In May 1972, César Chávez was fasting inside Santa Rita Hall in Phoenix in protest of a new Arizona law against farmworker unions. Dolores Huerta had spent the day asking prominent Latino leaders for help, and they told her it could not be done in Arizona. She answered, “Sí se puede en Arizona,” and was still thinking about the exchange when she got to Mass in the hall that night and told the other activists about it. They stood up and started clapping the words. Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers and coined that rallying cry, has died at 96. Her family announced her death on Wednesday in a Facebook post. The Arizona law stayed on the books anyway, while the phrase was taken up by unions, protest movements and, decades later, a presidential campaign. She was born Dolores Clara Fernández in 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico. Her father was a miner and union activist who later won a seat in the state legislature. After her parents divorced, her mother took the children to California, and Huerta grew up in Stockton, a farmworker community in the San Joaquin Valley. She began teaching in rural California in 1954 and quit after a year. In 1955, she co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organisation, and later the Agricultural Workers Association. When Chávez sat her down at his kitchen table and said they should start a union, she thought he was joking. They formed the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, and it became the United Farm Workers. Many of the workers she organised were Spanish-speaking, and labour law did not protect any of them. Huerta helped lead a worldwide grape boycott that forced growers to sign some of the country’s first farmworker contracts. As a lobbyist, she secured financial aid for the unemployed and disability insurance for California farmworkers. Over the years, she was jailed 22 times for union demonstrations. In 1968, she was with Robert F. Kennedy on the night he was assassinated, and his death made her more committed to non-violence. Twenty years later, at a peaceful protest in San Francisco against George H.W. Bush’s opposition to the grape boycott, a police officer beat her with a baton. The beating ruptured her spleen, broke several ribs and caused life-threatening internal bleeding. The city settled with her for $825,000, and she used the money for the benefit of farmworkers. “Sí, se puede” became the union’s motto, and other activist groups soon adopted it. The UFW later registered it as a federal trademark so it could protect the phrase’s original meaning. Puede is closely related to poder, the Spanish word for power, so the idea of power is built into the phrase. It rang through the US immigration reform protests. Abroad, Spain’s Unidas Podemos used it ahead of the 2019 general election, and Juan Guaidó made it his rallying cry during Venezuela’s presidential crisis the same year. In English, it became “Yes we can”, the slogan of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In 2012 Obama draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the 82-year-old Huerta’s neck. He admitted he had stolen her slogan and joked that he was glad she had let him off easy, because “Dolores does not play”. Huerta’s version was shorter: when he told her he had taken her line, she told him he certainly had. She had founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002 with the $100,000 Puffin/Nation prize for Creative Citizenship. At 89, she was led away in handcuffs from a California protest over pay for people who care for the elderly and disabled. California proclaimed her birthday, 10 April, Dolores Huerta Day in 2018. Only months before her death, she was still telling activists to keep speaking out. In March 2026, after a multi-year New York Times investigation into sexual misconduct by Chávez, Huerta said he had sexually assaulted her in the 1960s. She had kept it to herself for more than 60 years because she believed the truth would hurt the movement she had helped build. “My silence ends here,” she wrote. She added that she had always told others to use their voice, and that she was not the only one. Memorials to Chávez came down over the following months, including a bust in Denver and a statue at the University of Texas. In Watts, Los Angeles, the muralist Mister Alek painted out Chávez’s face on the wall he had made in 2021 at Wilmington Avenue and 103rd Street, leaving Martin Luther King Jr. where he was. A few days later, Huerta’s portrait was on the wall in Chávez’s place.