Dolores Huerta, a labor leader and civil rights activist who dedicated her life to improving working conditions for migrant farmworkers in the United States, has died at the age of 96. Huerta died at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by close family members on October 28, according to a statement released by her foundation. The cause of death was cancer, Erik Olvera, a spokesman for the family, tells the Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey.
If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.” Born in 1930 in New Mexico, Huerta moved to Stockton, California, as a child with her mother and two brothers after her parents divorced. She graduated from Stockton High School and earned a degree from Stockton College (now San Joaquin Delta College) at a time when educational opportunities for women, especially Mexican American women, were limited. Huerta began her career as an elementary school teacher but pivoted to advocacy after seeing farmworkers’ children coming to school hungry and barefoot.
She began working for the Community Service Organization, a Latino civil rights group, where she met Cesar Chavez, who shared her commitment to improving conditions for farmworkers. No bathrooms in the field, especially for the women. That was really horrible.
No access to drinking water. They would actually charge them for the water that they would give the workers and of course, no rest periods, as if they were pretty much brutalized.” A post shared by Dolores C. Huerta (@doloreshuerta) In 1962, Huerta and Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the union orchestrated strikes, nonviolent protests and nationwide produce boycotts. And that’s the way that we won.” Those efforts paved the way for the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which gave farmworkers the right to self-organize, form unions and engage in collective bargaining. It was the country’s first major farm-labor law outside of Hawaii, per the New York Times’ Robert D.
The mother of 14 children, Huerta served as Chavez’s second-in-command until his death in 1993 and the union’s vice president for nearly four decades. Earlier this year, Huerta told the New York Times’ Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes that Chavez had twice forced her into having sex, resulting in two pregnancies. She said she kept quiet about the sexual assaults because she didn’t want to hurt the farmworkers movement.
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