Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch the nation's first enduring union for poor farmworkers, dies

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Set us as preferred Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch and guide the nation’s first enduring labor union for poor farmworkers and later became an inspiration to women and liberal true believers, has died.She was 96.

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for Huerta’s family, told The Times on Wednesday that Huerta died in Bakersfield, surrounded by members of her “huge family.” The cause, he said, was cancer.“It’s a tough time,” Olvera said.“She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really.

If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”Huerta never gave up on her dream of a more equitable distribution of wealth in America, campaigning for working people for years beyond standard retirement age.The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, the petitemother of 13 attained singular stature as a rule-breaking proto-feminist, godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.Huerta’s fervent crusading for the dispossessed made her the potent alter ego to her union co-founder, the soft-spoken and methodical César Chávez, though the full complexity and pathology of their relationship only became apparent late in her life.The duo’s history took an unexpected and dark turn in March 2026, when two women came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted by Chávez when they were teenage girls, with Huerta telling the New York Times that the venerated labor leader also had twice forced sex on her, resulting in a pair of pregnancies.Nearly 96 at the time, Huerta said she had remained silent for six decades to protect the farmworker movement.

But she added: “I now understand that I am a survivor — of violenc...