Pioneering US civil rights leader and labour organizer, Dolores Huerta, has died at the age of 96.
Her family announced her death on Wednesday. Family spokesman Erik Olvera said she died of cancer and asked for privacy.
Huerta was a central figure in the American farm workers’ movement, campaigning alongside Cesar Chavez in the 1960s and 1970s to found the United Farm Workers Union, UFW.
Born in New Mexico and raised in Stockton, California, in the heart of the State’s agricultural belt, Huerta was raised by her mother who worked at a cannery.
After graduating from university, she worked as a teacher before turning to organising workers and becoming a driving force in the Chicano power movement. She later expanded her advocacy to civil rights, women’s rights, gender equality, immigration, voting rights and environmental justice, all while raising 11 children.
She coined the UFW motto “Si Se Puede!” – Spanish for “Yes, we can!” – which became a rallying cry for farm workers and Hispanic activists.
Her work included recruiting members, leading protests and pickets, and helping negotiate the first farm worker contracts in North America. She also helped end the Bracero Programme that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in the US and helped negotiate the 1986 Immigration Reform Act.
Tributes pour in
The UFW said in a tribute: “Her life’s work was to empower her community to face and overcome injustices, and she has left farm workers and the entire Latino community stronger and more organised than she found it. Her commitment to civic engagement and bringing political power to disenfranchised people is a lesson we all should carry to the ballot box.”
Former US President Bill Clinton, who awarded her the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 1998, said he and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “lost a dear friend.”
“To see her in action was to witness a living legend who never stopped pushing for progress,” Clinton said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said Huerta “represented the best of us,” praising her “resolute spirit, her passion for justice and fairness, and her commitment to those overlooked and forgotten.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass described her as an “icon” and “fearless leader” who helped secure landmark protections, including overtime pay for farm workers after eight-hour days and California’s first comprehensive standards to prevent heat deaths.
Voto Latino president Maria Teresa Kumar called her a “civil rights giant.”
Earlier this year, Huerta said Chavez, who died in 1993, had “manipulated and pressured” her into having sex and on another occasion forced her in the 1960s, following a New York Times investigation detailing allegations from Huerta and two other women.
Huerta said the two encounters resulted in pregnancies she kept secret, arranging for the children to be raised by other families. Chavez’s family said at the time they were “devastated” and praised the women’s “courage to come forward.”
Huerta is quoted as saying: “I would like to be remembered as a woman who cares for fellow humans. We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things.”
- BBC