Sí Se Puede: Dolores Huerta (1930–2026)

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers and gave a movement its rallying cry, "Sí se puede," died on October 28, 2026, at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96. Her family announced her death through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, saying she passed "surrounded by her close family."

For more than seven decades, Huerta organized the people the country preferred not to see: the Mexican and Mexican American families, Filipino workers, and migrants who picked its grapes, lettuce and cotton. Her story belongs to Mexican American history and to labor history. It also belongs to the long Black freedom struggle, which shared her enemies, her tactics and many of her allies.

From Stockton to the Fields

Huerta was born on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, and raised largely by her mother in Stockton, California, in a working-class neighborhood of Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and Black families. She trained as a teacher, but she said she quit the classroom because she could not bear to teach hungry children without fighting the reasons they were hungry.

In the 1950s she joined the Community Service Organization, the Mexican American civil rights group built by organizer Fred Ross, registering voters and pressing for public services in barrios. There she met César Chávez. In 1962 the two founded the National Farm Workers Association, the union that became the United Farm Workers.

The Strategist at the Table

The Delano grape strike began in 1965, when Filipino workers led by Larry Itliong walked out and the mostly Mexican farmworker union joined them. Huerta became the movement's chief negotiator and one of its sharpest strategists. She directed the national grape boycott from New York, persuading shoppers, churches and unions to leave grapes on the shelf, and in 1970 she helped win contracts with table-grape growers. She lobbied for the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which for the first time gave farmworkers in the state the right to organize and bargain collectively.

She coined "Sí se puede" during a 1972 hunger strike in Arizona. The phrase traveled far beyond the fields, and decades later it echoed in English as "Yes, we can."

Her work came at a cost. In 1988, while protesting a campaign appearance in San Francisco, she was beaten by a police officer with a baton, breaking ribs and rupturing her spleen. She sued and won a settlement, and the city changed its crowd-control rules. In 2012 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Brown and Black, in the Same Fight

Farmworker organizing grew up alongside the Black civil rights movement, and the two learned from each other. Young organizers who had worked in Mississippi with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee went to Delano, bringing the boycott, the march and the mass meeting with them. When Chávez fasted in 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wired him that "our separate struggles are really one," a struggle "for freedom, for dignity and for humanity." Coretta Scott King later joined the boycott's public campaigns.

The parallels ran deep. Farm and domestic workers had been left out of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, an exclusion written in large part to satisfy Southern lawmakers who wanted to keep Black sharecroppers and household workers unprotected. Mexican and Black field hands inherited that same gap. Huerta's fight for farmworker rights was also a fight against a labor system built on the color line. She stood beside Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of his assassination in June 1968, two months after King was killed, as the coalition both men had tried to build was cut down.

In her later decades she widened the circle: women's rights, LGBTQ rights, environmental justice, and the voting power of poor communities of color. Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, founded in 2002, she trained organizers in California's Central Valley, many of them young, Latino and Black.

Telling the Hardest Truth

In March 2026 The New York Times published an investigation in which women from the farmworker movement said Chávez had sexually abused them when they were girls and young women. Huerta herself said in a statement that Chávez had pressured her into sex once and, on another occasion, raped her. The United Farm Workers said it had no firsthand knowledge of the claims but that the conduct described was incompatible with the union's values, and activists began calling for Chávez's name to come off streets and schools.

It was characteristic of her that, in her nineties, she chose to speak. A movement is not one man, and her disclosure insisted that the women who built it, and the girls who were harmed inside it, be counted as part of its history. That reckoning does not erase the farmworkers' victories. It asks us to honor them without myths.

Immigration and the Unfinished Work

Huerta's people were the migrants, the undocumented and the children of both. She spent her final years denouncing raids and deportations, defending the workers who feed the nation while being told they do not belong to it. Black communities know that story through Haitian asylum seekers at the border and African migrants in detention. Her life argued that these struggles are linked, and that the people who harvest a nation's food deserve its full protection.