"Sí, Se Puede": Remembering Dolores Huerta
Remembering Dolores Huerta (1930–2026), her Indigenous roots, her fight for farmworkers, and the generations of Americans she inspired.
On October 28, 2026, Dolores Huerta passed away at the age of 96, leaving behind a lifetime of work that changed the lives of countless American families. She was a mother, teacher, labor organizer, and civil rights leader who spent more than seventy years standing beside people whose voices were too often ignored. She helped working families demand better wages and safer conditions, encouraged Mexican Americans to take pride in their heritage, and showed generations of women that they belonged in positions of leadership.
Her name will always be associated with three simple words: Sí, se puede. They have been heard at marches, in classrooms, at political gatherings, and wherever people have come together hoping to change something for the better. Yet few people know that those words were first spoken as an act of defiance in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1972, when Huerta was told that organizing farmworkers in the state was impossible.
There was much more to Dolores Huerta than the slogan she made famous. Her life was shaped by the communities of New Mexico and California, by her family's Indigenous and Mexican American ancestry, and by the people she met while working among some of the nation's poorest families. To understand her legacy is to understand something about the growth of the Chicano movement and the long struggle to make American society more inclusive of the people who helped build it.
“There's no such thing as can't.” Dolores Huerta, 2010 interview with Duke University.
A Childhood Shaped by Family and Community
Dolores Clara Fernández was born on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, a mining town where families depended on hard and often dangerous work to make a living. Her father, Juan Fernández, was a miner, farmworker, and union organizer who later served in the New Mexico Legislature. Her mother, Alicia Chávez, was a strong and independent woman whose example would leave an equally lasting impression on her daughter.
When Dolores was young, her parents separated, and her mother moved the family to Stockton, California. The Central Valley was home to people who had come from many places looking for work and a better life. Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and African American families lived and worked alongside one another, sharing neighborhoods while confronting many of the same economic hardships and prejudices.
Alicia ran a restaurant and later a hotel, often helping families who could not afford a meal or a place to stay. Dolores grew up watching her mother offer people kindness without asking what they could give in return. That example stayed with her, as did her father's involvement in organized labor. Long before she became a national figure, Dolores was learning that the way people treated their neighbors could shape an entire community.
Dolores Huerta, The Indigenous History
Like many Mexican American families with roots in the Southwest, Huerta's ancestry reached back through generations of Indigenous and Spanish colonial history. In an interview about her New Mexico roots, she spoke about genealogical research that introduced her to an ancestor named Inés, a Pueblo woman who lived approximately fourteen generations before her. Learning about Inés brought another part of her family's history into focus and gave Huerta a deeper appreciation of the Indigenous people from whom she descended.
New Mexico's Pueblo peoples have lived in the region for centuries, maintaining communities, languages, and cultural traditions through periods of Spanish colonization and American expansion. Among them were the Tano people, historically associated with the Galisteo Basin south of Santa Fe. Some Tano families eventually moved west, joining communities in what is now Arizona, where their descendants are connected to the Hopi mesas and the Hopi-Tewa people.
Huerta's reported Pueblo ancestry is part of this larger history, although the published genealogical accounts available for this article do not establish that her ancestor Inés belonged specifically to the Tano people. Her experience nevertheless speaks to something familiar to many families throughout the Southwest: discovering that the history carried in family names, stories, and traditions reaches much further into the past than they may have realized.
For generations, colonization, migration, and social pressures influenced how families understood and spoke about their Indigenous ancestry. Some maintained close relationships with their communities and traditions, while others lost those connections or rediscovered them later. Huerta's interest in her family history was another way of understanding the people and experiences that helped make her who she was.
The Children Who Changed Her Life
Before Dolores Huerta became a labor organizer, she was a schoolteacher. She enjoyed working with children, but what she saw in her classroom troubled her. Some students arrived hungry. Others lacked proper clothing or were exhausted by the difficulties their families faced at home. Many were children of farmworkers who spent long days harvesting the food that Americans depended upon but earned barely enough to support their own households.
Huerta could help a child learn to read, but she could not ignore the circumstances waiting for that child after school. She began to see that the problems inside her classroom were connected to the working conditions outside it. Parents needed wages they could live on, safe places to work, and a chance to provide more stability for their families.
She eventually made a difficult decision to leave teaching and work directly with those families. It was not a rejection of education, but a recognition that children needed more than a good classroom to thrive. They needed communities where their parents had a fair opportunity to support them.
During the 1950s, Huerta became active with the Community Service Organization, helping Mexican American families register to vote, navigate public institutions, and address problems affecting their neighborhoods. She learned to organize meetings, work with local officials, and bring people together around concerns they shared. Those experiences prepared her for the work that would define much of her life.
“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” Attributed to Dolores Huerta by People For the American Way.
The Farmworkers Who Helped Change America
In 1962, Huerta joined César Chávez in founding the National Farm Workers Association, which would later become part of the United Farm Workers. Agricultural laborers were among the country's most vulnerable workers. Many earned extremely low wages, lived in inadequate housing, faced exposure to dangerous pesticides, and had little protection when they complained about their working conditions.
For Huerta, these were not distant economic problems. They were the experiences of parents, children, and families she knew. She understood that workers needed more than sympathy. They needed the ability to organize, negotiate with employers, and have a meaningful voice in the decisions that affected their lives.
The movement grew during a remarkable period of American history. In 1965, Filipino farmworkers led by organizers including Larry Itliong began a grape strike in Delano, California. Mexican American workers from the National Farm Workers Association soon joined them. Their cooperation helped turn a local labor dispute into a national movement that attracted students, churches, labor unions, and families from across the country.
Huerta became one of the movement's leading organizers and negotiators. She helped coordinate nationwide grape boycotts and negotiated contracts that improved wages and working conditions. While Chávez often received greater public attention, Huerta was doing much of the demanding work of building relationships, bringing people to the negotiating table, and keeping the movement moving forward.
The movement also helped Americans see the people behind the food on their tables. Families who had never visited an agricultural field began asking how grapes were harvested and whether the workers responsible were being treated fairly. What happened in California's fields became a concern for people thousands of miles away, showing how communities could influence one another through shared action.
“Sí, Se Puede”: Three Words Born in Arizona
In 1972, Arizona passed a law that placed severe restrictions on farmworker organizing, including strikes and boycotts. Agricultural workers already faced considerable obstacles when challenging their employers, and the new legislation made it even more difficult for them to organize without risking legal consequences. Huerta later described how the law threatened people who called for boycotts or strikes, illustrating just how determined state leaders were to limit the movement's influence.
César Chávez traveled to Phoenix and began a 25-day fast at Santa Rita Hall to protest the legislation. Huerta was there too, working to find support among the city's Mexican American community. She approached a group of professionals, hoping they might help challenge the law and stand with agricultural families.
Instead, she was told that Arizona was different. Perhaps workers could organize successfully in California, they argued, but it could not be done in Arizona.
No se puede. It cannot be done.
Huerta was not willing to accept that answer. She replied, “Sí, se puede en Arizona.” Yes, it can be done in Arizona.
When she returned to Santa Rita Hall and told supporters about the exchange, the gathering began clapping and repeating her words. Before long, the room was chanting, “Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!” A response to people who had given up became a message that others immediately recognized as their own.
There is something especially human about the way the phrase began. Huerta was not trying to invent a slogan that would one day become famous. She was frustrated that people were willing to accept a situation she believed could be changed. Her words were a reminder that difficult circumstances did not have to determine what was possible.
The phrase traveled well beyond Phoenix. It became part of the language of the United Farm Workers, then found its way into immigrant rights demonstrations, community organizing, and other movements for social change. Decades later, Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign popularized the English variation, “Yes We Can,” introducing another generation to the message Huerta had helped give the world.
Today, Sí, se puede is recognized across the United States and beyond. Yet its beginnings remain firmly connected to Arizona, to a modest gathering place in Phoenix, and to agricultural workers fighting for the right to stand together.
Helping Mexican Americans Find a Stronger Voice
The farmworker movement was growing at the same time that Mexican Americans across the Southwest were beginning to challenge how they were represented in American society. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicano Movement brought renewed attention to discrimination in schools, unequal access to employment, political representation, and the importance of Mexican American history and culture.
For many families, the movement created an opportunity to speak openly about experiences that had long been treated as private struggles. Young people began questioning why their histories were largely absent from textbooks. Artists painted murals celebrating their communities, students formed organizations, and neighborhood leaders encouraged greater participation in local and national affairs.
Huerta helped bring those growing conversations into the national spotlight. The farmworker movement showed that Mexican Americans were not simply asking to be included in American life. They were already helping shape it, through their labor, their families, their communities, and their willingness to stand together.
Her influence reached far beyond the agricultural fields. Mexican American families had established communities across the country, from the Southwest to the Midwest and beyond. Their experiences were not all alike. Some had lived in the region for generations before it became part of the United States, while others had arrived more recently from Mexico. Many carried Indigenous ancestry, sometimes with strong connections to specific communities and sometimes through family histories that had become difficult to trace.
The Chicano Movement helped many people find common ground within those different experiences. It encouraged a sense of cultural pride without requiring everyone to share the same family story. Huerta contributed to that growing solidarity by demonstrating that people could work together across differences in background, occupation, and geography.
She also challenged expectations about women's roles. The mother of thirteen children, Huerta traveled extensively, negotiated with powerful employers, spoke before crowds, and worked alongside people who did not always welcome women in leadership. She was outspoken and persistent, and she refused to let those expectations decide how much she could contribute.
For generations of Chicanas and Latinas, her life offered a visible example of a woman who was not waiting for someone else to give her permission to lead. Her achievements helped broaden the public understanding of leadership within the Mexican American community and American society as a whole.
Her Work Continued Long After the Farmworker Movement's Early Victories
Huerta never regarded the victories of the 1960s and 1970s as the end of her work. She continued advocating for working families, women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ communities, and people who struggled to have a voice in the institutions affecting their lives. Although she was best known for her role in organized labor, her concerns extended to the conditions that allowed communities to live with dignity and opportunity.
That commitment sometimes came at great personal cost. In 1988, during a demonstration in San Francisco, police officers severely injured her, breaking her ribs and damaging her spleen. She required emergency medical treatment and a lengthy recovery, but the experience did not end her public advocacy.
In 2002, she established the Dolores Huerta Foundation, bringing decades of organizing experience to communities confronting problems in education, housing, infrastructure, and political representation. The foundation's work reflected something Huerta had learned throughout her career: lasting improvements were more likely when people had the knowledge and confidence to represent themselves.
She wanted residents to understand how decisions were made, how to speak with public officials, and how to organize around the concerns of their neighborhoods. Instead of simply providing solutions from outside a community, the foundation worked to help people develop their own leadership.
In 2012, President Barack Obama presented Huerta with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation's highest civilian honors. The recognition acknowledged her extraordinary influence on labor and civil rights, but Huerta was not interested in becoming merely a figure from the past. She continued speaking, traveling, and working with younger generations well into her nineties.
Finding Her Voice Once Again
In March 2026, Huerta publicly disclosed that César Chávez had sexually abused her during the 1960s. She explained that she had kept the experiences private for decades because she feared that speaking out might damage the movement she and so many others had worked to build. Her disclosure followed investigations into allegations of abuse involving other women and girls connected to Chávez.
It was a painful and deeply personal chapter in her history, one that also reminded the public how much of the farmworker movement's story had been told through the achievements and reputations of its most prominent leaders. Huerta emphasized that the movement belonged to the thousands of workers, organizers, families, and supporters who had made its accomplishments possible.
Her decision to speak publicly in the final year of her life was another example of the determination that had defined her for decades. She had spent much of her life fighting for people whose voices had been ignored, and now she was making certain her own story was heard. It was one more chapter in a legacy that extended far beyond the farmworker movement.
“We as women should shine light on our accomplishments and not feel egotistical when we do.” Dolores Huerta, quoted by Gender on the Ballot.
The Legacy She Leaves Behind
Dolores Huerta lived long enough to see her words become familiar to people who knew little about the farmworker movement that inspired them. Children repeated Sí, se puede in classrooms, families carried it on signs, and communities used it to express hope during difficult times. For some, it represented cultural pride. For others, it was encouragement to keep working toward something they believed in.
But her legacy reaches well beyond those three words. It lives in the people who gained better working conditions, the women who found encouragement in her example, and the Mexican American communities that became more visible and confident in their place within American society. It also lives in the younger organizers who continue working to improve the lives of their neighbors.
Huerta spent much of her life reminding Americans that the people who harvest their food, clean their buildings, raise their children, and contribute to their communities deserve to be heard and treated with dignity. She believed that ordinary people were capable of extraordinary things when they recognized what they could accomplish together.
Her death on October 28, 2026, closes a remarkable chapter in American labor and civil rights history. Yet her influence remains part of the country's cultural and social landscape, particularly in the communities she devoted her life to serving.
More than fifty years after she spoke those words in Phoenix, they remain a reminder of her determination and of the people who stood beside her.
Sí, se puede.
Sources:
Associated Press via KOAT: Dolores Huerta Dies at 96. October 28, 2026. Confirmation of her death and reporting on her life and advocacy.
KJZZ: Dolores Huerta Tells the Story of “Sí, Se Puede” at Santa Rita Hall in Phoenix. May 13, 2022. Huerta's firsthand account of the phrase's origin.
National Archives: Dolores Huerta, “Sí, Se Puede!”. October 11, 2023. Biography, farmworker history, and Arizona's restrictive labor legislation.
National Park Service: Dolores Huerta. Family background, teaching career, and the founding of the farmworker organization.
Dolores Huerta Foundation: Frequently Asked Questions. Her own organization's account of her career, the 1972 Phoenix campaign, and her later advocacy.
Congressional Record: Arizona Farm Labor Law, May 17, 1972. Contemporary documentation of restrictions on farmworker strikes and boycotts.
ABC News: Dolores Huerta Breaks Her Silence About César Chávez. March 18, 2026. Documents her public disclosure and the historical reassessment of the movement.
EBSCO: Dolores Huerta Biography. Additional reference for her life and accomplishments.
