Dolores Huerta, the labor activist who passed away Wednesday at 96, helped turn a farmworker uprising into a national movement and dedicated her life to putting power in the hands of ordinary people.
For much of the twentieth century, the people harvesting America's food had fewer workplace protections than those working in its factories and offices.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 excluded agricultural workers, leaving them without federal protections for organizing and collective bargaining. In California, this workforce included Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans and Filipino laborers, many of whom traveled from harvest to harvest in search of steady wages.
Some had crossed borders to find work, while others belonged to families that had lived in the Southwest for generations. As one can imagine, California growers grew enormously wealthy under this arrangement, while the people picking their crops often struggled to feed their own families.
Dolores Huerta would spend much of her life organizing the people working those fields, helping build a movement that brought their fight into grocery stores, statehouses and homes across the country.
Through strikes, boycotts and years at the bargaining table, she helped farmworkers demand a say in the conditions under which they worked. Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers whose activism spanned more than six decades, died today at 96.
Born in 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta’s career in organizing began in an elementary school classroom in Stockton, California, where she taught children whose parents worked in the surrounding agricultural fields. In interviews in her later years she revealed that the poverty she witnessed among her students convinced her that she could do more for those families by confronting the conditions that kept them poor.
In 1962, Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chávez, laying the foundation for what would become the United Farm Workers (UFW). Together with thousands of agricultural laborers, they helped build a movement that confronted an industry dependent on low wages, dangerous working conditions and workers with little bargaining power.
Dolores Huerta On Her Lifetime of Activism
In this extended interview from the documentary Seeds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor organizer reflects on the farmworker movement, civil rights and the importance of building power within communities.
Life Stories
The movement reached a turning point in September 1965, when Filipino farmworkers led by Larry Itliong and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked off the grape fields of Delano, California. Huerta and the National Farm Workers Association joined the strike days later, helping forge a multiracial labor coalition whose solidarity would prove essential to its success.
What followed was a years long campaign of strikes, marches and nationwide consumer boycotts. Huerta became one of the movement's most formidable negotiators, helping secure historic union contracts that brought higher wages, healthcare benefits and workplace protections to agricultural workers.
Her organizing also helped secure California's landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which established collective bargaining rights for farmworkers and required growers to negotiate with unions chosen by their employees.
These victories fundamentally changed the relationship between agricultural workers and the powerful industry that employed them. They also established a model of organizing that connected workplace struggles to broader fights for civil rights, racial equality and political representation.
Huerta carried that philosophy into campaigns for immigrant rights, women's political participation, LGBTQ+ equality and voting access. She helped advocate for the 1986 immigration reform law that granted legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants and spent decades encouraging women and working-class communities to seek positions of political leadership.
Her life also reflected the complicated realities of power within social movements. In March 2026, Huerta publicly disclosed that Chávez had sexually coerced and assaulted her decades earlier, explaining that she had remained silent out of concern for the farmworker movement.
She emphasized that its achievements belonged to the thousands of people who organized and sacrificed for them, rather than any single leader, and through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, she continued building that collective power at the community level. Its grassroots organizing programs have helped residents advocate for improved schools, public infrastructure, neighborhood parks and greater representation in local government.
Her work will continue through the foundation and its planned Peace and Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, scheduled to open in 2027 with an institute dedicated to training future generations of grassroots organizers.
Huerta, who popularized the rallying cry Sí, se puede, or "Yes, we can," spent her life demonstrating that political power could be built through relationships, shared interests and the persistent work of ordinary people organizing together. We can, and must, carry the torch forward.
