US labour rights icon Dolores Huerta dies at 96
Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union in the United States, died of cancer on Wednesday aged 96. She was one of the foremost women in US labour history.
Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union in the United States, died on Wednesday at the age of 96, a family spokesperson said. The cause was cancer. Together with Cesar Chavez, she took on legislators and powerful growers to improve the lives of farmworkers who previously had little power.
Role in the union
Huerta served the UFW as chief negotiator, strike organiser, lobbyist and reformer. Its heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s in California's agriculture-rich Central Valley. The contracts the union negotiated brought farmworkers job security, healthcare, retirement plans, a credit union, guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water and protection from pesticides.
Huerta is credited with giving the union its slogan "Si, se puede" ("Yes, we can"), which Barack Obama later used in his 2008 presidential campaign. While Chavez recruited supporters and held hunger strikes, Huerta negotiated with growers and worked with legislators. She was arrested more than 20 times, and in 1988 police batons broke her ribs and damaged her spleen at a San Francisco protest against the policies of George H. W. Bush.
Life and legacy
Huerta was born in Dawson, New Mexico, to a Mexican immigrant family and spent much of her youth in Stockton, California. She worked as a schoolteacher but decided she could do more by organising farmworkers. In 1962 she and Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association. From 1965 a five-year series of strikes and boycotts followed against California grape growers. In 1975 her work helped secure the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first US law to give farmworkers collective bargaining rights.
In 2012 Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honour. Into her 90s she spoke at colleges and criticised President Donald Trump's immigration policies. In 2026 Huerta was among the women who publicly described being sexually assaulted by Chavez; she said he pressured her into sex once and raped her another time, with both encounters resulting in pregnancies.
