Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union and one of the most influential women in American labor history, died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by her family. Family spokesperson Erik Olvera told the Los Angeles Times that the cause was cancer.

Huerta served the UFW for decades as chief negotiator, strike organizer and lobbyist during its 1960s and '70s heyday, winning farmworkers job security, healthcare, retirement plans, field toilets, clean drinking water and protection from pesticides through the contracts she negotiated.

UFW President Teresa Romero said in a statement that Huerta left farm workers and the entire Latino community stronger and more organized than she found them.

Born Dolores Clara Fernández in Dawson, New Mexico, in 1930, Huerta grew up in Stockton, California, where her mother ran a hotel that sometimes housed migrant workers for free.

After quitting teaching because, as she put it, she couldn't stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes, she became a community organizer and met Cesar Chavez at a 1955 fundraising dinner in Oakland.

Together they launched the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, the forerunner of the UFW, the first nationally recognized union for farmworkers.

Huerta coined the rallying cry 'Sí, se puede' — 'Yes, we can' — which Barack Obama later borrowed for his 2008 presidential campaign, a point the president joked about when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Huerta was the operational engine of the farmworker movement. Her work also helped win passage of California's 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first US law giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights.

She was arrested more than 20 times and suffered broken ribs and a ruptured spleen when San Francisco police beat her during a 1988 protest.

The most startling coda to Huerta's life came earlier in 2026, when she told The New York Times that Cesar Chavez had sexually abused her — pressuring her into sex in 1960 and raping her in 1966, with both encounters resulting in pregnancies she kept secret for nearly 60 years, arranging for the two daughters to be raised by others.

She spoke out as part of a Times investigation in which other women also alleged Chavez had groomed and molested girls as young as 12. 'I saw him, again, as my boss, as my hero,' she told the Times, explaining she had stayed silent to protect the movement.

In a statement, she said, 'I now understand that I am a survivor.' Chavez's family said they were devastated and praised the women's courage to come forward.

The revelations also raised hard questions about Huerta's own role.

The New York Times reported that interviews and archived records suggested a number of women complained at the time that Huerta often failed to support them and rebuffed their complaints of sexism inside the union, an atmosphere she herself described as marked by machismo — she recalled being excluded from a news conference celebrating the 1986 immigration reform she had lobbied for.

The Los Angeles Times notes some wished she had spoken out within the insular union to prevent others from being victimized, while her champions insisted the late-life revelation reflected only on Chavez, who had long been a virtual secular saint of the American left.

Her Dolores C. Huerta Foundation, headed by her daughter Camila Chavez, broke ground in 2025 on the $35-million Dolores Huerta Peace & Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, largely funded by California, with an academy to train future community organizers.

As she told a 2025 documentary, 'I hope that my legacy will be one of an organizer that organized to fight injustice.'