Boston Mayor Wu Mourns Union Leader Huerta

Dolores Huerta, the cofounder of the United Farm Workers who died Wednesday at age 96, is drawing mourning from Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who highlighted the labor leader’s lasting connection to the city’s farmworkers.

Wu issued a statement on October 29 honoring Huerta’s role in transforming labor and civil rights movements. The mayor described Huerta as a brave organizer whose solidarity inspired multiple generations and united workers of different nationalities and languages.

Wu specifically recalled an event in August 1973 during the grape boycott. According to a report by The Harvard Crimson, more than 500 farmworkers and UFW sympathizers in Greater Boston gathered to hear Huerta speak from California via a telephone loudspeaker. That same day, UFW director Cesar Chavez spoke on the State House steps urging support for the lettuce and grape boycotts.

The mayor noted that Huerta helped create the unity clap, a gesture of solidarity between Mexican and Filipino farmworkers. Wu said her cabinet has ended its meetings with that clap for the past five years as a reminder of the power of unity.

The boycott Huerta helped organize involved more than 17 million Americans who stopped buying grapes in the five years following its start. In Massachusetts, Boston supermarket chains including Stop & Shop, Star, Purity Supreme, and First National cooperated with the boycott by November 1973. The Boston Teachers Union also supported the effort by publishing lists of products to avoid, a practice that continued until 1978.

Huerta was born in New Mexico in 1930 and grew up in California’s Central Valley. She worked as a teacher before cofounding the National Farm Workers Association with Chavez in 1962. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Obama acknowledged borrowing Huerta’s slogan “Si, se puede” for his 2008 campaign’s “Yes, we can” motto.

In her statement, Wu closed in Spanish with the phrase “Si, se puede, siempre.” The family announced Huerta’s death through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, based in Bakersfield, California. The foundation requested privacy during the mourning period and said it will announce plans for future tributes in the coming weeks.