SÍ, SE PUEDE: Labor Leader Dolores Huerta Dies at 96

Dolores Huerta — the labor leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and gave the movement its famous slogan — has died at 96, her family announced.

Dolores Huerta, the labor leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and gave the movement its famous slogan, has died at the age of 96, her family announced.

Huerta was the movement's great organizer. While Chavez became its public face, Huerta built the machinery behind it — negotiating contracts, lobbying legislators and leading boycotts that forced growers to the table.

Her slogan, Sí, se puede — yes, it can be done — became the rallying cry of the farmworker movement, and later of much wider struggles for workers' rights and civil rights in America.

From the Delano grape strike to the landmark 1975 California farmworker bargaining law, her organizing changed life in the fields. The strike and the nationwide grape boycott that followed brought the conditions of farmworkers — low pay, long hours, exposure to pesticides — into American living rooms for the first time.

The 1975 law gave California farmworkers the right to bargain collectively, a breakthrough that turned years of protest into lasting legal protection.

In 2012, Huerta was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, for a lifetime of organizing on behalf of workers, immigrants and women.

She kept organizing for decades after the UFW's founding years, and the slogan she coined outlived every campaign it was written for. Sí, se puede is now part of the American language — and it started in the fields with Dolores Huerta.

Reporting: Reuters