Dolores Huerta

CTL-E-5350 · Person · activist · 1962–present

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta (born April 10, 1930, Dawson, New Mexico) is an American labor leader and activist who moved from teaching farmworkers' children in California's Central Valley to organizing their parents. Working first with the Community Service Organization, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez in 1962, the forerunner of the United Farm Workers, and became the union's formidable negotiator and boycott coordinator through the Delano grape strike and the campaigns that produced California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first law recognizing farmworkers' collective bargaining rights. In Arizona in 1972, answering officials who said it could not be done, she coined the movement's enduring cry, Sí se puede. She founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002, received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and in March 2026 publicly disclosed, after decades of silence, that Chavez had forced sex on her in the 1960s.

The record

• Also known as: Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta, Dolores Fernández

Notes

Statistics: Born April 10, 1930, Dawson, New Mexico (Britannica) · Co-founded National Farm Workers Association on September 30, 1962, with Chavez and Gilbert Padilla (HISTORY; Britannica) · Agricultural Labor Relations Act, 1975, first law recognizing California farmworkers' bargaining rights (Britannica; Smithsonian dates the culminating signing to 1975) · Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights, 1998; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2012 (Smithsonian) · Dolores Huerta Foundation founded 2002 (Britannica) · Arrested 22 times in nonviolent protest per New-York Historical Society biography — single-source in this pass, held as attributed · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review: For decades the movement's story was told as one man's name; Huerta's record corrects the grammar — co-founder, negotiator, slogan-maker, survivor. Her 2026 disclosure is included because she chose, at 95, to put it on the record herself. · Photo slot: CLEARED CANDIDATE — Wikimedia Commons File:Dolores Huerta by Gage Skidmore.jpg, Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, license verified from Commons API metadata on 2026-10-15; direct URL https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Dolores_Huerta_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg; not downloaded — visual pass follows merge per standing pattern.

Referenced by

• Cesar Chavez — collaborated with → this record

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Dolores Huerta" — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dolores-Huerta
• Smithsonian Institution, "Dolores Huerta: A Latina Civil Rights Icon" — https://www.si.edu/collections/snapshot/dolores-huerta-latina-civil-rights-icon
• HISTORY, "Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta establish the NFWA" — https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/september-30/national-farm-workers-association-chavez-huerta
• Fast Company, "Where Cesar Chavez Day is getting renamed Farmworkers Day" (reporting Huerta's March 2026 disclosure) — http://www.fastcompany.com/91518392/cesar-chavez-day-is-getting-renamed

Record CTL-E-5350 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 4 sources · 1 mapped relationship · CTL research: PPL-001.
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