The Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies Program joins the wider community in mourning the recent loss of Dolores Huerta. A pathbreaking labor leader and community activist whose career spanned more than four decades, Huerta is best known as a co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Her leadership contributed to UFW victories in the late 1960s and early 1970s that had eluded generations of farmworker organizers before. Her contributions to that struggle are legendary, and the honors and accolades she has earned over the years are many. A strong advocate for women’s equality, she participated in many efforts across the country to ensure women’s access to health care, pay equity, and empowerment, remaining a beacon of inspiration for U.S. grassroots movements well into her 90s. We will miss her leadership and her example of determination. Toward the end of her life, she showed great courage by ending her lifelong silence about sexual abuse she had endured during the height of the farmworkers’ organizing efforts, responding to reports of such misconduct by other women in that movement. For that, and for so much else, she will be revered.

South-Central Wisconsin is a long way from California, but Dolores Huerta was no stranger to the UW–Madison campus. Below are a few photographs from a visit she paid to the University in 1995 at the invitation of students, and an image of a flyer for a speech she gave in May of 1969.