Dolores Huerta Coined "Sí Se Puede," Then a Presidential Campaign Borrowed It

Arizona House Bill 2134 cleared the state Senate on May 11, 1972, and Governor Jack Williams signed it forty-five minutes later. The law outlawed secondary boycotts and banned farmworkers from striking at harvest, the only weeks of the year when unpicked fruit costs a grower anything. Cesar Chavez began a water-only fast at Santa Rita Hall in Phoenix that same day. Local Latino political and labor figures came to the hall to explain to the organizers that the growers’ lobby in Arizona could not be beaten: no se puede. Dolores Huerta’s answer was sí se puede. The room stood up clapping it, and thirty-six years later a senator from Illinois ran a presidential campaign on the English translation.

Huerta co-founded that union with Chavez in Delano in 1962, wrote its first contract with a grower in 1966, and was its lead negotiator when twenty-six Delano growers signed in July 1970 and the five-year grape strike ended. She is 96 years old. By her foundation’s count she has been arrested more than twenty-five times, and she raised eleven children in the middle of all of it. The three words are the part of her record everyone can recite, and the part whose authorship kept getting handed to somebody else.

Stockton, and the kids without shoes

Dolores Clara Fernández was born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, a coal camp. Her father, Juan Fernández, mined coal, carried a union card, and later won a seat in the New Mexico legislature. Her parents divorced when she was three, and her mother, Alicia Chávez, raised her in Stockton, California while running a hotel and restaurant that housed and fed farmworkers cheaply or for nothing.

She earned a teaching credential and lasted about a year in a classroom. The National Archives quotes her explanation for leaving:

I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she said. “I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.

In 1955 she met the organizer Fred Ross and joined the Community Service Organization, which ran voter registration drives and pushed for Spanish language ballots and driver’s tests. The CSO sent her to Sacramento to lobby, and in 1963 that work extended Aid to Families with Dependent Children and disability insurance to California farmworkers. It also introduced her to a CSO staffer named Cesar Chavez.

The union, 1962

Huerta, Chavez, and Gilbert Padilla founded the National Farm Workers Association in Delano in 1962. Congress had written agricultural workers out of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, so none of the machinery a union normally uses existed for them: no protected right to organize, no election procedure, no board to complain to. What farmworkers had instead was the crop, which rots, and the consumer, who can be asked to stop buying.

On September 8, 1965, the Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked out of the Delano grape fields, and Huerta’s union joined the strike that month. Huerta ran the boycott operation, organizing a wine boycott across California and then directing the grape boycott out of New York and New Jersey, which is the work that carried a strike in the San Joaquin Valley into supermarkets in cities that had never seen a grape field.

What she got in writing

The negotiating is the part of Huerta’s record that exists as paper with signatures on it. In 1966, with no legal training and no experience of ever having drafted a contract, she negotiated the union’s agreement with the Schenley wine company, the first contract between an American grower and a farmworkers’ union.

On July 29, 1970, twenty-six Delano growers signed and the strike ended. The contracts set an hourly wage of $1.76 with fifteen-cent annual raises, added a twenty-five-cent bonus per box, funded health and welfare plans, and banned DDT in the fields those growers farmed. A union that federal labor law did not cover had put a pesticide ban into a commercial contract and gotten twenty-six companies to sign it.

California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act five years later, in 1975, giving the state’s farmworkers a legal right to bargain collectively for the first time. Huerta lobbied it through.

Phoenix, 1972

Arizona moved in the other direction. HB 2134 was written to keep the union out of the state, and Chavez answered it with a fast at Santa Rita Hall that ran 24 days and ended on June 4, 1972. Huerta was in the hall for the meetings with the political and community leaders who came. Fifty years later she told the Phoenix public radio station KJZZ what those meetings had sounded like:

And they said to me, ‘No, aqui en Arizona, no se puede.’

My answer to them was, ‘Si se puede en Arizona.’

The Arizona campaign turned into a recall drive against Governor Williams. Organizers filed 176,152 signatures; enough of them were struck as invalid that the recall never reached a ballot. The chant did better than the petition.

Who owns three words

Sí se puede is a federally registered trademark of the United Farm Workers. When the Mexican airline AeroMexico applied to register the phrase with the US Trademark Office, the union went after the application; AeroMexico dropped it and agreed to stop using the line.

The chant went national in 2006, on signs at the immigration marches in American cities. Barack Obama began using the English version in his 2004 Illinois Senate primary campaign and built the 2008 presidential run around it after his second-place finish in New Hampshire. On May 29, 2012, at the Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House, he said this with her standing there:

And on a personal note, Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, “Si, se puede.” Yes, we can.

The attribution is worth stating precisely, because it has never been tidy. Huerta says she coined the phrase in Phoenix. The rhetoric scholars John Hammerback and Richard Jensen attributed it to Chavez, as Stacey Sowards documents in her 2019 study of Huerta’s speeches and letters. Chavez credited Huerta. So did the president who borrowed it.

September 14, 1988

Huerta was 58 and standing outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, handing out a press release criticizing Vice President George H. W. Bush, who opposed the union’s grape boycott over pesticide use. Police moved into the crowd with batons. An officer’s baton broke her ribs and ruptured her spleen. She was bleeding internally and went into emergency surgery.

San Francisco settled for $825,000. The police department rewrote its rules on crowd control and discipline. Huerta stepped down as vice president of the UFW in 1999 and started the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2003 with a $100,000 Puffin Prize she had been awarded the year before.

March 18, 2026

The New York Times published an investigation by Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes on March 18, 2026, reported over roughly five years, drawing on more than sixty interviews and hundreds of pages of union records, describing accusations that Cesar Chavez sexually abused girls and women in the farmworker movement. Huerta released a written statement the same day. She said Chavez sexually assaulted her twice in the 1960s, that both assaults resulted in pregnancies, and that she had arranged for other families to raise those children. She said she had held it for about sixty years to protect the farmworker movement she had spent her life building.

I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.

She was 95 when she published that. The statement also separates the man from the work:

Cesar’s actions do not reflect the values of our community and our movement.

The Cesar Chavez Foundation said it was “deeply shocked and saddened by what we are hearing.” The UFW declined to take part in Cesar Chavez Day on March 31. Marches carrying his name in San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Tucson, and San Francisco were called off.

What the record holds

Huerta is still working, running the foundation she started in 2003. Everything else in this article is documentation: contracts with twenty-six signatures on them, a settlement paid out by the City of San Francisco, a trademark registration, a stack of recall petitions ruled invalid, a statement published in March under her own name. At the White House in 2012, before he got to the part about stealing her slogan, Obama read out the answer she gives people who ask how to start. “Don’t wait to be invited,” she says, “Step in there.”