Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta died on 28 October 2026 at her home in Bakersfield, California, aged 96. Her family announced her death in a Facebook post: "We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today at the age of 96." They asked for privacy and said they would share plans to recognize and celebrate her life. A cause of death was not made public.

Her death was reported by NBC and other outlets across the United States, and labor organizations, civil rights groups and political figures paid tribute to her decades of organizing.

Dolores Huerta was born Dolores Fernández on 10 April 1930 in Dawson, a coal mining town in New Mexico, to parents of Mexican descent. Her father, Juan Fernández, was a miner and member of the United Mine Workers who later worked as a farm laborer and was elected to the New Mexico legislature in 1938. Her parents divorced when she was five, and her mother, Alicia, moved the children to Las Vegas, Nevada, and then to Stockton, California.

In Stockton she was raised by her mother and her grandfather, Herculano. Her mother worked in a cannery and as a waitress, took part in a 1937 cannery strike, and later opened a restaurant and bought a hotel that served mostly farmworkers. Huerta spent ten years as a Girl Scout and graduated from Stockton High School in 1947. She studied at Stockton College, later San Joaquin Delta College, and earned a provisional teaching credential in 1953. She taught in rural California for about a year before deciding that organizing farmworkers would help her pupils more than teaching them.

In 1955 Huerta met Fred Ross and joined the Community Service Organization (CSO), founding new chapters, running voter registration drives and lobbying the California State Legislature for farmworkers and noncitizens. Through the CSO she met Cesar Chavez. In 1962, frustrated that the CSO would not focus on farmworkers, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Chavez and Gilbert Padilla.

When Filipino workers led by Larry Itliong struck the Delano vineyards in September 1965, the association joined them. Huerta organized a wine boycott in California and then directed boycott efforts in New York and New Jersey, building a coalition of unions, churches and students. After the two groups merged into the United Farm Workers she became vice president and the union's lead negotiator, and in 1970 helped secure contracts that raised wages, added pesticide safety rules, created a health fund and gave the union control of hiring.

In the 1970s she led boycotts of lettuce, Gallo wine and table grapes, helped found the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974, and lobbied for the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act. In the 1980s she founded the UFW radio station Radio Campesina and testified before Congress on farmworkers' wages and health. After a police officer beat her at a 1988 protest in San Francisco, breaking two ribs and rupturing her spleen, she took leave from the union, returning after Chavez died in 1993. She stepped down as UFW vice president in 1999.

She then worked with the Feminist Majority Foundation and in 2002 used her Puffin/Nation Prize to found the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, which trains residents of rural Central Valley towns to organize for better roads, sewers and schools. She remained an active Democratic campaigner and served as an honorary co-chair of the 2017 Women's March.

Huerta married her high school sweetheart, Ralph Head, and they had two children, Celeste and Lori, before divorcing. With her second husband, Ventura Huerta, whom she met through the CSO, she had five children, Fidel, Emiliano, Vincent, Alicia and Angela; they divorced in 1963. She later had four children, Juanita, María Elena, Ricky and Camila, with Richard Chavez, Cesar Chavez's brother. Her youngest daughter, Camila Chavez, became executive director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Her family said she was the mother of 13 children.

In March 2026, after a New York Times investigation into Cesar Chavez, Huerta said publicly that he had sexually assaulted her in 1960 and 1966 and had emotionally abused her, and that two children born after those assaults had been raised by other families. She said she had never seen herself as a victim, but now understood that she was a survivor.

Huerta is remembered as one of the central figures of the American farmworker movement and one of its few women leaders. The contracts she negotiated and the 1975 labor law she lobbied for gave California farmworkers rights to bargain collectively that they had never had before. Her later work tied labor organizing to women's rights, immigrant rights and voter participation.

She received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award, the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship and, in 2012, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. California proclaimed 10 April Dolores Huerta Day in 2018, and Oregon followed in 2019. She was portrayed by Rosario Dawson in the 2014 film Cesar Chavez and was the subject of the 2017 documentary Dolores.