Dolores Huerta, the US labour leader and civil rights icon whose union work changed the lives of migrant workers, has died, her family said on Wednesday. She was 96.

For nearly four decades Huerta was vice-president of United Farm Workers, the union she founded with Cesar Chavez, organising strikes and walkouts that won improvements in working conditions for the millions of men and women who labour in US fields.

“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved mother, Dolores Huerta, has passed away today at the age of 96,” a family statement said.

“We know that many of you around the world share in our mourning, and we will be following up on plans to recognise and celebrate her incredible life and legacy.”Erik Olvera, a spokesman for her family, said on Wednesday that Huerta died of cancer in the morning surrounded by loved ones.

Born in New Mexico and raised in California, Huerta took the reins of the US farmworker movement in the 1960s with Chavez.

At the time, she was raising seven children – she later had more – while going through a divorce.

While Huerta was the organising force behind the union, Chavez was its charismatic leader and the public face who became an icon to generations on the left, even after his death in 1993.

But that fame and the seemingly tight relationship between him and Huerta hid a dark secret that came to light this year, when Huerta said she was one of a number of women Chavez had raped. In her case, the attacks resulted in two pregnancies.

“The first time … I didn’t feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to,” she said in a statement to The New York Times, which broke the story.

“The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.”Huerta remained a galvanising figure in left-wing politics well into her 90s, helping to organise a fightback among migrant labourers targeted by US President Donald Trump’s immigration swoops that saw farmworkers snatched from the fields by masked federal agents.

“People are reaching out because they want to do something,” she said during a July 2025 interview at the headquarters of her Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, an agricultural nexus in California’s Central Valley.

“We’ve got to be a lot more active, because what’s happening right now is so huge. I liken it to what was happening in Germany before Hitler took power,” she said.

Huerta rubbed shoulders with some of America’s most influential people over decades in the public eye.

In 1968, she stood on a podium alongside Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, brother of assassinated former president John F. Kennedy, just minutes before he was shot dead.

Barack Obama – whose “Yes, we can” slogan he acknowledged he adopted from Dolores’ “Si se puede” – awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom when he was in the White House.

News of Huerta’s death prompted an outpouring of tributes from figures across the worlds of activism and politics, especially in her home state of California.

Governor Gavin Newsom ordered flags flown at half-staff in her honour, saying “Dolores represented the best of us” in her work that “changed the course of history against all odds”.

Former US president Bill Clinton praised her as a “dear friend” and “stalwart champion of working Americans”.

“To see her in action was to witness a living legend who never stopped pushing for progress,” Clinton said in a statement, “even as those efforts sometimes brought her grave consequences”.

And California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi lauded Huerta’s “courage and determination”, saying the activist “inspired generations of Americans to believe in the power of collective action”.