Dolores Huerta

It was 1962, in California.

A young woman and a man left the organization where they had met. They wanted to build something else: an association for farmworkers.

His name was César Chávez. Hers was Dolores Huerta.

Dolores was born on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico. Her father was a miner. He was active in a union and was elected to his state's legislature.

Her parents separated when she was three. Her mother left with the children for Stockton, California.

There, her mother held two jobs, then ran a restaurant and a hotel. They served farmworkers and day labourers.

Dolores became a teacher, in the San Joaquin Valley. Many of her students were the children of farmworkers.

Their poverty upset her deeply.

She left teaching.

In 1955, with Fred Ross, she founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization, a civil rights group. That is where she met César Chávez. In 1960, she founded a first farmworkers' association.

Then came 1962, and the new association with Chávez. It became a union: the United Farm Workers.

In Delano, Filipino grape pickers went on strike. Dolores joined them on the picket line.

The strike lasted five years.

Dolores negotiated. With Chávez, she won contracts from big growers. For the first time, farmworkers had health and benefit plans.

In the early 1970s, she directed boycotts across the country. The aim was to stop people buying grapes and lettuce.

The boycotts helped California pass, in 1975, the first state law recognizing farmworkers' right to bargain together.

She is credited with a slogan: Sí, se puede! Yes, it can be done.

In 1988, in San Francisco, Dolores was protesting George H. W. Bush's opposition to the boycott. A police officer struck her with his baton. She was gravely injured. Later, the city reached a settlement with her.

In 1999, she left the union. In 2002, she created her own foundation, in Bakersfield, California.

In 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He joked that he had borrowed her slogan for his 2008 campaign.

On October 28, 2026, her family announced that she had died at home. She was 96.

Dolores Huerta's struggle was not born of Ubuntu. But it echoes it: no one succeeds alone, people succeed by marching together, and a worker's dignity is everyone's business.

She had started in a classroom, in front of children who were hungry.

What remains of her is three words, born in the farmworkers' struggle and carried all the way into a presidential campaign: Sí, se puede.