By Bill Trott
WASHINGTON, Oct 28 (Reuters) – Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers (UFW) with Cesar Chavez and fought legislators and powerful growers in the US to improve the lives of a previously powerless constituency, died on Wednesday at the age of 96, her family said in a statement.
Huerta was one of the foremost women in US labor history, serving the UFW as chief negotiator, strike organizer, lobbyist and reformer during its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s in California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.
Thanks to the contracts the UFW negotiated, farmworkers won job security, healthcare, retirement plans, a credit union and job-specific benefits such as guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water and protection from pesticides.
Huerta was credited with giving the UFW its slogan “Si, se puede,” the loose translation of which, “Yes, we can,” was later used by Barack Obama during his successful 2008 presidential campaign.
She remained a regular on the college lecture circuit into her 90s, speaking out against the immigration policies of President Donald Trump. During elections she traveled the country, endorsing candidates and registering voters.
UFW co-founder Chavez, who died in 1993 and was the face of the organization, was a seventh-grade dropout and former grape picker with a man-of-the-soil appeal who espoused the non-violent philosophies of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, with a nod to Emiliano Zapata, a leader of Mexico’s peasant revolution in the early 20th century.
But Chavez had a dark side. In 2026, Huerta was one of a number of women who came forward with accounts of how they had been sexually assaulted by him, in some cases when they were minors. Huerta said that he had pressured her into having sex one time, and another time raped her. Both encounters resulted in pregnancies, and Huerta said she arranged for the babies to be raised by others.
OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT
While Chavez was recruiting, going on well-publicized hunger strikes and being embraced by liberal lawmakers and celebrities, the diminutive, college-educated Huerta handled negotiating with growers, lobbying legislators and other business for the UFW.
She was arrested more than 20 times, subjected to death threats and other harassment. She suffered broken ribs and a damaged spleen when beaten by baton-wielding San Francisco police in a 1988 protest against the policies of George H.W. Bush during his presidential campaign.
In an interview with PBS in 2012, before the assault accusations against Chavez came to light, Huerta said she had been fine with him taking the spotlight as she wanted to focus on helping people rather than gaining fame.
“He said, ‘One of us is going to have to be the spokesperson. Are you all right if I’m the spokesperson?’ Of course, I said yes.”
STANDING UP
Huerta was born in Dawson, New Mexico, to a Mexican immigrant family, and spent much of her youth in Stockton, California, after her parents divorced. Her father was a miner, laborer, union activist and state lawmaker; her mother raised three children while buying and running a hotel for low-income people in Stockton.
Huerta’s mother instilled a spirit of activism in her daughter. Huerta was into her second marriage when she became a schoolteacher, but that career did not last long.
“I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she said. “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”
She registered voters in Stockton and founded the Agricultural Workers Association before meeting Chavez and joining him in starting the National Farm Workers Association in 1962. In 1965 they began a series of strikes and boycotts that would last five years against various California grape growers and eventually spread to lettuce growers.
During that period the organization evolved into the United Farm Workers and picked up support from King and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Not eating a grape — unless it had a union label — became a political statement in the United States.
The boycotts and strikes sometimes became contentious. In addition to industry opposition, the UFW found itself up against California Governor Ronald Reagan, who denounced the UFW as immoral and made a point of eating grapes on television.
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
One by one, growers began signing contracts with the UFW and in 1975 Huerta’s work also helped bring about another victory — passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law in the US that gave farmworkers collective bargaining rights.
Huerta said that being a woman gave her an edge at the negotiating table with growers.
“They really didn’t know how to respond because they couldn’t do the usual forceful type of thing,” she told PBS. “And when you would bring up to them and show them the conditions that the workers were working under, and they were kind of embarrassed, actually.”
In 2012, Obama presented Huerta with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award.
Her life was the basis of the award-winning film “Dolores” that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017.
While the UFW’s influence abated, Huerta’s activism did not. In 2002 she established the Dolores Huerta Foundation for community activism with her daughter Camila Chavez as its executive director. She pushed for changes in immigration laws, voter registration, women’s rights and Obama’s healthcare reform.
Huerta, who said she remained close to the two children she had with Chavez, also had two children from her first marriage, five from her second and four from a long-term relationship with Richard Chavez, brother of Cesar and another key UFW figure, who died in 2011.
(Reporting by Bill Trott; Additional reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Rosalba O’Brien)
