Dolores Huerta, who cofounded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez, dies at 96 at her home in Bakersfield

Huerta grew up in Stockton, California, and organized farmworkers in the San Joaquin and Coachella valleys. In 1962 she and Cesar Chavez founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers. She worked as the union chief negotiator, strike organizer and lobbyist through its strongest years in the 1960s and 1970s.

The contracts the union won gave farmworkers job security, health care, retirement plans, a credit union and guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water and protection from pesticides. The grape boycotts she helped lead brought the conditions in California fields to national attention, and the campaigns ended in the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which gave farmworkers collective bargaining rights. She coined the union slogan “Si se puede,” which Barack Obama later used in his 2008 presidential campaign. Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield in 2002 and stayed on the college lecture circuit into her nineties.

In March 2026, at the age of 95, Huerta broke a silence she said she had kept for sixty years. She said Chavez manipulated and pressured her into sex during a work trip in 1960, and that in 1966 he drove her to a secluded grape field in Delano and raped her. Each encounter left her pregnant, she said, and she arranged for others to raise the babies. She said she stayed silent because she believed exposing Chavez would hurt the farmworker movement she had spent her life building. Her account came out with a New York Times investigation that carried accounts from two other women who said Chavez abused them as girls in the 1970s. “I have kept this secret long enough,” Huerta said. “My silence ends here.”

Her family announced her death on Wednesday and asked for privacy, and said memorial plans will follow. A family spokesman said the cause was cancer. Governor Gavin Newsom ordered California flags flown at half staff. United Farm Workers president Teresa Romero said Huerta “left farm workers and the entire Latino community stronger and more organized than she found it,” and that the best tribute to her life is for the organizing to continue.