Yes, We Can, Dolores Huerta, 1930-2026. Yes, We Did.

What a life!

Dolores Huerta at Carnaval San Francisco, 2016. Photo: Tom Hilton, Creative Commons License 2.0

Dolores Huerta, the labor, civil rights, and feminist activist who inspired generations to fight for change, died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 96 (New York Times gift link). Huerta was best known for co-founding the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in 1965, but as a loving obituary in Mother Jones reminds us, “Huerta’s activism never stopped.”

She campaigned for voting rights and pushed against voter suppression. She was a strong supporter of women’s rights, including campaigning for reproductive justice. Throughout her life, she advocated for immigrant rights, most recently speaking out against Trump’s deportation campaign. As the founder and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, she kept speaking in support of movements, leaders and legislation in support of civil rights until the very end of her life.

Huerta also coined the slogan “Sí, se puede!” ( “Yes, it can be done” or “Yes we can”), a rallying cry that decades later was adopted by another organizer for his presidential campaign. He’s been in the news lately too, and when an impossibly young Obama — he looks like a delegate at the Model UN — awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, he said he was “pleased that she let me off easy, because Dolores does not play.”

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Huerta was not herself a farmworker, as she explained in a 2017 PBS Independent Lens documentary. But as an elementary school teacher, she was painfully aware of the terrible conditions her students faced at home. “I couldn't stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she recalled. “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

In 1962, she and Chavez created the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers in 1966, a year after she and Chavez were asked by Filipino grape pickers to lend their support to a strike against growers in Delano, California. That grew into a successful five-year strike and national boycott of grapes beginning in 1965, eventually forcing growers to end abusive treatment of laborers. Huerta and Chavez negotiated a ban on short-handled hoes that caused back injuries, as well as higher wages and better working conditions, including providing portable toilets for farm workers. Even after the strike formally ended, many Americans continued to boycott grapes, because as Yr Editrix’s mama taught her, serious people don’t care if a boycott’s “over” or “doesn’t exist.”

Flash-forward to now, and after years of attacks on labor, we’re once again learning from multiple disease outbreaks that saving a bit of money by skimping on toilets for harvest workers isn’t worth the price of explosive diarrhea.

Speaking of nasty and toxic, we also learned earlier this year that Cesar Chavez didn’t belong so much on a pedestal as in a waste pit, because while he was building his reputation as a civil rights icon, he was also a sexual predator who groomed and molested girls as young as 12.

As part of the New York Times investigation (gift link) of Chavez’s abuse of two girls, Huerta broke decades of silence, acknowledging that Chavez had raped her twice, resulting in pregnancies both times. Out of misplaced loyalty, and justified fear that exposing Chavez might hurt workers and the movement, Huerta kept the sexual violence a secret for decades, even from the two children she bore as a result. Instead, she arranged for them to be raised by other families and never acknowledged them publicly, long after Chavez died in 1996.

But when New York Times reporters informed Huerta that Chavez had also molested the two young girls, Huerta broke down in tears, and knew she had to speak out. Huerta said in a statement, “The knowledge that he hurt young girls sickens me. My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years.”

For much of her life, Dolores Huerta lived and worked in Chavez’s shadow, as the vice president of the United Farm Workers for almost 40 years. But UFW leadership found other ways to demean her, as the Times obit notes. After she’d spent months lobbying members of Congress to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which is now mostly remembered as “Ronald Reagan’s” amnesty bill, UFW leaders failed to tell her about the news conference they scheduled to celebrate the win.

To her, it was a reflection of the sexism and machismo culture that permeated the union.

“I realized afterward they just wanted to get me out of the way so they could take credit for the work,” she said of her male co-workers in remembering the news conference. “Straight male-chauvinist trick.”

Ironically, when the truth came out about Chavez’s brutality and the dangers of having icons at all, his name and image soon came off signs and celebrations, and in at least two cases his face was replaced in murals by a new painting of Huerta, who was always there, always advocating for the workers.

Huerta was jailed 22 times while demonstrating for workers’ rights. In 1988, she was beaten by cops while protesting George HW Bush in San Francisco. Blows from cop’s batons broke three of her ribs and smashed her spleen, and she needed more than a dozen blood transfusions. The city fucking settled for $825,000 in 1991.

Huerta, by then in her sixties but not slowing down, kept up with her activism, focusing on encouraging Latinas to run for public office and lobbying California lawmakers on behalf of farmworkers. She fought against pesticides that sickened workers and people living near farms, and pushed back against white nationalists’ increasingly vile policies against undocumented immigrants.

We’ll give Dolores Huerta the well-earned last word on her life and work, from the 2025 documentary Seeds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Dolores Huerta, in which she recalled drawing inspiration from the women’s movement of the 1970s:

“I hope that my legacy will be one of an organizer that organized to fight injustice. […] We want to give our children an inheritance of justice, right, not jewels or property or money because they'll just fight over it. So the main thing to do is to give them this love for justice — and that is the greatest gift I think that any of us can have.”

Yes we can. Yes, she did.

OPEN THREAD.

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The Time The United Farm Workers Won The Grape Boycott. No, They Did!

Cesar Chavez Is Why We Don't Need Any More Icons

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[NYT (gift link) / Mother Jones / NPR / NYT (gift link)

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