Dolores Huerta has died in California. She was 96. In 1962 she helped to start a union for farm workers. She also invented the words “Sí, se puede” — “Yes, we can”.
Huerta died of cancer on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield. Born in New Mexico in 1930, she taught school before she became an organiser. In 1962, with César Chávez, she founded the union that became the United Farm Workers — in a year when the average American farmworker earned 93 cents an hour. She ran the picket lines of the Delano grape strike and the four-year boycott that followed, then bargained the contracts they won.
Her slogan travelled further than her name: Barack Obama, who gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, conceded this week that he “too often” gets the credit for “Yes, we can”. The tributes were shadowed by the accusation she made public this year — that Chávez raped her in 1966. Some fear that reopening it divides a fragile cause and unmakes its only icon; others answer that a union cannot ask its women to keep its secrets.