Photo: Bill Andrews, via Wikimedia Commons.
Dolores Huerta, the labour and civil rights leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers and gave the movement its enduring slogan, "Sí se puede" — "Yes, we can" — has died at the age of 96, according to her family and foundation.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, Huerta died on October 28 at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by close family members, and the cause of death was cancer. NPR also reported her death on October 29, noting that she co-founded, with Cesar Chavez, the union that became the United Farm Workers.
Huerta was born in 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, and moved to Stockton, California, as a child. She trained as a teacher, but, as she often explained, she left the classroom after seeing farmworkers' children arrive at school hungry and barefoot. She believed she could do more by organising farmworkers than by teaching their hungry children.
Her work took her from the Community Service Organization, where she met Chavez, to the founding of the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 and the Delano grape strike of 1965. She led boycott campaigns on the East Coast, negotiated contracts, and helped win California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the first law recognising farmworkers' right to collective bargaining in the state.
Her influence reached well beyond the fields. She campaigned for women's rights, immigration reform and civic participation, founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. California marks April 10, her birthday, as Dolores Huerta Day.
Her family has asked for privacy and said plans to remember and celebrate her life will follow. What happens next is a public reckoning with a legacy built over seven decades: the slogan she coined still appears at marches, in classrooms and in campaign speeches, and the union she helped build remains a reference point for farm labour organising in the United States.