Dolores Huerta, who rose to national prominence as the co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, and was known for her advocacy for women farmworkers, died on Wednesday. Long recognized for her lifelong dedication to farmworkers, Huerta’s fight against injustice — and the sacrifices she made in that fight – reemerged in the wider public consciousness this year when she spoke of being sexually assaulted and raped by César Chávez, the farmworker movement’s most visible leader. Her revelation was just one more act of speaking out in a life dedicated to justice.
Huerta was born in New Mexico but spent most of her life in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural hub where a quarter of the country’s food is grown. After graduating college, she became an elementary school teacher. A majority of her students were the children of migrant farmworkers.
She left teaching when she realized that she could better use her talents to help their parents fight issues like wage theft and poor working and living conditions. She is widely quoted as saying: “I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.” She left the school to work at the Community Service Organization, a Latino civil rights group.
In 1955 she helped start the Stockton chapter of the organization, which is where she met Chávez, a rising Chicano leader. The two went on to create the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). One of the first major actions she undertook was helping organize the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, a five-year strike that was started by Filipino workers who were fighting for higher wages.
About a week into the strike, NFWA joined the movement with 1,200 Mexican laborers. The two groups representing the strikers eventually merged to become the United Farm Workers (UFW), a labor union. As part of the UFW’s work to fight for better working conditions and union contracts, Huerta went to New York to organize a national boycott against table grapes.
There she met the feminist leader Gloria Steinem, who in 1968 flew out to California to march with the striking farmworkers. While Huerta was the lead negotiator for the grape worker contracts that resulted from the organizing, her contributions and leadership during the strikes and subsequent boycotts were often overshadowed by Chávez. It was Huerta who coined the ¡Sí Se Puede! chant, which means “yes, it can be done” and came to define the farmworker movement – but the phrase has been erroneously credited to him over the years.
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