for the movement began in 1965 in Delano, California, where Filipino farmworkers had launched a strike against table-grape growers. Huerta helped manage boycott campaigns and negotiate with grape companies, and a nationwide boycott of California table grapes followed. Major growers eventually signed union contracts. In 1972, the organization became the United Farm Workers, and in 1975 California enacted the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which gave farmworkers the right to organize and bargain collectively.

A public life that continued into her 90s

Huerta stood beside Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, after he won the California Democratic presidential primary. Kennedy was shot minutes later and died the following day. In 1988, while demonstrating outside a San Francisco hotel, a police officer struck Huerta with a baton, breaking ribs and rupturing her spleen. She underwent emergency surgery, later received an $825,000 settlement from San Francisco, and the city changed its crowd-control policies. She stepped down as a United Farm Workers officer in 1999 after 37 years. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and the Bakersfield-based Dolores Huerta Foundation, which she founded in 2002, continued her work in grassroots organizing and civic engagement.

Earlier this year, Huerta told The New York Times that Chavez raped her in a secluded grape field in Delano in 1966, and that he had pressured her into having sex with him during a work trip in 1960. She said she had stayed silent because of loyalty to the farmworker movement, distrust of law enforcement, and fear she would not be believed. Chavez died in 1993. His family told The New York Times they are “not in a position to judge” the allegations, and said they honor the voices of those who report sexual misconduct.

Tributes came Wednesday from the union and from elected officials. The United Farm Workers said the “greatest possible tribute to her life is for her work of organizing to continue.” Obama called Huerta “a hero of mine” and said she got to the slogan first, noting that he too often gets credit for “Si, se puede,” when, as he put it, “Dolores got there first.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Huerta “represented the best of us.”

Reporting based on coverage by CNN and USA Today.