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

Dolores Huerta, the labor activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers union and spent decades campaigning for better conditions for the nation's agricultural workers, has died at the age of 96. Her foundation announced that she died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California, with her close family at her side.

Svante Myrick, president of the progressive advocacy group People For the American Way, called her "unstoppable." Huerta sat on the group's board of directors for 22 years. "Dolores Huerta was one of the fiercest and most consequential activists in our nation's history," Myrick said. "She was the first to get started in the morning and the last to quit at the end of the day."

Huerta was born in New Mexico and raised by a single mother in California's San Joaquin Valley. She started out as a schoolteacher, then helped found a local chapter of a grassroots group that took on segregation and police brutality. Her attention later moved to labor organizing. In 1962 she and César Chavez built the National Farm Workers Association, which four years later merged with another organization to become the United Farm Workers. More than six decades on, it remains the country's longest-standing union for agricultural workers.

She became widely known for the rallying cry "Sí, se puede!", which means "Yes, it can be done." The phrase reflected her conviction that ordinary people can bring about political change. Beyond her work for fruit and vegetable pickers, many of them immigrants, Huerta became a leading voice for civil rights and women's rights, pushing back on discrimination and demanding gender equality in a labor movement then dominated by men.

Huerta was among the leaders of the Delano grape strike, which ran from September 1965 to July 1970. Alongside a coalition of Mexican and Filipino farmhands, she accused grape growers in Delano, California, of underpaying and exploiting their workers. Thousands of laborers left the fields in 1965, and Huerta helped widen the action into a nationwide consumer boycott of grapes. The strike ended in the summer of 1970 when the union agreed to collective bargaining contracts covering 10,000 workers.

Her honors included the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. When then-President Barack Obama presented it in 2012, he praised her decades of activism and joked that he had borrowed "Sí, se puede" for his 2008 campaign.

Earlier this year, Huerta publicly accused Chavez of raping her in 1966 after he drove her to a grape field in Delano during the strike. The account appeared in The New York Times in March, alongside accounts from two other women who said Chavez sexually abused them as girls in the 1970s. She also told the paper that in August 1960, during a work trip to San Juan Capistrano in Southern California, he allegedly pressured her into sex in a hotel room.

According to a statement she released, Huerta became pregnant after both encounters and later arranged for the children to be adopted by other families. She said she kept the alleged assaults and the children secret for decades, fearing she would not be believed within the Latino civil rights movement and that speaking out against one of its most prominent figures could harm the cause. Even after coming forward, she urged people to keep fighting for their rights and said the movement was bigger than both her and Chavez.

From the early 1970s, Huerta's lifelong partner was Richard Chavez, César's brother, with whom she had four children. She also had seven children from two earlier marriages. Well into her 90s she stayed politically engaged, giving speeches, attending rallies and speaking out on issues from civil rights to national politics.