Pioneering US labour leader Dolores Huerta dies at 96

LOS ANGELES: Dolores Huerta, the US labour leader and civil rights icon whose union work changed the lives of migrant workers, has died, her family said on Wednesday. She was 96.

For nearly four decades, Huerta was vice-president of the United Farm Workers, the union she founded with Cesar Chavez, organising strikes and walkouts that won improvements in working conditions for millions of men and women working in US fields.

"We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today at the age of 96," a family statement said.

"We know that many of you around the world share in our mourning, and we will be following up on plans to recognise and celebrate her incredible life and legacy."

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for her family, told AFP on Wednesday that Huerta died of cancer in the morning, surrounded by loved ones.

Born in New Mexico and raised in California, Huerta took the reins of the US farmworker movement in the 1960s alongside Chavez.

At the time, she was raising seven children — she later had more — while going through a divorce.

While Huerta was the organising force behind the union, Chavez was its charismatic leader and public face, becoming an icon to generations on the left, even after his death in 1993.

But that fame and the seemingly close relationship between him and Huerta concealed a dark secret that came to light this year, when Huerta said she was one of several women Chavez had raped.

In her case, the attacks resulted in two pregnancies.

"The first time... I didn't feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to," she said in a statement to The New York Times, which broke the story.

"The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped."

Huerta remained a galvanising figure in left-wing politics well into her 90s, helping to organise a fightback among migrant labourers targeted by President Donald Trump's immigration raids, which saw farmworkers seized from fields by masked federal agents.

"People are reaching out because they want to do something," she told AFP during a July 2025 interview at the headquarters of her Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, an agricultural hub in California's Central Valley.

"We've got to be a lot more active, because what's happening right now is so huge. I liken it to what was happening in Germany before Hitler took power," she said.

'The best of us'

Huerta rubbed shoulders with some of America's most influential people over decades in the public eye.

In 1968, she stood on a podium alongside Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, brother of assassinated former president John F. Kennedy, just minutes before he was shot dead.

Former president Barack Obama — whose "Yes, we can" slogan he acknowledged he had adopted from Huerta's "Si se puede" — awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom while he was in the White House.

News of Huerta's death prompted Obama to once again emphasise that she coined the slogan, for which he noted he "too often get(s) credit".

"As usual, Dolores got there first."

"Michelle and I are thinking of Dolores's family, the people whose lives she changed, and everyone who drew inspiration from her example," the former president said in a statement on social media.

Obama was among a chorus of figures from politics and advocacy who paid tribute to Huerta.

Governor Gavin Newsom ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in her honour, saying "Dolores represented the best of us" through work that "changed the course of history against all odds".

Former president Bill Clinton praised her as a "dear friend" and "stalwart champion of working Americans".

"To see her in action was to witness a living legend who never stopped pushing for progress," Clinton said in a statement, "even as those efforts sometimes brought her grave consequences".

California Representative Nancy Pelosi lauded Huerta's "courage and determination", saying the activist "inspired generations of Americans to believe in the power of collective action".