Farmworkers Organizer Dolores Huerta Dies at 96

Dolores Huerta died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California.

She was 96. Her family announced the death on her Instagram account and did not give a cause. The New York Times, citing a spokesperson for Huerta, reported that she died of cancer. The family post said many people around the world share in the mourning and that plans to recognize her life would follow.

Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez in 1962. That group became the United Farm Workers of America. The association organized after California farmworkers reported low wages, no benefits and no access to water or bathrooms in the fields. She and Chavez left the Community Service Organization to start it. Huerta had joined that group's Stockton chapter in 1955 after meeting its founder, Fred Ross Sr.

In 1965, farmworkers in Delano, California, began a strike. Filipino workers affiliated with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee started it, and the National Farm Workers Association joined. Huerta helped organize a nationwide boycott of grapes during the strike, which ran from 1965 to 1970. Grocery chains stopped selling the fruit until industry labor standards were set. In 1975, California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, giving farmworkers the right to unionize. The state credited Huerta as instrumental in establishing those rights.

Huerta was born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, to Alicia Chávez and Juan Fernández. Her father worked as a miner and farmworker and later joined the New Mexico state legislature. After her parents divorced, her mother opened a hotel in Stockton, California, and offered rooms at low cost or no cost to low-wage workers. Huerta earned a provisional teaching credential at the University of the Pacific's Stockton College, which later became San Joaquin Delta College, and taught at an area elementary school. Many of her students were children of farmworkers.

"I think the one thing that really kind of hooked me for life was going to the homes of some workers who did not have linoleum or wood on their floor, only dirt," she told MAKERS in 2012. "And yet, these are people who are working, they're working very hard and you know that this is wrong."

At the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization, she co-founded the Agricultural Workers Association and ran voter registration drives. She met Chavez there in 1955. He became the organization's executive director in 1959. Huerta later called Ross her "spiritual father" and the first person to teach her and Chavez organizing techniques.

In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Obama said she helped lead a grape boycott that "forced growers to agree to some of the country's first farmworker contracts" and added, "she 'does not play.'" Huerta is credited with coining "Sí se puede," which Obama later adopted as "Yes we can."

In March 2026, Huerta said Chavez had sexually abused her in the 1960s. She said he pressured her into sex on one occasion and raped her on another, and that both encounters resulted in pregnancies. She said she arranged for the children to be raised by other families and later built close relationships with them. She said she stayed silent for decades because she feared damaging the movement. Her disclosure came alongside a New York Times investigation into allegations that Chavez abused other women and girls.

Huerta raised 14 children, and a spokesperson for her told TIME she also had 24 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and seven great-great-grandchildren. During the Delano boycott, she said her home was "terrorized in the middle of the night" with windows broken while she was alone with her children, and that "shotguns and rifles" were aimed at the family. Mario Garcia, a professor of Chicano Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said before her death, "She's really quite an electrifying person."