Dolores Huerta, Who Led Farm Workers, Dies at 96

LAS VEGAS: Labor leader Dolores Huerta, who addressed Latino high school students at a summer conference at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the early 2010s, died Wednesday of cancer at age 96. She had co-founded the United Farm Workers of America with Cesar Chavez.

At the UNLV event, teenagers filling a lecture hall fell silent as Huerta, then in her 80s and shorter than many of them, stepped toward the podium. She spoke briefly about self-improvement and how it lifts communities, drew laughs and cheers, brought some students to tears, and closed by leading a chant of "Sí se puede" with the crowd. Students gathered around her afterward for a group photograph before she left the hall.

Huerta spent decades advocating for farmworker conditions across the United States. She went from the daughter of a coal miner to a leader of the Chicano power movement and of American labor. She was the mother of 14 children.

The conference organizers told the columnist who followed her at the podium that Huerta had other commitments that week but accepted a speaking fee far below her usual rate, and below the $25,000 a prominent Latina author had charged for the same event.

Huerta continued to appear at rallies, talks for college students and community groups, and at art galleries and film screenings to support artists and filmmakers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she joined a video fundraiser for Cheech Marin's Chicano art museum with cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz and the columnist, where she told them to stop making pendejos of themselves.

In 2026, Huerta said that Chavez, her co-founder at United Farm Workers, had raped her and fathered two of her children during the 1960s. She said she stayed quiet about the abuse for decades to protect the movement they had built together.

Huerta also defended Chavez against critics of his position on undocumented immigrants. In a phone call while she was on a train to a conference, she told the columnist, "You have it all wrong on Cesar," and invited him to meet her in Bakersfield, where her nonprofit is based. She also criticized Latino activists who objected to her support for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

She addressed the students at UNLV on improving themselves and their communities, and closed with the chant "Sí se puede."