It is with deep sadness that we at YWCA USA mourn the passing of civil rights leader, co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW), and elder Dolores Huerta.
For more than seven decades, Dolores organized for the dignity and rights of farmworkers, immigrants, and working families. She led historic Delano grape boycott, and in 2012 received the presidential Medal of Freedom. As founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation (2002), she continued organizing, educating, and helping communities build the power to shape their own futures.
My connection to Dolores Huerta is deeply personal, rooted in my earliest childhood memories. My parents shared a lifelong friendship with Joe and Mercy, who were among the earliest organizers Dolores hired. Mercy lovingly made nearly all of the early United Farm Workers flags, including the one that hangs in my office today.
As a young girl, I remember watching Dolores being interviewed, leading meetings, organizing marches, but what has stayed with me most vividly is the unmistakable awe and reverence in my mother’s voice whenever she spoke of her. Long before I fully understood the significance of Dolores’s leadership or the movement she helped build, I understood through my mother that I was witnessing the work of an extraordinary woman. That early impression shaped my understanding of courage, justice, love and the power of women who devote their lives to changing the world. It is a lesson I have carried with me ever since, and one that feels especially meaningful as we consider how we remember those whose lives have shaped our own.
As Día de los Muertos approaches, we are reminded that honoring our ancestors means not only mourning their loss, but celebrating the lives they lived, the lessons they gave us, and the legacies they leave in our care. Today, we celebrate Dolores: her strength, her conviction, and a life spent advocating for the dignity and rights of others.
While doing the hard, daily work of creating change, Dolores was also confronting barriers within the very movement she was instrumental in building. In spaces largely led by men, Dolores had to fight for her seat at the table while raising 11 children. At YWCA, we know that women have always carried the work of justice. We must also have the power to lead it, to shape it, and define what justice looks like.
Dolores was a heroine to generations of women and girls because she showed us what it looks like to claim our power and use it in service of others. She reminded us that change does not happen because we wait for it. It happens because people organize, raise their voices, stand together, and refuse to accept injustice as inevitable.
That is the legacy Dolores leaves us. Now we must carry it forward.
¡Sí, se puede!
Margaret Mitchell
CEO, YWCA USA