Dolores Huerta cause of death revealed: Labour icon dies at 96

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and became one of the most influential labour leaders and civil rights activists in U.S. history, died Wednesday, October 28, at her home in Bakersfield, California.

She was 96.

The cause was cancer, according to a spokesman for her family.

Huerta, who coined the rallying cry “¡Sí, se puede!" ("Yes, it can be done!"), spent more than seven decades organising for better pay and treatment of immigrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley.

With Chavez, she founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which later became the United Farm Workers. She served as the union’s vice president for nearly four decades and was its chief negotiator, strike organiser, and lobbyist.

She helped lead the five-year Delano Grape Strike started in 1965 and organised national boycotts of grapes and lettuce. Her work helped secure the first health and benefit plans for farmworkers and contributed to passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first U.S. law granting farmworkers collective bargaining rights.

Huerta has been arrested multiple times and brutally beaten up by the police of San Francisco during a protest in 1988, which resulted in broken ribs and rupture of her spleen.

In early 2026, she stated that Chavez raped her many years ago – a secret she kept for 60 years, fearing that the information might damage the movement. Her statement came amid reporting on the evidence that Chavez molested underage girls.

President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and joked that he took her slogan as the basis of his 2008 campaign. Huerta is the first Latina to be inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Huerta is survived by her 11 children. Her foundation in Bakersfield keeps working in line with Huerta's ideas.