How Dolores Huerta Became an Icon of the Labor Movement

Civil rights icon Dolores Huerta was one of the most influential activists and labor organizers of the 20th century. Together with labor leader Cesar Chavez, Huerta co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers in 1962. As the Civil Rights Movement was gaining serious momentum, their work spotlighted the ongoing civil and human rights struggles of the largely Latino farm worker community. In addition to helping organize the five-year Delano grape strike, she led the successful national grape boycotts in 1970 that, alongside years of strikes and organizing, pressured California growers to pay higher wages and offer better working conditions to farm workers.

Huerta's partnership with Chavez was also marked by abuse, she later revealed. In 2026, she told The New York Times that Chavez had sexually assaulted her in the 1960s. The Times investigation also reported allegations that Chavez had sexually abused girls who had been connected to the movement.

Huerta’s legacy, however, extended far beyond her partnership with Chavez. She continued her decades-long fight for economic justice for farmworkers and other marginalized communities. Huerta pursued civil rights gains for marginalized groups while breaking down barriers for women activists through her tenacious work as a labor leader, community organizer, negotiator, lobbyist and advocate against discrimination.

When President Barack Obama awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, he summed up her accomplishments this way: “She has fought to give more people a seat at the table.”

Huerta died on October 28, 2026, at age 96.

Huerta, who called herself a “born-again feminist,” credited her mother for sparking her unflinching commitment to justice.

After a divorce, independent-minded Alicia Chavez Fernandez left northern New Mexico and moved with 3-year-old Dolores and her two brothers to California during the Great Depression. They settled in Stockton, in California’s Central Valley farm country, then home to many impoverished farmworker families who faced exploitation and abuse. The activist and entrepreneur bought and ran a 70-room boarding house for farm laborers. During particularly hard times, she let some stay for free.

She urged her daughter to be sensitive to the poor and to follow her religious calling to serve those in need. Through her example, she shaped Dolores into a bold, confident young woman with a talent for organizing people around community causes. Dolores earned a teaching credential, uncommon for a Mexican American woman at the time. She taught elementary school briefly—until her outrage at the poverty she witnessed among her students drove her out of the classroom.

Her students came to school hungry and barefoot. At home visits during voter registration drives, Huerta just saw dirt floors, no wood or linoleum. Families used orange crates as chairs and tables. Huerta realized she could help them more—and they could help themselves—if they organized to fight for change.

“I thought, this is wrong because these people are working very, very hard out there, picking our food every day and yet they can’t even afford to live decently,” Huerta recalled of that time in a 2012 interview with PBS NewsHour. “And that’s when I made up my mind that I was going to quit teaching.”

After working in two other labor organizations that disagreed on strategy or that ultimately didn’t prioritize farmworkers, Huerta and Chavez started what would become the United Farm Workers in 1962. Through the UFW, they fought for better wages, unemployment compensation, rest periods and things as basic as cold drinking water and toilets in the fields.

In an interview conducted for the University of California, San Diego Farmworker Documentation Project, Huerta said she soon realized the “racist mentality” they faced. During public and private talks and in legislative hearings in Sacramento, she said, growers stated that workers didn’t know how to use toilets, so putting them in the fields was pointless. They justified paying workers so little, she added, because in their mind, giving a job to people they called “degenerates,” “alcoholics” and “winos” was a public service. Some growers said they liked to hire Mexicans and Filipinos because they were “close to the ground,” she said, and considered children ideal for picking prunes because they were even closer to the ground.

Soon after starting the UFW, Huerta lobbied for—and secured—Aid for Dependent Families and disability insurance for farmworkers in California in 1963. She helped organize the five-year Delano grape strike and spearheaded national table grape boycott, pressuring more than 20 growers to raise wages and improve working conditions. Huerta served as the UFW’s lead negotiator for the three-year collective bargaining agreements signed after the strike.

Together with Chavez’s second hunger strike to bring attention to the conditions of farmworkers, Huerta was also instrumental in achieving California’s landmark 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act. The pioneering legislation gave the state’s farmworkers the right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining.

She also became involved in politics to bring about change. Huerta and the UFW canvassed in Los Angeles to support Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. The former attorney general had visited Delano to support the grape strike and criticized local police for their treatment of striking farmworkers.

Huerta stood beside Kennedy on the speaker’s platform when he delivered his victory speech for the California Democratic Party primary in June 1968—minutes before he was gunned down in a kitchen pantry just off the Ambassador Hotel ballroom. “His assassination was the death of our future,” she lamented years later in a 2018 interview with NBC News marking the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.  At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Huerta formally placed Hillary Clinton’s name into nomination.

Huerta was arrested more than 20 times at nonviolent activities and strikes throughout her years as a labor leader and civil rights activist. In September 1988, a police officer broke several of her ribs and ruptured her spleen during a peaceful protest in San Francisco against then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush’s policies and platform.

After a lengthy recovery, she took a leave of absence from the UFW, turned her attention to women’s rights and embarked on a successful national effort to encourage Latinas to run for office. She used a $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship she received in 2002 to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which trains leaders in community organizing and civic engagement. Reflecting Huerta’s vision of cross-pollinating the movements seeking justice and civil rights, the foundation weaves the rights struggles of women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, workers and people of color into a common thread. She argued that the most lasting change is rooted in community organizing, which she pursued for decades.

“Ordinary working people, once they understand that they can make the changes, and you get them involved and then they commit their time, they commit their resources to be able to make those changes, I think this is what keeps me going,” Huerta said.

Decades after Huerta and Chavez helped launch the farmworker movement, allegations against Chávez cast a troubling new light on their shared history. In a March 2026 New York Times investigation, several women who had been involved in the farmworker movement as children alleged that Chavez had sexually abused them over a period of years. Huerta also told The Times that Chavez had forced her to have sex with him in the 1960s, resulting in two children, a secret she had kept for nearly six decades.

Beyond her work with Chavez, Huerta built a legacy of activism and advocacy. She was awarded more than a dozen honorary doctorate degrees. At least eight schools in four states bear her name. She received numerous awards and recognitions for her work on labor rights, voting rights, women’s rights and other causes. Musicians have composed corridos, a traditional Mexican song, to tell her story.

When President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he remarked on how he borrowed the Huerta’s signature UFW rallying cry —“Sí, se puede” or “Yes, we can”— for his 2008 presidential campaign.

“On a personal note, Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan...,” Obama said to laughter from the audience. “Knowing her, I’m pleased that she let me off easy—because Dolores does not play.”