Labor leader and feminist activist Dolores Huerta has passed away, her family announced Wednesday. She was 96.
The Latina icon spent over seven decades at the forefront of the fight for equal rights.
“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today at the age of 96,” her family said in a statement. “As you can imagine, this is an incredibly difficult time for us, and we ask for privacy as we grieve this incredible loss to our family. We know that many of you around the world share in our mourning, and we will be following up on plans to recognize and celebrate her incredible life and legacy.”
Huerta is also remembered as being a visionary, a pioneer, courageous and resilient. When she sat down with NBC Bay Area a few years ago for an introspective look at her life, Huerta said her most valued title has been “organizer.”
“You think that you’re going to go in one direction and then all of a sudden you get the calling,” Huerta previously said. “I felt that I had to help people that need to be organized so they could help themselves.”
Born Dolores Clara Fernandez in Dawson, New Mexico, in 1930, advocacy was in her blood. Her father was a farmworker and union activist, while her mother was a fiercely independent entrepreneur who moved Huerta and her brothers to the San Joaquin Valley after her divorce.
It was in Stockton that Huerta flourished as a girl scout, pianist and writer. But it was the racism she suffered in school that took her from her dreams to demanding.
That meant launching voter registration drives, taking on grape growers and with labor unionist Cesar Chavez staging a massive boycott that would bring the “patrones,” the corporate bosses, to the negotiating table.
Huerta never failed to take a position. Whether it was as a teacher in Stockton where her students struggled with hunger or in the fields of Delano where she co-founded what would become the United Farmworkers, staging strikes that changed working conditions for farmworkers in the 1960s.
Huerta advocated for immigrant rights, fought against gender discrimination and redefined the role of women, wives and mothers on the picket lines.
“My youngest son, Ricky, says we had to share our mother with the world, but she shared the world with us,” Huerta recalled in a previous interview with NBC Bay Area.
A world that embraced one of the most iconic calls for social justice as a battle cry.
Huerta’s legacy took a hit in March of 2026 when the New York Times detailed allegations that Chavez had sexually abused girls and women associated with United Farmworkers.
Not long after, Huerta came forward to back Chavez’s accusers, revealing she too had been raped twice decades earlier by the revered labor leader, bearing two children she sent to live with family and friends.
The damning admission dismantled Chavez’s legacy and disclosed a secret Huerta had hoped to keep forever for the sake of the movement.
After a brief stint out of the public eye, Huerta returned to her calling and organizing for a future she believed, until the very end, was worth fighting for.
“I believe one thing we can do is just remember we are one human family,” Huerta said in a previous interview with NBC Bay Area. “I don’t think you should use the word race unless it’s attached to the word human. We cans say we have ethnic groups and nationalities, we have cultures, but we only have one human race.”
Huerta is survived by her 13 children and by the foundation that bears her name in Bakersfield.
