Director Gregory Nava Remembers Dolores Huerta, the Civil Rights Icon Who Introduced Him to His Wife and Trusted Them With Her Life Story

Director Gregory Nava is paying tribute to civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, who died Wednesday at 96.

Huerta introduced Nava to his wife, Barbara Martinez Jitner, and served as a witness at their wedding. In the last years of her life, she sat with them for more than 70 hours and told them things she had never told anyone.

On Tuesday night, the two filmmakers drove to Bakersfield to say goodbye.

Huerta, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers and the woman who gave the country the phrase “Sí, se puede,” died Wednesday morning at her home, surrounded by family. A family spokesperson said the cause was cancer.

“We were blessed to be by Dolores’ side last night in Bakersfield, to say goodbye and stand with her family in love,” Nava and Martinez Jitner wrote in a joint statement. “Dolores was a great light and a fearless warrior for justice. She set the world ablaze with her passion for equality and inspired generations to discover their own power.”

The pair have spent the better part of three years preparing the first dramatic feature about Huerta’s life, which Variety first reported in April 2024, with Nava writing and directing and Martinez Jitner co-writing and producing with him. Huerta, who had been approached by a long line of filmmakers for her life rights, chose the two people she had known for decades.

“In these last few years, Dolores and her beautiful family welcomed us even closer, entrusting us with the telling of her life — its extraordinary courage, its struggles and joys, its deepest pain,” they said. “It has been one of the greatest privileges of our professional lives, and a deeply personal trust. We will honor it with tenderness and care, carrying her voice and her story to generations yet to come.”

Nava helmed films like “El Norte,” his 1983 drama about two Guatemalan siblings crossing into the United States, which earned him an Oscar nomination for original screenplay and helped put a face on the immigration debate of the Reagan years. He followed up with the drama “Mi Familia” and the biopic “Selena,” the 1997 film that made Jennifer Lopez a movie star. All three sit in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Martinez Jitner has been his collaborator since “Selena.” In 2002, she became the first Latina to executive produce a primetime network drama with PBS’ “American Family,” which Nava created.

When Variety broke the news of the biopic, Nava described his subject as “like an earthquake that shook this country.” Huerta, for her part, said she had spent a year sharing “intimate, never before disclosed details” of her journey and that Nava “has made classic movies that are the most authentic and impactful of our American Latino experience.”

In March, Huerta told The New York Times that Cesar Chavez, her partner in building the farmworkers movement, raped her in 1966 in a secluded grape field. She had carried the secret for 60 years, out of fear it would unravel everything the union had won. “My silence ends here,” she said at the time.

Dolores Clara Fernández was born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, the daughter of a coal miner and a mother who ran a hotel in Stockton, Calif., that catered to farmworkers. She taught elementary school for a year and quit after watching hungry children arrive in class barefoot, deciding she could do more for them by organizing their parents.

In 1962, she and Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association, which became the UFW. She helped lead the 1965 Delano grape strike alongside Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong and negotiated the first contracts in the fields. In 1988, while protesting outside a George H.W. Bush fundraiser in San Francisco, a police officer beat her with a baton, breaking four ribs and rupturing her spleen. She recovered and spent the next decade recruiting Latinas to run for office.

President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. California made April 10 “Dolores Huerta Day” in 2018. Huerta was a mother to 11 children.

The last time I saw Nava and Huerta in a room together was Oct. 24, 2025, at the Critics Choice Association’s Celebration of Latino Cinema and Television in Beverly Hills, a night I co-programmed and hosted. Huerta was the evening’s Icon Award recipient, and it was Nava who walked onstage to hand it to her. He talked about her as a force of history, while she spoke about the young people in the room and how they needed to get off the sidewalk and into the street to fight. She was 95 then, and nobody in the ballroom was sharper and more energizing.

“Today, we mourn,” Nava and Martinez Jitner wrote. “We send all our love and gratitude to her family. The baton is now in our hands. We will carry it forward, Dolores.”

They closed with the three words she spent six decades proving true: “Sí, se puede.”