Dolores Huerta, ¡Presente!
We join farmworkers, organizers, families, and communities across the Americas in mourning Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta, who died at home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by her family. She was 96.
Many of the protections farmworkers rely on today exist because Dolores fought for them by name: the right to organize, unemployment and disability insurance, and the 1986 amnesty that gave legal status to 1.4 million farmworkers. She co-founded the farmworker movement, gave it the words “¡Sí, se puede!”, and spent more than seventy years proving them true. She also understood that the deepest result of organizing is the people it changes. She described it as “the leadership that is learned by ordinary people as they take direct action.”
In 2014, HIP honored Dolores in our first cohort of HIPGivers at our 30th Anniversary Gala. When we asked her what her “give” was, she didn’t mention awards or titles. She said her giving was “to do the organizing and advocacy work that needs to be done without a salary,” and she named the sacrifices her children made alongside her. She lived that answer until the end, as a full-time volunteer at the Dolores Huerta Foundation, organizing in the Central Valley communities she called home.
Earlier this year, Dolores gave one more gift, perhaps the hardest of her life. After decades of silence carried for the sake of the movement, she told the truth about the harm she survived within it. She stood with other women who came forward, and she reminded all of us that a movement is measured not only by what it wins, but by how it protects the people inside it.
For philanthropy, honoring Dolores means more than tribute. It means resourcing the organizers she trained and those she inspired. It means investing in women’s leadership, and funding the infrastructure that keeps people safe within our movements. She told us, “If we can get the resources to organize and educate our community, we can make a tremendous contribution to society.” That’s still the work, and it’s still ours to fund.
To her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and to the Dolores Huerta Foundation family, we send our deepest condolences. We honor the family’s request for privacy. Her love for humanity, her legacy as a champion of civil rights, and endless care for a movement toward justice will live in every house meeting, every picket line, and every young organizer discovering her own power.
Que en paz descanse. Dolores Huerta, ¡presente!