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By Hollie Silverman

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Dolores Huerta, the labor organizer and civil rights leader who co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers (UFW) of America, negotiated landmark contracts for agricultural workers and originated the rallying cry “Sí, se puede,” died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96.

“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today at the age of 96,” a family statement said. “As you can imagine, this is an incredibly difficult time for us, and we ask for privacy as we grieve this incredible loss to our family. We know that many of you around the world share in our mourning, and we will be following up on plans to recognize and celebrate her incredible life and legacy.”

The Dolores Huerta Foundation said she died surrounded by close family. No cause of death was immediately announced. Her family asked for privacy and said plans to recognize and celebrate her life would be announced later.

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Huerta became nationally significant by helping organize a largely Latino and Filipino workforce that had little political power and was excluded from many federal labor protections.

As a negotiator, strike organizer and lobbyist, she helped farmworkers secure contracts providing higher wages, job security, healthcare, retirement plans, rest periods, clean drinking water, field toilets and protections from pesticides.

Her public life extended far beyond organized labor. Over more than six decades, she advocated for voting rights, women’s political participation, immigrant rights, racial equality, environmental justice and LGBTQ+ rights, becoming one of the country’s most prominent Latina activists.

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Huerta’s Legacy

Huerta helped transform farmworkers from a dispersed and frequently exploited workforce into a national labor and political constituency.

Although César Chávez became the farmworker movement’s most recognizable public figure, Huerta handled many of its most consequential negotiations and legislative battles. She served as a chief negotiator, organized strikes and consumer boycotts, lobbied elected officials and became one of the United Farm Workers’ most visible spokespeople.

According to the Dolores Huerta Foundation, her legislative victories included extending Aid to Families with Dependent Children and disability-insurance protections to California farmworkers. She also helped secure a measure allowing driver’s-license exams in Spanish.

Huerta was instrumental in the passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which established farmworkers’ rights to organize, select union representation and bargain collectively. The law was the first of its kind in the United States.

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From Teacher to Organizer

Huerta was born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, a mining community in the northern part of the state. After her parents divorced, she moved with her mother and two brothers to Stockton, California.

Her father, Juan Fernandez, worked as a farmworker and miner, participated in union activism and later served in the New Mexico Legislature. Her mother, Alicia Chávez, operated a hotel that welcomed low-wage workers and was active in civic and church organizations. Huerta later identified her mother’s independence and community work as formative influences.

After earning a provisional teaching credential from Delta College, Huerta worked as a teacher. She later said that seeing children come to class hungry and without adequate clothing convinced her that she could help them more effectively by organizing their parents.

She joined the Stockton Community Service Organization, where she organized voter-registration drives, fought discrimination and pressed local officials for improvements in Latino neighborhoods. By the late 1950s, she was lobbying state lawmakers in Sacramento.

Building the Farmworker Movement

Fred Ross Sr., founder of the Community Service Organization, introduced Huerta to Chávez in 1955. They shared an interest in organizing farmworkers, a goal that fell outside the organization’s mission.

Huerta helped establish the Agricultural Workers Association with Filipino American labor leader Larry Itliong in 1960. Two years later, she joined Chávez in founding the National Farm Workers Association.

The history was broader than their partnership alone. In 1965, Filipino farmworkers affiliated with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee initiated the Delano grape strike. The National Farm Workers Association subsequently joined the walkout. The two organizations merged in 1966, creating the organization that became the United Farm Workers.

Huerta helped sustain the strike and the accompanying national grape boycott by mobilizing workers, consumers, religious groups and political supporters. The pressure campaign eventually produced labor agreements with major California growers.

Her role was often less visible than Chávez’s, but it was distinct and central. She negotiated with growers, worked with legislators, coordinated boycott activity and pushed for benefits that addressed the daily conditions faced by workers in the fields.

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'Sí, Se Puede'

Huerta originated the phrase “Sí, se puede” during the farmworker movement. Translated literally as “Yes, it can be done,” it came to express her belief that people who lacked traditional power could build it through collective action.

The phrase later became a rallying cry for labor, immigration and civil rights campaigns. “Yes, we can” was adopted by Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. When awarding Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, Obama joked that he had taken the slogan from her.

The slogan also captured the organizing method that defined her career: registering voters, building local leadership and converting community demands into sustained political pressure.

Beyond Organized Labor

Huerta increasingly connected labor organizing with feminism and the push for greater Latino political representation.

While helping direct the national table-grape boycott in New York, she encountered feminist leaders including Gloria Steinem. The Dolores Huerta Foundation says those relationships encouraged her to challenge gender discrimination within the farmworker movement.

She later traveled the country encouraging Latinas to run for office and supported candidates including Bill Clinton, Ron Dellums, Jerry Brown, Hilda Solis, Obama and Joe Biden, according to her foundation.

Huerta also remained active in campaigns involving immigrant rights, voting access, poverty, racial justice and LGBTQ+ equality. She continued marching, speaking and registering voters into her 90s. In 2019, at age 89, she was arrested while participating in a protest seeking higher pay for home healthcare workers.

Her activism repeatedly brought her into conflict with employers, police and conservative political opponents. She was arrested more than 20 times during nonviolent protests and faced death threats and other harassment.

In 1988, a San Francisco police officer struck Huerta with a baton during a demonstration against the policies of Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. She suffered four broken ribs and a shattered spleen. Public outrage over the incident contributed to changes in the department’s crowd-control and disciplinary policies, according to her foundation.

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Complicated Partnership With Chávez

Huerta’s place in the farmworker movement was long framed through her professional partnership with Chávez. Her foundation described that relationship as productive but often contentious, with disagreements that reflected her willingness to challenge him and other male leaders.

That history took on a more painful dimension in March 2026, when Huerta said Chávez had sexually abused her in the 1960s. She described one encounter in which she said she was manipulated and pressured into sex and another in which she said she was forced against her will. She said both encounters resulted in pregnancies and that the children were raised by other families. Chávez died in 1993.

Huerta said she remained silent for six decades because she feared that speaking publicly would damage the movement and the gains won by farmworkers. She emphasized, however, that Chávez’s alleged conduct did not erase the achievements of the thousands of workers and organizers who built the union.

“César’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said at the time.

The disclosure complicated the history of one of the labor movement’s best-known partnerships while reinforcing a point increasingly made about Huerta’s career: her accomplishments and leadership stood apart from Chávez’s reputation.

Honors and Recognition

Huerta was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993 as the first Latina inductee.

She received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Bill Clinton in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama in 2012. She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame the following year and received the Smithsonian Institution’s James Smithson Award, the Ohtli Award from the Mexican government and numerous honorary degrees.

She also founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which continued her model of developing local leaders to work on education, voting rights, economic inequality and social justice.

Reactions to Dolores Huerta’s Death

Kendall Scudder, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said Huerta had dedicated her life to demonstrating that “our voices matter, that our rights are worth fighting for, and that real change happens when people come together and refuse to endure injustices in silence.”

Scudder said it had been an honor to welcome her to the party’s state convention in Corpus Christi four months ago, when she urged the community to organize, participate and make its voice heard at the ballot box.

“The most meaningful way to honor Dolores is to carry forward her message, by supporting one another, helping our neighbors regardless of race or religion, and ensuring that our voices are heard in every election,” he said.

The Dolores Huerta Foundation said her work “transformed the possibilities of Latina leadership in America” and inspired generations by teaching workers, women and immigrants to recognize and use their political power.

Dolores Huerta’s Legacy

Huerta’s legacy cannot be reduced to her partnership with Chávez. Her individual contribution was to transform the demands of farmworkers into enforceable contracts, legislative victories and political power while insisting that women and Latinos belonged among the leaders of those campaigns.

The movement she helped build improved wages and working conditions, but its wider impact was political. It showed that workers who lacked money, legal protections and access to established institutions could still exert power through strikes, boycotts, voter registration and disciplined community organizing.

Her later disclosure about Chávez added a difficult final chapter to that history. It demonstrated the personal costs she carried while protecting a movement she believed was larger than either of its most famous leaders.

Huerta spent her life arguing that ordinary people could change institutions that appeared immovable. The laws, labor contracts and activists that followed provide the measure of that argument’s reach.

As Scudder recalled in his tribute, her message was both an assessment of her life and an instruction to those who would continue the work: “Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.”

Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn
here.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Gabe Whisnant and Dave Siminoff.

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