Skip to Main Content
Rider University Libraries

Dolores Huerta Fernandez

Background

Who is Dolores Huerta?

Huerta, Dolores Fernandez (1930-...), is an American labor union leader, lobbyist, and civil rights activist. She is known for her commitment to nonviolence and for her support of the rights of farmworkers, women, minority groups, and the poor. For more than 30 years, she worked closely with the California labor union leader Cesar Chavez to organize farmworkers.

Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernandez on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico. She attended high school in Stockton, California, and went on to attend a local community college. In the 1950's, she married Ventura Huerta, a public health administrator. They later divorced.

In the mid-1950's, Huerta helped establish the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO). She was involved in campaigns to register people to vote and to improve services in the Mexican American community. Through her involvement with the CSO, Huerta met Cesar Chavez. In 1962, Huerta helped Chavez found the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). In 1966, the NFWA merged with another union to create the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. In 1972, the organization changed its name to the United Farm Workers of America (UFW).

As a UFW negotiator, Huerta assisted in the development of labor policies for hiring, grievance (complaint) procedures, and benefit plans. She also organized strikes and consumer boycotts. She was instrumental in the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (1974), which enabled farmworkers to bargain for better wages and working conditions. Huerta received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the country's highest civilian honors, in 2012.

Huerta, Dolores Fernandez. (2018). Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, 1

Dolores Huerta's life accomplishments

Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta is one of the most influential labor activists of the 20th century and a leader of the Chicano civil rights movement.  

Born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta was the second of three children of Alicia and Juan Fernandez, a farm worker and miner who became a state legislator in 1938. Her parents divorced when Huerta was three years old, and her mother moved to Stockton, California with her children. Huerta’s grandfather helped raise Huerta and her two brothers while her mother juggled jobs as a waitress and cannery worker until she could buy a small hotel and restaurant. Alicia’s community activism and compassionate treatment of workers greatly influenced her daughter.

Discrimination also helped shape Huerta. A schoolteacher, prejudiced against Hispanics, accused Huerta of cheating because her papers were too well-written. In 1945 at the end of World War II, white men brutally beat her brother for wearing a Zoot-Suit, a popular Latino fashion. 

Huerta received an associate teaching degree from the University of the Pacific’s Delta College. She married Ralph Head while a student and had two daughters, though the couple soon divorced. She subsequently married fellow activist Ventura Huerta with whom she had five children, though that marriage also did not last. Huerta briefly taught school in the 1950s, but seeing so many hungry farm children coming to school, she thought she could do more to help them by organizing farmers and farm workers.

In 1955 Huerta began her career as an activist when she co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), which led voter registration drives and fought for economic improvements for Hispanics. She also founded the Agricultural Workers Association. Through a CSO associate, Huerta met activist César Chávez, with whom she shared an interest in organizing farm workers. In 1962, Huerta and Chávez founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the predecessor of the United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW), which formed three year later. Huerta served as UFW vice president until 1999.

Despite ethnic and gender bias, Huerta helped organize the 1965 Delano strike of 5,000 grape workers and was the lead negotiator in the workers’ contract that followed. Throughout her work with the UFW, Huerta organized workers, negotiated contracts, advocated for safer working conditions including the elimination of harmful pesticides. She also fought for unemployment and healthcare benefits for agricultural workers. Huerta was the driving force behind the nationwide table grape boycotts in the late 1960s that led to a successful union contract by 1970.

In 1973, Huerta led another consumer boycott of grapes that resulted in the ground-breaking California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which allowed farm workers to form unions and bargain for better wages and conditions. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Huerta worked as a lobbyist to improve workers’ legislative representation. During the 1990s and 2000s, she worked to elect more Latinos and women to political office and has championed women’s issues.

The recipient of many honors, Huerta received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. As of 2015, she was a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, and the President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

Michals, Debra.  "Dolores Huerta."  National Women's History Museum.  National Women's History Museum, 2015