Huerta's 1972 retort answers Arizona's no se puede with Sí, se puede

Organizer’s legacy spans strikes, boycotts and the Chicano Movement

In 1972, leaders of the United Farm Workers went to Arizona to fight legislation that barred agricultural workers in the state from striking or boycotting during harvest season. One of the union’s founders, Cesar Chavez, began a fast — a protest tactic he had taken from Gandhi. Another, Dolores Huerta, gave speech after speech to build support.

Huerta, who died Wednesday at 96, often recalled that at one of those events, after she detailed the gains the union was winning for farmworkers in California, someone told her, “Oh, Dolores. You can do all that stuff in California” but “in Arizona, no se puede.” It can’t be done. Instinctually, she answered, “Sí, se puede” — yes, it can be done, or more colloquially, yes we can.

When Huerta repeated the exchange to a meeting of farmworkers that night, the room jumped to its feet and began chanting, “Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!” The line became the union’s slogan.

Barack Obama, awarding Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in 2012, joked, “Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan” for his first presidential campaign. Huerta had campaigned for Hillary Clinton in those primaries, against Obama.

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for Huerta’s family, confirmed her death. Huerta’s work spearheaded the Chicano Movement and emphasized the interconnectedness of workers’ rights, social-justice issues, feminism and the environment. She spent much of her career seeming to deflect credit for her contributions, and she was often seen simply as Chavez’s sidekick.

In 2026, Huerta was a key voice in a New York Times investigation that presented evidence Chavez had sexually assaulted several women involved in the movement, including two young teenagers. Huerta said she was one of Chavez’s targets: in one instance, she said, he pressured her into sex; in another, he drove her to a remote grape field and assaulted her.

In a separate statement, Huerta said both incidents occurred in the 1960s and led to pregnancies she kept secret. She placed the babies with other families and was eventually able to forge “deep relationships with these children,” she wrote. They were now “close to my other children…But even then, no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.”

Other revelations detailed a degrading, male-chauvinistic culture within the Farm Workers movement under Chavez’s leadership, in which Huerta’s power and contributions were undermined — even as, Huerta reaffirmed, Chavez also genuinely sought to elevate her and other women and relied on them to do significant work, up to a point.

The disclosures rewrote not just Chavez’s legacy but Huerta’s as well. CBS News had once described her as possibly “the most vocal activist you’ve never heard of.”

Dolores Clara Fernández was born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, N.M., and grew up in Stockton, Calif., in California’s Central Valley, with her mother, Alicia Chavez — no relation to Cesar — after her parents divorced. Her mother’s sense of civic responsibility informed her own activism. When a Japanese friend was interned during World War II, Alicia Chavez became a steward of her family’s hotel and restaurant and offered affordable rooms to low-wage workers. She also exposed Huerta and her two siblings to the arts: Huerta played violin as a child and did tap and flamenco dancing, and she had a lifelong love of jazz.

After high school, Huerta taught elementary school in Stockton, where her students were the children of farmworkers. She was dismayed to find some living in homes with dirt floors and orange crates for furniture, coming to class malnourished and shoeless. “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children,” she told the Los Angeles Times.

She went to work at the local Community Service Organization, a civil-rights group serving Latinos, and by 26 she was its political director, drafting legislation and lobbying state lawmakers, often ambushing them in their offices.

As agribusiness scaled up and corporatized, growers increasingly exploited the region’s immigrant, low-wage workers. Crop pickers were paid less than the federal minimum wage, had no access to toilets, no way to wash their hands and no mandated breaks, and were often given drinking water from a single tub.

In 1962, Huerta and Chavez, both Community Service Organization leaders, began organizing the Chicano men and women working in California’s fields. Huerta hosted nighttime house meetings across the state’s northern half while Chavez worked the south. Outsiders were skeptical, with a racist conception of the farmworkers holding that they were too poor, uneducated or uncivilized to band together.

Their National Farm Workers Association, which eventually evolved into the United Farm Workers, was up and running within a year. In September 1965, the young union joined a strike called by the mostly Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in Delano, where migrant grape pickers were fighting for $1.40 an hour instead of $1.20. The two unions’ willingness to work across racial lines drew attention.

Huerta led picket lines and marches and, for years, the union’s contract negotiations. Chavez joked to Ms. magazine about “unleashing Dolores” and called her “absolutely fearless, physically and emotionally.” Her nickname was “la Pasionaria,” the Passionate One.

At 35, Huerta was a twice-divorced single mother who had pulled her family from a comfortable, middle-class life in Stockton to live in voluntary poverty beside the striking workers in Delano. A brief marriage to Ralph Head at 20, a marriage and divorce from Ventura Huerta, and a later long-term relationship with Chavez’s brother Richard produced 11 children. Political opponents, and even allies, criticized Huerta for this perceived promiscuity and for pursuing her unconventional (for a woman) work as a nomadic labor organizer. A 1976 Ms. magazine profile found her living on the road, not having changed clothes in three days, her children scattered across the state among caretakers. “My life is a mess,” Huerta said.

Chavez and Huerta considered women’s participation critical to the union’s success, and Huerta’s visibility gave other women permission to get involved, whether picketing, running health clinics or serving as field directors and clerks. In the 2017 PBS documentary “Dolores,” her son Emilio Huerta said, “We soon recognized that my mother didn’t really belong to us.” Huerta said, “I know it was very painful for them, and it still pains me to think about it.” The film also showed a reporter asking whether she ever wanted to go to a spa or a salon — to indulge in the “average woman’s dream.” “Well, to me, having a hairdo and being in a spa would be a terrible waste of time,” she said.

The Delano strike escalated into a national table-grape boycott in 1968. Huerta went to New York City to rally religious and student groups and lead protests outside grocery stores. The union later estimated that 17 million Americans stopped buying grapes during the boycott, as solidarity grew between urban and suburban Americans — often homemakers — and the men and women picking their food up to 3,000 miles away.

Huerta sought alliances with other movements, including feminists, and highlighted the harsh working conditions of mothers and pregnant women during harvests. Gloria Steinem said in the documentary, “She set me on fire…. I would not have been able to see what’s hidden in the fields of our country without Dolores.” Although Huerta’s initial opposition to abortion was rooted in her Mexican and Catholic heritage, she came to call herself a “born-again feminist.”

The United Farm Workers also helped Sen. Robert Kennedy win California’s 1968 Democratic presidential primary through a sprawling grassroots mobilization of Latino voters. Huerta stood beside Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when he delivered his victory speech. Moments later, he was assassinated.

In 1988, at 58, Huerta was clubbed by San Francisco riot police while protesting outside the St. Francis Hotel, where Vice President George H.W. Bush was speaking. Footage showed her backing up as the officers ordered. She broke three ribs and needed emergency surgery to remove her spleen. An $825,000 settlement with the city would pay her $2,000 a month for the rest of her life.

Three years after Chavez’s death, Huerta was passed over as his successor. She eventually resigned from the union but continued traveling, working and organizing. A 2000 Progressive magazine profile wrote: “At 70, she bounces around our nation with the urgency of a 25-year-old, nibbling sparrow-sized snacks that fit in her purse.” In 2002, she set up the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which trains organizers and employs them in agricultural communities. As of late 2024, she had attended the Burning Man festival four times. She loved it.

“One thing that we never want to do when we try to help people is feel sorry for them,” Huerta said at a 2021 event at the National Portrait Gallery. “Because when we feel sorry for people, actually we take away their dignity.”

The point of organizing, she told the podcast “70 Over 70,” was “to remove the fear that people have and the apathy that people have, so that they understand they have personal power.” She added: “It has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with how many college degrees you have, or don’t have. It only has to do with learning to use your personal power.”

At the height of the grape boycott, Huerta left a teenage grape picker, Eliseo Medina, at the Port of Los Angeles with a picket sign and told him to stop longshoremen if they attempted to load any nonunion grapes. Medina, who went on to a career as a labor leader and immigration advocate, later told the Los Angeles Times that he stood at the port for 14 hours before Huerta returned. No grapes showed up. If any had, Medina said, “Dolores just thought I would figure it out and stop those grapes all by myself.”