Dolores Huerta: How She Organized Farmworkers

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9 hours ago

Dolores Huerta smiling, seated, beside the title Dolores Huerta: How She Organized Farmworkers

Content note: this post includes a mention of sexual abuse.

In May 1972, the union’s own history says, Arizona’s legislature pushed through a bill “denying farm workers the right to strike and boycott during harvest seasons.” Huerta says local Latino leaders then told her it could not be done in Arizona, and she answered: “No, in Arizona sí se puede!”

At the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony, President Obama said: “Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, ‘Si, se puede.’ Yes, we can.”

Dolores Huerta in conversation with Andrew Young at the Summit on Race in America, LBJ Presidential Library, April 8, 2019. Photo by Jay Godwin, LBJ Library. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Step One: See the Problem in Its Details

Dolores Huerta was born on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, a mining town. Her father, Juan Fernandez, a U.S. citizen of mixed Spanish and Mexican ancestry, worked as a coal miner and a member of the migrant labor force. He later became a union activist, earned a college degree, and was elected as a representative in the New Mexico state legislature. She grew up in Stockton, California.

Before she became a labor organizer, she was an elementary school teacher. President Obama said she remembered seeing children come to school hungry and without shoes.

In a 2017 NPR interview, she described the conditions in the fields. “The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time,” she told NPR. “They didn’t have toilets in the fields, they didn’t have cold drinking water. They didn’t have rest periods.” The violence from growers was also direct: “We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.” The National Park Service says she has been arrested over two dozen times.

Step Two: Build the Structure

In 1955, at the age of 25, Huerta began organizing for the Latino civil rights Community Service Organization (CSO), focusing on the Stockton chapter. She lobbied in Sacramento for pensions for non-citizens, disability insurance for farm workers, and the ability to register voters.

In 1960, she organized the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA), which provided English language classes, voter registration drives, health clinics, and a credit union for the community.

In 1962, Huerta and Cesar Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). She became both a lobbyist and lead contract negotiator for the union.

Step Three: Negotiate the Contract

In April 1966, Schenley workers won a union contract that immediately raised wages and established a hiring hall. The author Randy Shaw writes that Huerta negotiated the union’s first contract, with Schenley, and was in charge of building its negotiating department.

On July 29, 1970, Delano-area table grape growers signed their first union contracts, according to the union’s chronology. History.com reports that Huerta served as the lead UFW negotiator for the three-year collective bargaining agreement signed after the strike.

Step Four: Reach the Buyers

In 1965, the NFWA launched a campaign to convince distributors and consumers across the United States to stop buying grapes. Initially, Huerta directed the boycott on the East Coast while Chavez directed the West Coast. The National Park Service says she moved to New York for four years. Shaw writes that in 1968 she headed to New York City with more than fifty farmworker families to direct the operation.

Step Five: Change the Law

In 1975, California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, a landmark law that extended collective bargaining rights and protections to agricultural employees who had been excluded from coverage under federal labor law. The White House credits Huerta as “influential in securing the passage” of the law.

Step Six: Pass It Forward

In 2002, Huerta received a $100,000 Nation/Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship and used it to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation, an organization dedicated to developing community organizers and national leaders.

At the Medal of Freedom ceremony in 2012, President Obama quoted her directly: “Don’t wait to be invited,” she says, “Step in there.”

In March 2026, Huerta said: “I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences.” In her statement to ABC News about Cesar Chavez, she said that the first time she was “manipulated and pressured into having sex with him,” and that the second time, “I was forced, against my will.” She said she kept the secret because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work.” ABC News reported that the statement came in response to a New York Times article published March 18, 2026. (ABC News, March 18, 2026)

I am Mexican, and part Zuni and part other tribes that went unnamed. I speak only for myself.

Which of her six steps is closest to work you are doing or thinking about? Comment the number below. Or tell me what step you would add as a seventh.