LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Civil rights leader Dolores Huerta has died. She was 96. Huerta began fighting for better conditions for agricultural field workers in the 1960s. She co-founded the union that would become the United Farm Workers. Here's NPR's Adrian Florido.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: California farm owners detested the way Dolores Huerta, in the 1960s, would show up at their grape fields with a bullhorn urging their workers to strike.
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DOLORES HUERTA: Come on up, brothers. We are waiting for you. You are earning more money today because the workers here are not on strike on September 9th.
FLORIDO: She was born in New Mexico but raised in California's Central Valley. As a teenager, she picked onions and cherries there. She later told an interviewer at Cal State Northridge why she started organizing Mexican American agricultural workers.
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HUERTA: When you look and you see the homes of farm workers and you see how they're struggling just to survive, or you know the children who have been poisoned with pesticides and you know that they died, all of that injustice, that's what makes one really angry to know...
FLORIDO: Through the work, she met another young organizer, Cesar Chavez. In the early '60s, they formed a union. It soon merged with the Filipino workers' union that was boycotting table grapes and became the United Farm Workers. Its national grape boycott eventually forced growers to sign contracts that improved pay and labor conditions.
But by the mid-'70s, the union was losing influence. Chavez and Huerta started kicking out people who disagreed with them. He died in 1993. She left the union several years later, but she took on new causes like immigrants and women's rights. She often reflected on how the farm worker movement galvanized broader Mexican American activism.
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HUERTA: Everybody came alive 'cause once the people see that farm workers, who are the most oppressed, the least educated, that has the least political power, that they can make changes. And I think it inspires other people to do that.
FLORIDO: In 2012, President Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom. Earlier this year, Huerta, then 1995, made a startling revelation. She told The New York Times that in the 1960s, Cesar Chavez had raped her in a grape field. She said she had kept the secret for decades to protect her life's work but said she finally spoke out to support other women coming forward with their own abuse accusations against Chavez. Since then, across the country, murals of Chavez have been painted over. Many have been replaced with images of Dolores Huerta.
Adrian Florido, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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