A pioneering labor organizer who co-founded the United Farm Workers union, Huerta spent a lifetime fighting for migrant laborers’ rights, advocating for women and supporting marginalized communities
Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent
October 28, 2026 5:03 p.m.
Dolores Huerta, a labor leader and civil rights activist who dedicated her life to improving working conditions for migrant farmworkers in the United States, has died at the age of 96.
Huerta died at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by close family members on October 28, according to a statement released by her foundation. The cause of death was cancer, Erik Olvera, a spokesman for the family, tells the Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey.
“It’s a tough time,” Olvera adds. “She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really. If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”
Born in 1930 in New Mexico, Huerta moved to Stockton, California, as a child with her mother and two brothers after her parents divorced. She graduated from Stockton High School and earned a degree from Stockton College (now San Joaquin Delta College) at a time when educational opportunities for women, especially Mexican American women, were limited.
Huerta began her career as an elementary school teacher but pivoted to advocacy after seeing farmworkers’ children coming to school hungry and barefoot. She began working for the Community Service Organization, a Latino civil rights group, where she met Cesar Chavez, who shared her commitment to improving conditions for farmworkers.
“They were only earning like 50 cents an hour,” Huerta told Good Morning America in 2020. “They had no unemployment insurance … They weren’t even able to have any kind of access to the food banks ... No bathrooms in the field, especially for the women. That was really horrible. No access to drinking water. They would actually charge them for the water that they would give the workers and of course, no rest periods, as if they were pretty much brutalized.”
In 1962, Huerta and Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the union orchestrated strikes, nonviolent protests and nationwide produce boycotts.
“The farmworkers couldn’t win by themselves,” Huerta told Smithsonian magazine’s Ryan P. Smith in 2017. “They had to reach out to the American public, and all of the 17 million Americans that decided not to eat grapes or lettuce and Gallo wine. And that’s the way that we won.”
Those efforts paved the way for the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which gave farmworkers the right to self-organize, form unions and engage in collective bargaining. It was the country’s first major farm-labor law outside of Hawaii, per the New York Times’ Robert D. McFadden.
The mother of 14 children, Huerta served as Chavez’s second-in-command until his death in 1993 and the union’s vice president for nearly four decades. Earlier this year, Huerta told the New York Times’ Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes that Chavez had twice forced her into having sex, resulting in two pregnancies. She said she kept quiet about the sexual assaults because she didn’t want to hurt the farmworkers movement. She arranged for both girls to be raised by others but later reconnected with them.
The Times investigation also found that Chavez had groomed and sexually abused girls as young as 12. Huerta said she had not been aware of Chavez’s sexual misconduct involving underage girls. “Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children—it’s really awful,” Huerta told Times.
In 2003, Huerta founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation, a social justice nonprofit, and promoted women candidates for public office as part of the Feminist Majority Foundation. She remained active into her later years, advocating for racial equality, economic justice, LGBTQ rights and women's rights.
Did you know? Nonviolent activism
Taking inspiration from the nonviolent protest strategies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, Huerta was arrested 22 times throughout her career.
Huerta earned numerous awards, including 15 honorary degrees and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2019, California established an annual Dolores Huerta Day in recognition of her lifelong pursuit of justice.
“She made history,” Tey Marianna Nunn, associate director of content and interpretation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino, tells Smithsonian magazine. “We can never forget the impact she has had on all of us.”
Huerta is credited with coining the phrase “Sí se puede,” or “yes we can,” which became a “rallying cry for workers, women, immigrants and people fighting for justice around the world,” according to the statement from her foundation. “She gave people the courage to recognize their own power—and showed them how to use it.”
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Source: Smithsonian Magazine · Sarah Kuta
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