Statement from Brenda Solórzano, President and CEO, The California Endowment, on the Passing of Dolores Huerta

My heart is heavy today. California has lost one of its greatest organizers, and so many of us have lost a teacher.

Dolores Huerta spent more than seven decades proving that the people closest to injustice hold the power to end it. She left her Stockton classroom because she could not stand to watch farmworkers’ children come to school hungry. She went into the fields, onto the picket lines, and into the halls of power, and she never once waited for permission. She co-founded the United Farm Workers. She fought for fair wages, clean water, health benefits, and protection from the pesticides poisoning workers and their families. She gave a movement its rallying cry. And she gave generations of women, especially Latinas, proof that our place is at the front of the march.

She never retired. Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, she kept building. Neighbors in Arvin, Lamont, Lindsay, and Parlier learned to speak up at school boards and city councils, register voters, and fight for the health of their own communities. The California Endowment is proud to have stood with that work. It is health equity in its truest form: not services delivered to people, but power built by people.

Just last September, at 95, Dolores joined us for CalEndow Live. She took us back to the house meetings where the union was built: three years in people’s living rooms, listening to their fears and their hopes. She gave the credit for every victory to farmworkers themselves. She spoke plainly about the terror immigrant families are living through right now. And she left us with a charge I keep coming back to: “Always use your presence.” Watch our conversation with Dolores here.

She was still teaching us this year. In March, she chose to tell a painful truth she had carried for sixty years, so that other survivors would not have to carry theirs alone. That, too, was organizing. That, too, was courage.

As an immigrant, a Latina, and a mother, I know how many of us stand where we do because Dolores went first. Dolores would not want us to mourn quietly. She would want us to show up, for each other, for our communities, for the California she spent her life building.

So we will. Descansa en poder, Dolores. ¡Sí, se puede!