Los Angeles (United States) (AFP) – US labor leader and civil rights campaigner Dolores Huerta, whose union work with Cesar Chavez changed the lives of migrant workers, has died, her family said. She was 96.
Huerta was vice president of United Farm Workers, the union she founded with Chavez, for four decades, organizing strikes and walkouts that won improvements in working conditions for the millions of men and women who labor in US fields. “We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today at the age of 96,” said a family statement. “We know that many of you around the world share in our mourning, and we will be following up on plans to recognize and celebrate her incredible life and legacy.”
Born in New Mexico and raised in California, Huerta took the reins of the US farmworker movement in the 1960s with Chavez. At the time, she was raising seven children — she later had more — while going through a divorce. While Huerta was the organizing force behind the union, Chavez was its charismatic leader and the public face who became an icon to generations on the left, even after his death in 1993. But that fame and the seemingly tight relationship between him and Huerta hid a dark secret that came to light this year when Huerta said she was one of a number of women Chavez had raped. In her case, the attacks resulted in two pregnancies.
“The first time…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 New York Times, which broke the story. “The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.”
Huerta remained a galvanizing figure in left-wing politics well into her 90s, helping to organize a fightback among migrant laborers targeted by President Donald Trump’s immigration swoops that saw farmworkers snatched from the fields by masked federal agents. “People are reaching out because they want to do something,” she told AFP during a July 2025 interview at the headquarters of her Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, an agricultural nexus in California’s Central Valley. “We’ve got to be a lot more active, because what’s happening right now is so huge. I liken it to what was happening in Germany before Hitler took power,” she said.
Huerta rubbed shoulders with some of America’s most influential people over decades in the public eye. In 1968, she stood on a podium alongside Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, brother of assassinated former president John F. Kennedy, just minutes before he was shot dead. Barack Obama — whose “Yes, we can” slogan he acknowledged he adopted from Dolores’ “Sí se puede” — awarded her the presidential medal of freedom when he was in the White House.
© 2024 AFP
