We lost Dolores Huerta on Wednesday, Oct. 28. She died at home in Bakersfield, Calif., surrounded by family. She was 96.
You know the words she left us: “Sí, se puede”—“Yes, it can be done.” People print them on T-shirts now. Dolores never meant them as a slogan; she meant them as an instruction.
Before the strikes, before the boycotts, before the contracts and the awards, she taught school in Stockton, Calif. The children came to her hungry, and some came in clothes too thin for the season. Their parents worked long days in the fields for wages that covered neither.
After watching this for a while, she reached a conclusion most people would have kept to themselves: She could do more for those children by organizing their parents than by teaching them. So she left the classroom. That was the first time she declined to stay where she had been put—but it was not the last.
She helped build what became the United Farm Workers. When she negotiated, growers signed contracts that covered healthcare, retirement and safer working conditions. When she organized the grape boycott, 17 million Americans stopped buying grapes. (Seventeen million!)
We first heard her speak at a convention of the National Organization for Women in the late 1980s. By then, Dolores had spent three decades as the woman nobody had planned for. We asked her to join us in a new venture: a national effort to put more women in elected office. Dolores said yes. She stayed nearly 40 years, becoming an adviser to Ms. magazine after the Feminist Majority Foundation took over publishing it in 2001.
The election is six days away. For 70 years, Dolores knocked on doors to tell people one thing: Democracy works only when you show up. If you want to honor her this week, do what she would have asked. Vote. Then bring someone with you. She would have preferred that to flowers.
