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Dolores Huerta, who spent decades organizing farmworkers and fighting for civil rights, died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield. She was 96.
Huerta had been diagnosed with cancer. Abridged by PBS KVIE confirmed her death with Carla Guerrero of the Dolores Huerta Foundation.
“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today,” Huerta’s family said in a statement. “As you can imagine, this is an incredibly difficult time for us, and we ask for privacy as we grieve this incredible loss to our family.”
The family said plans to celebrate Huerta’s life are being organized.
Abridged was with Huerta in Sacramento as she advocated for immigrant rights and worked on labor issues Aug. 11 at the state Capitol. Huerta’s foundation said the “images from that day were the last taken of her in action.”
Organizing farmworkers
Huerta cofounded the National Farm Workers Association, a predecessor of the United Farm Workers, in 1962. She helped organize boycotts, negotiate union contracts and secure California’s landmark agricultural labor protections. Huerta became one of the country’s most famous civil rights leaders.
President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Huerta’s famous rally cry, “Sí, se puede” — “Yes, we can” — echoes throughout the farmworker campaign. Barack Obama later adopted the English version for his presidential campaign. When he awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, he joked, “Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan.”
She entered the California Hall of Fame in 2013. Through her foundation, Huerta continued training organizers and teaching communities in California and across the country how to become changemakers.
Huerta’s Sacramento visit in August was her first time back in the public eye after stepping away following her disclosure that Cesar Chavez had sexually assaulted her twice in the 1960s.
Huerta came forward in March after learning from a New York Times investigation that other women had accused Chavez of sexually abusing them when they were girls. She condemned Chavez’s actions and said they did not represent the movement’s values.
Born in New Mexico, raised in Stockton
Dolores Clara Fernandez was born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, a mining town in northern New Mexico.
Her father, Juan Fernandez, was a farmworker, miner and union activist who won a seat in the New Mexico Legislature in 1938.
After her parents divorced, Huerta moved with her mother, Alicia, to Stockton. She spent most of her childhood and early adult life there.
Her mother worked as a waitress and cannery worker before buying a small hotel and restaurant.
Huerta later became a teacher in Stockton. Seeing children arrive at school hungry helped convince her to leave the classroom and fight for better conditions for families in need.
Setting the record straight
This summer, Huerta was helping complete a new exhibit on the history, immigrant workers at the California Museum.
“Help Wanted/Leave Now” fills roughly half the museum’s second floor with accounts of Mexican workers and their families, tracing a century of recruitment and deportation.
The exhibition examines how workers were welcomed when the United States needed their labor, then targeted for removal when economic conditions or politics changed.
Photographs, artifacts and filmed interviews document what happened to those workers and their children. Among them were American citizens forced from their own country and families separated and never reunited.
Huerta served on the exhibition’s advisory council alongside historians, legal scholars and other experts. Presented in English and Spanish, it examines Depression-era deportations, wartime labor recruitment and the federal government’s 1954 deportation campaign.
Huerta lived that history firsthand. In her August interview, she recalled Mexican laborers coming north during World War II, when American workers were leaving for military service.
“I think it’s important so we can set the record straight,” she told Abridged.
“This exhibit does that and is very, very, very important to me.”
The example her mother set
Huerta credited her mother with teaching her to help people without waiting to be asked.
Her mother was deeply Catholic and devoted to St. Francis. Huerta said her mother’s expectation was clear and simple. “If someone needed help, we had an obligation to act without expecting anything in return,” Huerta said.
“Don’t expect any kind of a reward,” Huerta told Abridged, “because if you expect a reward, then you’re taking away the grace of the act.”
‘You’re an I can’
Huerta spoke with PBS KVIE many times over the years.
During an August 2024 interview, Huerta was called an icon. Huerta responded with something her youngest son, Ricky, had told her.
“Mom, you’re not an icon. You’re an I can.”
Huerta lived that testament in good times and in bad. The Dolores Huerta foundation says it will continue to work tirelessly on her living legacy.
