Dolores Huerta Timeline
Dolores Huerta from her 1930 birth in Dawson, New Mexico, through the Community Service Organization, the farmworkers' movement and 'Sí, se puede', to her death in 2026 at 96.
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Key events
Childhood in Stockton, California
1930sAfter her parents divorced when she was a small child, her mother moved the family to Stockton, California, where she grew up in a mixed working-class neighborhood with help from her grandfather Herculano. Sources differ on her exact age at the divorce (about three to five).
Birth in Dawson, New Mexico
Dolores Clara Fernández was born in the mining town of Dawson, New Mexico, the second of three children of Juan Fernández, a miner and farm laborer, and Alicia Chávez.
Life of Dolores Huerta
–Labor organizer and civil-rights activist who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, later the United Farm Workers, and spent more than seven decades organizing farmworkers, women and low-income communities.
Mother's hotel and restaurant
Her mother, Alicia, who had worked as a cannery worker and waitress, came to run a restaurant and a 70-room hotel in Stockton, often housing farmworker families at low cost. Huerta credited her mother's independence and generosity as the root of her own activism and feminism.
Elementary school teacher
She taught briefly in rural California but left after seeing farmworkers' children arrive at school hungry and without shoes, concluding she could do more by organizing their parents.
Joins the Community Service Organization
Recruited by organizer Fred Ross, she helped start the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization, a Mexican American civil-rights group, leading voter registration and citizenship drives.
Meets César Chávez
Fred Ross introduced her to César Chávez, then a fellow CSO organizer; the two later worked closely as CSO staff and went on to found a farmworkers' union together.
Founds the Agricultural Workers Association
While still with the CSO, she founded the Agricultural Workers Association to register and organize farmworkers. Most sources give 1960; one account dates its founding to 1958.
Co-founds the National Farm Workers Association
With César Chávez and others, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association at a founding convention in Fresno, California; Chávez became president and Huerta vice president.
Vice president of the farmworkers' union
–She served as vice president of the NFWA and its successors, UFWOC and the United Farm Workers, for nearly four decades and was the union's chief contract negotiator.
Wins AFDC and disability insurance for farmworkers
As a lobbyist in Sacramento she helped secure Aid to Families with Dependent Children and state disability insurance for California farmworkers, who had been excluded from many protections.
Delano grape strike
–Filipino American members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked out of Delano-area vineyards, and the NFWA soon joined; the five-year strike became a landmark of the farmworkers' movement.
NFWA votes to join the strike
At a meeting at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano, NFWA members voted to join the strike begun by Filipino workers a week earlier.
National grape boycott
–The union urged consumers nationwide to stop buying California table grapes. Huerta directed much of the boycott, leading the effort in New York and on the East Coast, and the pressure helped bring growers to the table.
Negotiates the Schenley contract
Huerta led talks that produced a contract with Schenley Industries, one of the first union agreements between a California grower and farmworkers, raising wages and adding benefits.
March from Delano to Sacramento
–Strikers walked roughly 250 miles from Delano to the state Capitol in a pilgrimage, or peregrinación, that ended at a rally on Easter Sunday and drew national attention to the strike.
NFWA and AWOC merge into UFWOC
The two striking unions merged under the AFL-CIO as the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, with Huerta as vice president; it later became the United Farm Workers.
With Robert F. Kennedy on primary night
Huerta, who had campaigned for Kennedy and was thanked by him for helping win the California primary, stood near him during his victory speech in Los Angeles shortly before he was fatally shot.
Grape growers sign union contracts
Twenty-six Delano-area table grape growers signed contracts with the union, ending the strike; the agreements raised wages, set pesticide safety rules, created a health fund and gave the union a hiring hall.
Origin of "Sí, se puede"
During César Chávez's fast in Phoenix, Arizona, protesting a new state law restricting farmworker organizing, Huerta answered people who said it could not be done in Arizona with "Sí, se puede" ("Yes, it can be done"). She is widely credited with the phrase, which became the union's motto, though some accounts credit Chávez or both.
Second grape boycott
–After many growers signed with the Teamsters instead of the UFW when the 1970 contracts expired, Huerta helped lead a renewed national boycott of grapes, lettuce and Gallo wine.
California Agricultural Labor Relations Act
California enacted the first U.S. law guaranteeing farmworkers the right to organize and bargain collectively; sources give June 4 or June 5 for the signing. Huerta lobbied for it, and the boycott pressure she helped lead is credited with its passage.
Beaten by San Francisco police
At a protest outside a George H. W. Bush campaign fundraiser at San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel, a police officer struck her with a baton, breaking ribs and rupturing her spleen, which was surgically removed. She later received an $825,000 settlement, and the department revised its crowd-control and discipline policies.
Feminization of Power campaign
While recovering and on leave from the UFW, she worked with the Feminist Majority Foundation, traveling the country for two years on its campaign urging Latinas and other women to run for office.
National Women's Hall of Fame
She became the first Latina inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The same year she also received the ACLU's Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty and the Eugene V. Debs Foundation's Outstanding American Award.
Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award
President Bill Clinton presented her with the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award. Ms. magazine also named her one of its women of the year.
Steps down as UFW vice president
She left her union leadership post to devote herself to broader organizing, including encouraging women and Latinos to seek public office.
Founds the Dolores Huerta Foundation
Using the $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship, she founded a Bakersfield-based foundation that trains low-income communities in grassroots organizing. Most sources give 2002; some give 2003 for its formal start.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Documentary "Dolores"
Peter Bratt's documentary "Dolores" brought her life and her often-overlooked role in the farmworkers' movement to a wide audience.
Dolores Huerta Day in California
Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 2644, designating her birthday, April 10, as Dolores Huerta Day in California; Washington and Oregon passed similar measures in 2019.
Public statement about César Chávez
Following a New York Times investigation into abuse by César Chávez, Huerta said that he had sexually pressured her in 1960 and forced himself on her in 1966, and that two children born as a result were placed with other families; she said she had kept silent for some 60 years to protect the movement and that it was larger than any one person.
Death in Bakersfield
Huerta died of cancer at her home in Bakersfield, California, at age 96, with family present. Her family announced that "our beloved mother" had passed away.
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