Dolores Huerta Dies at 96

The story so far

As of October 28, 2026

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers and popularized the rallying cry “Sí, se puede,” died of cancer at her home in Bakersfield on October 28 at age 96. She was the movement’s lead negotiator and tactician, turning field walkouts and consumer boycotts into contracts that delivered first-time gains for farmworkers on wages, toilets and clean water in the fields, protections from toxic pesticides, and access to health benefits.

What her life adds up to is the proof that a dispersed, low-wage workforce could force powerful growers to bargain and that protest could be converted into law. The Delano grape strike and the national grape boycott she helped organize set up California’s 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first major state law to give farmworkers the right to choose a union and require growers to negotiate in good faith. That sequence explains why tributes today dwell on practical changes in working conditions as much as on her slogan.

Her death also freezes a late-life turn in the story she helped create. Early this year, Huerta said that Cesar Chavez raped her in the 1960s. That account complicates commemorations that long centered on his image and shifts attention to the women who built the movement’s infrastructure while facing abuse and exclusion inside it.

Where it stands now: public figures are honoring Huerta’s seven decades of organizing, her 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and her foundation’s work training new local leaders. The next phase is about memory and instruction more than succession: how to teach a movement that won tangible rights for workers, who did the grinding work to win them, and how to hold its heroes to the same standards it demanded in the fields.