Dolores Huerta, farm-labor leader who gave America "Si, se puede," dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, who helped build the modern farm-labor movement, negotiated some of its landmark contracts and coined a rallying cry that outlived the fields it came from, died on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, at 96. Her death was announced by the Dolores Huerta Foundation, whose website read, "In Loving Memory of Dolores Huerta," under the headline "Labor Leader and Civil Rights Activist Dolores Huerta Dies at 96." A family spokesperson, Erik Olvera, said she died of cancer at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by family.

A life in the movement

Huerta was born April 10, 1930, in the mining town of Dawson, New Mexico, and raised largely in Stockton, California, after her parents separated. A former schoolteacher, she turned to organizing because, as she often told it, she could not teach hungry children and ignore why they were hungry.

In 1962 she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez and Gilbert Padilla. The group merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee on August 19, 1965, to form what became the United Farm Workers. During the five-year Delano grape strike and the national boycott that followed, Huerta ran negotiations and organized the boycott machinery, work that produced some of the first enforceable union contracts for farm laborers in the United States.

"Si, se puede"

Huerta is widely credited with originating the union's slogan "Si, se puede," Spanish for "Yes, we can," during a 1972 organizing campaign in Arizona. The phrase became a durable fixture of American political language and was later adapted into the "Yes, we can" refrain of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. The authorship has been debated by historians, but Chavez himself credited Huerta with it.

Recognition, and a hard cost

President Barack Obama awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 2012, noting that he had borrowed her words. Her activism carried real physical risk: in September 1988, a San Francisco police officer beat her at a protest outside a hotel where then-Vice President George H. W. Bush was appearing, leaving her with serious injuries and leading to an $825,000 settlement and changes to the department's crowd-control rules.

She had a large family, with sources counting as many as 13 children, and she continued to speak, march and campaign well into her 90s through the foundation she established in 2002 to carry on community organizing in California's Central Valley.

Tributes

California Governor Gavin Newsom, who described Huerta as a close friend, ordered flags at the state Capitol flown at half-staff in her honor. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued a statement marking her death. Her foundation said plans to celebrate her life would be announced, and asked for privacy for the family.

Why it resonates beyond labor

Huerta's work reshaped the economics of one of the country's largest low-wage workforces. The contracts, boycotts and legislative wins she helped win, including a California measure allowing driver's-license exams in Spanish and disability protections for farmworkers, set precedents that rippled through agriculture, food supply chains and immigrant labor policy that still shape those industries today. For a business audience, her legacy is a reminder that farm labor, long treated as an afterthought in commodity pricing, became an organized and contractual part of the system in large part because of organizers like her.

What to watch

• Memorial and celebration-of-life details, which the foundation said it would announce.
• Statements from the United Farm Workers and national labor organizations.
• Whether California officials move to mark her legacy formally, as several states have done with "Dolores Huerta Day" resolutions.

Sources: Dolores Huerta Foundation, death notice and "In Loving Memory" page (doloreshuerta.org); on-record statement from family spokesperson Erik Olvera; biographical record including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012) and the 1988 San Francisco settlement. This is a news report.