Two Legacies of Dolores Huerta

The farmworker icon’s history raises uncomfortable questions about what happens when protecting a movement becomes more important than protecting its members.

D olores Huerta, who died Wednesday at 96, spent most of her life demanding that the powerful listen to the powerless. Yet within the farmworkers movement that she helped create, dissent was often treated as treason, loyalty to leadership outweighed loyalty to workers, and the interests of the union prevailed over the rights of its own members.

Her death comes seven months after devastating revelations about her more famous colleague, Cesar Chavez — and Huerta’s own assertion that Chavez had sexually abused her. She kept that story secret for six decades, she said, in order to protect their movement.

Born Dolores Fernández in Dawson, N.M., in 1930, she grew up in Stockton, Calif., the daughter of a union activist and a mother who owned and operated a hotel. After attending college and working briefly as a teacher, she turned to community organizing. In 1962, she joined Chavez to establish the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers.

Together they transformed California agriculture. Their strikes and boycotts brought national attention to the difficult conditions endured by farmworkers, and their political influence helped produce California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975.

Coming as it did amid the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the farmworkers movement also generated its own gravitational field. It reshaped California’s Democratic Party and the party’s relationship with Hollywood. Its admirers included Robert F. Kennedy, who joined Chavez in Delano in March 1968 as the labor leader ended a 25-day hunger strike. Kennedy had urged Chavez to consider the consequences if his health failed, but the senator’s public appearance came after Chavez decided to end the fast. Other allies included Jerry Brown, who championed the farmworkers’ cause and, upon becoming governor, signed the landmark 1975 law. The movement also attracted celebrities, including Joan Baez, who performed benefit concerts in 1966, and actor Martin Sheen, who marched with the UFW and became a prominent supporter in later decades.

Huerta was no mere figurehead. She served as the union’s chief negotiator, helping win contracts that improved farmworkers’ wages and established health and retirement benefits. During a 1972 organizing campaign in Arizona, Huerta coined the slogan Sí, se puede — usually translated as “Yes, we can,” though its more literal and perhaps more revealing meaning is “Yes, it can be done.” President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

But there was another Dolores Huerta, considerably less celebrated.

Under Chavez and Huerta, the UFW became increasingly authoritarian, developing a culture of personal loyalty that could be ruthless toward dissenters. In 1981, when farmworker representatives in Salinas attempted to elect their own candidates to the union’s executive board, Huerta was dispatched to fire ten of the dissident leaders. Marshall Ganz, a longtime UFW organizer, later accused her of amplifying the organization’s growing atmosphere of paranoia. Huerta disputed the dissidents’ motives, blaming Ganz for encouraging the rebellion.

An even more revealing episode unfolded at the union’s La Paz headquarters, near Keene in Kern County, the cradle of the UFW movement. There, farmworkers completing English classes celebrated their graduation with a slide presentation. Its concluding message was simple: The union belonged to the workers, not Chavez. According to historian Miriam Pawel’s account of the episode, Huerta erupted, demanding to know which teachers had planted such subversive thoughts in their students’ heads. Chavez fired two teachers later that day.

Consider the inversion: Farmworkers had been taught that the union existed to empower them. When they repeated that principle, union leaders regarded it as insubordination.

The contradiction appears again in a largely forgotten chapter of UFW history: Huerta and Chavez’s campaign against illegal immigration. The original concern was understandable as a matter of labor economics. Huerta and Chavez believed growers could break strikes by hiring workers entering illegally from Mexico. The UFW wanted immigration laws enforced against strikebreakers.

But in the 1970s, Chavez went much further. As historians have documented, the union launched an “Illegals Campaign,” encouraged its members to report illegal aliens to immigration authorities, and established its notorious “Wet Line,” an armed patrol along the Arizona-Mexico border intended to intercept people entering illegally. Historical accounts record allegations of violence against migrants.

Huerta reportedly objected to Chavez’s language, urging him to stop calling people “wetbacks” and questioning the practice of describing human beings as “illegal.” Chavez angrily dismissed her objections. “They’re wets, you know,” he told her. “They’re wets, and let’s go after them.”

Despite everything, Huerta stayed. By her own account, she was a central figure in the union, a partner whose disagreements with Chavez were often tactical rather than fundamental. She remained one of the union’s most powerful officers while its campaign continued. Later, she became a vigorous advocate of amnesty and helped advance the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

After that, the UFW became a brand rather than a movement. Consider the extraordinary case of Gerawan Farming, a major fruit producer in Fresno County. The UFW received certification to represent Gerawan employees in 1992, then went nearly two decades without doing much to secure a contract. When the union returned and sought bargaining in 2012, workers themselves wanted no part of it. The UFW persisted, pressing its rights over workers, many of whom had worked for Gerawan for decades. In 2013, Gerawan workers voted in a decertification election. California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board — the very agency created under the 1975 law the UFW had helped secure — impounded the ballots. It claimed to have found evidence of employer misconduct but resisted all legal efforts to adjudicate those claims in public. In 2018, a California appellate court overturned the board’s decision to discard the election and ordered the ballots counted.

The result was devastating for the UFW: 1,098 votes against union representation and just 197 in favor, with 660 additional ballots challenged. The board eventually certified the union’s defeat.

The Gerawan catastrophe revealed something more than the distance between the union’s professed devotion to democracy — to amplifying the collective voice of workers — and its apparent reluctance to accept the verdict of actual farmworkers. It exposed the increasingly anemic condition of the UFW itself. At its height, the union had claimed approximately 80,000 members. By 2025, federal labor filings showed just 5,138. Its symbolic importance and political relationships remained significant, but the organization representing workers in the fields had become a shadow of its former self. Its moral authority had been reduced to the power of a Che Guevara T-shirt on a community college campus.

Huerta’s personal celebrity could no longer guarantee victory even in her own backyard. In 2022, Huerta and her eponymous foundation joined the Bakersfield teachers’ union in opposing the Central Academy of Arts and Technology, a proposed public charter school in Kern County. The California Teachers Association celebrated when the Bakersfield City School District rejected the charter petition. In an October 2022 article titled “A Collaborative Victory,” CTA praised Huerta’s appearance before the school board and the defeat of a school that its opponents suggested would encourage racial segregation and drain resources from traditional public education.

Huerta told trustees that charter schools were taking money out of public education. The union treated its initial victory as a model for defeating other charters.

But the celebration was premature. CAAT appealed to the Kern County Board of Education, where Huerta again personally opposed the charter. This time the board voted 5–2 to approve it, in January 2023.

The school opened in August 2024. By the 2025–26 school year, California Department of Education records showed 523 students enrolled. The school reported that 98 percent of its first-year students returned for the second year. In late October, the school cut the ribbon on its expanded campus, now open to high school students. Days later, Huerta was gone.

There was something revealing about this late-career defeat. In the same Kern County where Chavez and Huerta had helped create a movement that once seemed capable of bringing growers, national politicians, and even Hollywood to heel, the celebrated labor leader could not prevent a new school from opening its doors to families who wanted another educational choice.

Nor could Huerta persuade San Diego to topple a statue of former Republican Governor Pete Wilson. In 2023, she joined activists demanding the removal of Wilson’s bronze likeness from a privately owned plaza downtown. The former governor’s support for Proposition 187, California’s 1994 initiative restricting public benefits for illegal immigrants, remained an unforgivable offense in Huerta’s eyes. But the statue’s owners refused to budge. The same sculpture that had been temporarily removed amid protests in 2020, then restored, survived Huerta’s renewed campaign. The irony was hard to miss: A labor leader who had tolerated Chavez’s own campaign against illegal immigrants was now demanding that California erase a governor for supporting immigration restrictions.

Her legacy also remained unfinished in a more literal sense. In 2019, the Dolores Huerta Foundation announced plans for a Peace and Justice Cultural Center in downtown Bakersfield, intended to become a permanent home for the organization and a monument to its founder. California taxpayers have contributed $22 million toward the project, including an initial $15 million appropriation and another $7 million to cover rising costs. Plans announced in 2023 envisioned a completed building by 2026. But construction did not begin until June 2025, and Huerta died without seeing it finished. The foundation now anticipates completion in June 2027 and a grand opening that fall. The project, which the foundation says is fully financed for core construction, is expected to cost roughly $35 million.

The contrast is instructive. The union that once mobilized tens of thousands of farmworkers had dwindled to a fraction of its former size, and Huerta could no longer reliably impose her preferences on school boards or the owners of a privately held statue. Yet California’s political establishment continued to fund the preservation of her legacy, even as her foundation struggled to finish the building that would celebrate it during her lifetime.

The darkest chapter of Huerta’s legacy, however, emerged this March, when a New York Times investigation reported allegations that Chavez sexually abused women and girls. One woman alleged that he began sexually touching her when she was 12 and raped her when she was 15.

Confronted by the Times, Huerta disclosed that Chavez had sexually abused her, too. She described two encounters in the 1960s, one involving manipulation and pressure and another in which he forced himself upon her. Both resulted in pregnancies; Huerta sent the children to be raised by other families.

Why had she kept silent for roughly 60 years? Her explanation was extraordinary for its candor. She feared that exposing Chavez would damage the movement to which she had devoted her life.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” she wrote.

Huerta also claimed she had only recently learned of the allegations involving girls and teenagers. There is no established evidence that she knew Chavez was abusing minors at the time. But she did know, from her own experience, that the man she helped elevate into a national icon was capable of sexual coercion and violence. And she kept that knowledge from the public for six decades. More critically, she secreted that information from generations of girls and women who fell into Chavez’s orbit.

Again and again, the UFW’s history reveals the danger of Huerta’s calculations. Dissident workers could threaten the union. Illegal immigrants could threaten a strike. Teachers telling workers that the union belonged to them could threaten Chavez’s authority. And exposing Chavez himself, Huerta believed, could threaten the movement.

Huerta confronted growers, governors, police officers, and presidents. She was capable of extraordinary courage, and the movement she helped build achieved lasting improvements for farmworkers. But she also left a record of defending institutional power against the very people that power was supposed to serve. The woman who taught generations of Americans to chant Sí, se puede leaves behind a harder question: What happens when a movement founded to defend the powerless decides that protecting itself is more important than protecting the people?

Perhaps the more revealing slogan for that part of the UFW’s history would have been Cállate y sigue órdenes: Shut up and follow orders.