Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez in 1962, negotiated the contracts that ended the Delano grape strike, and coined the slogan si se puede. She was born in New Mexico and raised in Stockton, California, by a mother who ran a hotel that housed farm-worker families, and she was teaching primary school when she decided that organising their parents would do more for the children than teaching them hungry. She worked first for the Community Service Organization, where she met Chavez, and became its lobbyist in Sacramento, securing state disability insurance for farm workers and the removal of the citizenship requirement for public assistance. In the union she was the negotiator and he was the public figure, a division that has a good deal to do with why her name is less known. The Delano strike began with Filipino workers under Larry Itliong in 1965 and the Mexican-American union joined it; the grape boycott that followed was directed from New York by Huerta and reached millions of American households, and the growers signed in 1970. She was beaten by San Francisco police at a protest in 1988, suffering broken ribs and a ruptured spleen, and the city changed its crowd-control policies after the lawsuit. The phrase si se puede was hers, adopted for Barack Obama's campaign as yes we can, and he acknowledged the borrowing when awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She has eleven children and was for decades criticised for it by people on all sides. She left the union board in 1999 and runs a foundation in Bakersfield, and was still speaking at rallies past ninety. The union she built with Chavez became the United Farm Workers in 1972. California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the first law in the United States granting farm workers the right to bargain collectively.

• Lived: 1930 CE – ?
• Nationality: American
• Roles: activist