Dolores Huerta had no lobbying experience when she went to Sacramento in the early 1960s, championing legislation that secured better conditions for California farmworkers who helped feed the nation, harvesting fruits and vegetables at low wages without regular access to toilets, clean water or health care.
She had no formal legal training when she negotiated the farmworkers’ first union contracts a few years later, sitting down at the bargaining table with growers — all men — who nicknamed her “the Dragon Lady,” bristling at the assertive woman in their midst.
And she had no patience for Latino community leaders who told her, “No se puede,” it can’t be done, when she and fellow labor activist César Chávez coordinated a recall campaign to oust Arizona’s Republican governor in 1972, after he signed legislation that limited farmworkers’ ability to organize. “Sí se puede,” yes we can, she insisted. The governor remained in office through the end of his term, but the campaign was credited with revitalizing the state’s Democratic coalition.
Ms. Huerta, who founded the United Farm Workers with Chávez and spearheaded some of the union’s early victories, spent more than six decades fighting for racial and economic justice. She endured the sexism of fellow labor leaders, threats from anti-union thugs and beatings by police. And long after she campaigned in Arizona, her phrase “Sí se puede” was taken up by farmworkers who rallied behind her at picket lines and chanted her slogan during marches.
The battle cry was later adopted by Barack Obama, who made “Yes we can” a refrain of his presidential campaigns. “Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan,” he said in 2012, presenting Ms. Huerta with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. “Knowing her, I’m pleased she let me off easy, because Dolores does not play.”
Ms. Huerta was 96 when she died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by family, the Dolores Huerta Foundation said on its website. The statement did not cite a cause of death.
Ms. Huerta was often overshadowed by Chávez, with whom she started the UFW, an organization that they envisioned less as a labor union than as a social movement, “la causa.”
The soft-spoken Chávez acquired a saintly aura through his weeks-long fasts. Ms. Huerta became known as “la Pasionaria,” the Passionate One, for her intense, confrontational style in the dusty fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley and in marches from the grape capital of Delano to the state capital of Sacramento.
Earlier this year, the New York Times published an explosive story revealing that Chávez had sexually abused teenage girls over multiple decades and engaged in other incidents of sexual harassment. The Times interviewed more than a dozen women who said they were pressured into sex or assaulted by men in the labor union.
The revelations led Huerta to acknowledge that she had sexual encounters with Chávez twice in the 1960s, becoming pregnant both times.
“The first time I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to,” she said in a statement to the Times after the article was published. “The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.”
After the babies were born, she arranged for them to be raised by other families, she said.
“Over the years, I have been fortunate to develop a deep relationship with these children, who are now close to my other children, their siblings. But even then, no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago,” she said.
Raising the plight of migrant workers
Even at its peak in the 1970s, the UFW was relatively small, never representing more than 100,000 workers. But it was widely credited with raising awareness of the plight of migrant workers, who had been excluded from federal labor laws, and with helping them win the right to collective bargaining in California under a landmark 1973 state law.
Ms. Huerta was an organizer of the table-grape boycott that swayed public opinion in the 1960s, as the union gained national prominence amid a five-year strike by Filipino and Mexican American farmworkers in Delano. She later battled for protection from pesticides, set up medical plans and pension funds for workers and lobbied for the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which resulted in legal status for about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.
A decade after Chávez’s death in 1993, she established the Dolores Huerta Foundation, broadening her advocacy to encompass health care, housing, education and LGBTQ rights. Following years of struggle with her traditional Catholic beliefs, she became a “born-again feminist,” as she put it, and opposed restrictions on abortion.
At 89, she was arrested during a California demonstration for better pay for home care workers; at 90, she appeared in a prerecorded segment of President Joe Biden’s inauguration celebration, reading from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Ms. Huerta was “absolutely fearless, physically as well as psychologically,” Chávez once said. Though she was only 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds, she faced down union opponents who swung two-by-fours, slashed her tires and tried to force their way into her home. She was arrested more than 20 times while protesting and, in 1988, was severely beaten by San Francisco police during a peaceful demonstration against presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, who opposed a UFW grape boycott.
The attack left Ms. Huerta with a ruptured spleen and several broken ribs. She sued the city, which changed its crowd-control procedures and paid her $825,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Ms. Huerta, whose initial union salary was $5 a week, joked that she would have to open her first bank account.
“I imagine that if I had known Emma Goldman,” the radical labor organizer, “she would have been something like Dolores,” said feminist activist Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. magazine, which named Ms. Huerta a Woman of the Year in 1998. “She’s not a person whose life is divided into public and private, work and play — it’s all of a piece.”
Ms. Huerta sought to instill in her 11 children a sense that the farmworkers movement was bigger than all of them. Her family often relied on donations of food and clothing, and growers attacked her as an unfit parent, even as she helped launch a union hall day care center for mothers on the picket line.
“I remember, as a child, one time talking to her about my sadness that she wasn’t going to be with me on my birthday,” her daughter Lori told Ms. magazine. “And she said that the sacrifices we as her children make would help hundreds of other children in the future. How can you argue with something like that?”
Ms. Huerta worked alongside other women in the union, including Chávez’s wife, Helen, who served as the UFW’s bookkeeper and headed its credit union, and Marion Moses, a top Chávez aide who helped coordinate the table-grape boycott. But for years she was the only woman on the union’s executive board, where she served as a vice president.
“The men would come out and say their stupid little jokes about women. So I started keeping a record,” Ms. Huerta recalled. “At the end of the meeting, I’d say, ‘During the course of this meeting, you men have made 58 sexist remarks.’ Pretty soon I got them down to 25, then 10 and then five.”
Early influences
Born in Dawson, New Mexico, on April 10, 1930, Dolores Clara Fernández was the daughter of Alicia Chávez and Juan Fernández, whose parents were Mexican immigrants. Her father, a farmworker, miner and union activist, was elected to the New Mexico state legislature in 1938.
Ms. Huerta’s parents divorced when she was 3, and she moved to Stockton, in the San Joaquin Valley, with her two brothers and mother, who worked as a waitress and in a cannery. During World War II, her mother bought a 70-room hotel from a Japanese family that was forced into an incarceration camp. She turned the hotel into a refuge for farmworkers, who sometimes paid her with fruits or vegetables, and she put her children to work.
“In the Latino tradition, women serve the men,” Ms. Huerta told Vogue in 2017. “Not in our family.” She and her brothers all helped with cooking, cleaning and ironing. In her free time, she rose through the Girl Scouts and took dance lessons, envisioning a life as a professional flamenco dancer.
Her turn toward activism was inspired partly by racial discrimination she and her family encountered. In one incident, one of her brothers was beaten by White men while he was wearing a zoot suit, the billowing, high-waisted outfit often worn by young Mexican Americans in the early 1940s.
Ms. Huerta received an associate’s degree from Stockton College (now San Joaquin Delta College) and worked briefly as a teacher before deciding, as she put it, that she “could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”
She learned the basics of organizing after a 1955 meeting with Fred Ross, a leader of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civil rights group. “If it weren’t for Fred,” she said, “I’d probably just be in some stupid suburb somewhere.”
Her first marriage, to Ralph Head, ended in divorce. Soon after joining the CSO, she married Ventura Huerta and persuaded him to leave his job and join her as an organizer. He became a front man for her, a way to get around the sexism of men who refused to take her seriously. Within a few years, their marriage had splintered.
While battling with her husband over custody of their children, she successfully lobbied for California legislation that, among other results, removed citizenship requirements for receiving public assistance and made it possible to take driver’s license exams in Spanish.
She also deepened her friendship with Chávez, a fellow CSO activist who shared her interest in organizing farmworkers, and who encouraged her to keep Huerta’s name after their divorce. It was lovely and fitting, he told her: Roughly translated, Dolores Huerta means “sorrows in the orchard.”
‘His story is told, hers isn’t’
In 1962, Ms. Huerta and Chávez teamed up to form the National Farm Workers Association, a precursor of the UFW. Ms. Huerta later said there was no doubt that Chávez would be the leader: Many farmworkers were loath to have a woman lead them.
“Looking back, I would have said, ‘Let’s do it 50-50,’” she told USA Today in 2020, when the newspaper named her one of 100 “women of the century.”
Ms. Huerta recruited workers at pool halls and on the stoops of her homes, and she was named chief negotiator when the union began hashing out contracts with the growers. By many accounts, she scolded, insulted and harangued the growers on the way to winning higher wages.
She also battled with Chávez behind the scenes, debating union tactics and messaging. “Whenever we weren’t fighting, we were plotting,” Chávez told novelist and journalist Peter Matthiessen. “Dolores is the only one I fight with, the only one who makes me lose my temper. I guess that’s because I like her so much.”
Together they extended their activism into Democratic politics, helping to get out the vote for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. Ms. Huerta was standing by Kennedy’s side, flashing a peace sign at the camera, when he gave his final public address, thanking her and the UFW moments before he was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
The Delano grape strike culminated in a wave of contract signings in 1970, but the union found itself fighting for its life three years later, when the Teamsters swept into its territory and signed contracts with the growers. A bloody union turf war lasted for years. UFW membership dwindled, and the union was also rocked by infighting and accusations of mismanagement.
According to “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez,” a 2014 biography by Miriam Pawel, Ms. Huerta angered many union leaders in the early 1970s, when they learned that she was in a relationship with married UFW activist Richard Chávez, César Chávez’s younger brother. Ms. Huerta weathered the criticism, continuing her work with the union until the early 2000s. She and Richard Chávez remained a couple until his death in 2011.
In addition to the children she said were fathered by César Chávez, Ms. Huerta had two children from her first marriage, five from her second and four from her relationship with Richard Chávez. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
While César Chávez rose to national prominence during the Delano grape strike, Ms. Huerta remained little-known for years. The Los Angeles Times dubbed her the “unheralded heroine” in a rare profile in 1970, and she was usually relegated to the background in news reports that described her as a “tiny, tough assistant” (Time magazine) and “a very pretty, sad-eyed young woman who does not look like the mother of seven children but is” (the New Yorker).
In part, Ms. Huerta blamed sexism among journalists and historians. “That’s the history of the world,” she told the Associated Press in 1995. “His story is told, hers isn’t.” But she later noted that she had grown up at a time when women were often expected to support and accommodate the men in their lives, without asking for credit.
“I always thought it was wrong for me to take credit for the work that I did,” she said in a 2017 documentary, “Dolores.” “I don’t think that anymore.”
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