Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers, dies at 96
The labour and civil rights leader who built the UFW with Cesar Chavez and gave it the slogan 'Sí, se puede' died at home on Wednesday 28 October, her family said. Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
Dolores Huerta, who helped build the first lasting farmworkers’ union in the United States, died on Wednesday at the age of 96. Her family announced her death in a statement shared by the foundation that carries her name, saying she died at home. No cause was given.
The union she co-founded, the United Farm Workers, marked her death in a statement from its president, Teresa Romero, which credits her with the movement’s famous rallying cry, “Sí, se puede”.
A life spent in California’s fields
Huerta was born on 10 April 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, and grew up in Stockton, California, raised by her mother and grandfather. She trained as a teacher. She quit because, as she later put it, the children in her class kept turning up hungry, and organising their parents looked like the more useful job.
In 1962 she founded, with Cesar Chavez and Gilbert Padilla, the association that became the United Farm Workers. She was the one across the table from the grape growers during the Delano strike, which ended in 1970 with union contracts for thousands of workers. The UFW also points to her part in ending the Bracero programme in the 1960s and in the 1986 immigration law that put millions of people on the road to legal status.
In 1988 a police officer beat her at a protest in San Francisco, breaking her ribs and rupturing her spleen. She went back to work. She set up the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield in 2002, and in 2012 Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honour.
Her final months
In March this year, as part of a newspaper investigation into the union’s founder, Huerta said publicly that Chavez, who died in 1993, had sexually assaulted her in 1960 and 1966. She said she had kept it secret for decades and saw herself as a survivor rather than a victim.
She stayed in the fight to the end, campaigning to get Latino voters to the polls. The argument she spent her life on (wages, and a contract to protect them) is the one unions in Portugal are still having as they push for a higher minimum wage in 2027.
Image: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
