Dolores Huerta Was Always a Hero
6 min readDolores Clara Huerta sits in a recliner in her living room, wearing bright red lipstick, with a grandchild and two great-grandchildren running behind her as she speaks. Clocking in at just 5 feet tall, the labor organizer has been a force for decades, organizing national boycotts, getting arrested for nonviolent protest, negotiating historic union contracts, and coining the phrase “Sí se puede,” which former President Barack Obama famously borrowed for his 2008 campaign.
Huerta, who turned 96 on April 10, the day before our interview, is a mother of 13, a feminist, a civil rights activist—and a survivor. In 1962, she cofounded the National Farm Workers Association (which later became United Farm Workers) with Cesar Chavez, and their decades of committed work resulted in better working conditions and pay for millions across the US. Chavez, who died in 1993, the more famous of the two, saw his name given to streets, buildings, and schools, during his lifetime.
But earlier this year, when reporters at The New York Times called Huerta for comment on an investigation about allegations of Chavez’s abuse of girls and women, she revealed a secret she had held for nearly 60 years—that he had raped her. The article has spurred a recentering of women in social movements who worked diligently alongside men like Chavez but let them take the credit. But now, with this reckoning, deserving women like Huerta are getting their flowers.
Artist MisterAlek covers Cesar Chavez’s face on an L.A. mural with a portrait of Huerta in March 2026.
“The achievements won for farm workers and others are still there and cannot be erased,” Huerta says when asked how it feels to get so much appreciation at this point in her life. “The support and love that I have received in this difficult moment has given me the strength and inspiration to continue working and seeking answers to end violence against women, girls, and boys.”
Huerta, who was born in New Mexico and moved to California as a child, became aware of injustice at an early age. “I could see the poverty. Some of my friends were not treated the way they should have been treated, always harassed by the police and discriminated against in school because they were Black or brown or Filipino, Mexican,” she says. “So I always had this anger inside of me also, because of the way we were treated.” Huerta and her friends formed a teenage club where they played table tennis and other games, and the police shut them down. “They shut down our center. And the reason they shut our center down was because they didn’t like to see these Anglo girls hanging out with Black and brown kids, you know?” Huerta says.
Her first taste of organizing came via the Girl Scouts, where she learned to help people in her community. “I tell people it was like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” she says of the formative experience.
She is no stranger to the difficulty of taking on the powerful in the quest for justice. As a leader in the farmworkers’ movement, in her fight to ensure better labor conditions and pay for laborers, she confronted the power of agribusiness, oil companies, banks, and even the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan. “And yet we were able to overcome all of them,” she says with pride.
Huerta in 1968.
Now, as she looks at the current political moment, she hopes to spur a similar call to action. “We know that what we’re going through in the United States of America right now is something that we’ve never seen to this extent before. It’s never been as challenging as it is right now,” she says. “And especially for young people, when they think about what their future is going to look like. When so many benefits that have been fought for, for so many years that were finally won, and now are being taken away from us, it’s do or die.”
In the lead-up to the midterms this fall, Huerta wants to work with young people to get out the vote, knocking on doors at age 96. “I love the idea of registering people to vote,” she says. “Because you’re talking to strangers, and you’re trying to convince them to do something that is not only good for them, but good for the country.”
Huerta’s mother, Alicia Chavez Fernandez, shaped her and her two brothers’ sense of justice and understanding of dignity and labor. Her mother was a divorcée and a business owner, not traditional labels for a woman at that time. “As mama used to tell us, ‘If you can help someone else who you see needs help, then you have an obligation to do that, even if they do not ask for help. That is your obligation as a human being: to help others,’” Huerta says. “And you’ve got to live your life in that way. She set that as an example for all of us kids, that she would always help people in whatever capacity she could.”
Huerta remembers her mother helping a Japanese friend who was taken to the internment camps during World War II. Huerta carried that memory with her, a reminder of the kind of person she wanted to be.
Huerta in 1968.
When Huerta began organizing at 25, she says, “Everyone thought I was absolutely crazy because it was like running away to join the circus.” At the time, she had five children and was getting divorced. “I received a lot of criticism for not being a traditional Latina woman. Why don’t you stay home with your children? What are you doing? Why are you always working?”
What her critics didn’t understand, she says, was that she had created an expansive community within the farmworkers’ movement, and they helped her raise her kids. “I am not a regular mother,” she says, explaining that for her kids, “it wasn’t an easy life. But at the same time, I would say it was kind of an exciting life for them because they were involved in building a movement—on picket lines and strikes and marches and protests and meeting all kinds of people.”
In the 1960s, Huerta spent several years organizing the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott by going house to house in California’s Central Valley. Her message to workers was: “They didn’t have to be afraid. They could actually change the system—they had the power to do so,” she says. The campaign is considered one of the most effective collective actions of its time, convincing about 16 million Americans to stop eating grapes. “And that is how we were able to win our struggle to get basic human rights for farm workers—and we could do that again.”
Huerta at a student rally in 2003.
When looking at organizing now, she says she thinks the effectiveness of the grape boycott inspires activists today. “What gives me a lot of hope is when I see all of the people coming out to stop these horrible detention centers,” she adds.
For young people who may feel timid about getting involved in their communities, Huerta says, “People don’t believe it sometimes when I tell them that I was shy when I was a kid. I was very shy, and my mother would always push me: ‘You’ve got to speak out, you know. Even if you feel a little embarrassed and even if you say the wrong thing.’”
As an organizer, she says she learned to swallow her fear and do the work, and she hopes that younger generations will follow her lead. “This is our moment, probably the greatest moment in history that we have right now to save our democracy, to save our country, and to save the world,” she says.
Now, as she works with Gregory Nava, who directed Selena, on a scripted film about her life’s work, she sees it as an opportunity to inspire. She describes the movie as being “about how people can find their power, and once they find their power, what miraculous things can come out of that,” she says. “It’s about how simple, everyday people can find their power.” Just like her.
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2026 issue of ELLE.