‘She always showed up’: Bay Area remembers Dolores Huerta

Dave Cortese was in the middle of a San Jose City Council meeting during his second term when he received a message that legendary labor leader Dolores Huerta was outside and wanted to speak with him.

He quietly left the dais and met her in the newly built rotunda where she had pulled up two chairs facing each other. She was organizing children’s immigration marches in five cities across the country, she told him, and “I need you to organize the San Jose march.”

RELATED: Photos: The influential life of Dolores Huerta

It was a daunting task, but he agreed on the spot, then asked her, “how do you do that?”

“How do I do what?”

“How do you get people to say yes, like I just did?”

“You have to be unconflicted” in your values, Cortese, now a state senator, recalled her saying. “If you’re unconflicted, then you’ll have the power to convince people to follow you.”

It’s a message that has stayed with him since. Huerta died at her Bakersfield home Wednesday at age 96, leaving a legacy of activism fighting for farmworker and civil rights across California and beyond. She co-founded the United Farm Workers Union with Cesar Chavez, who once had a home in San Jose, and she was a frequent visitor to the greater Bay Area where for decades she supported Democratic candidates for local office — even San Jose school boards — and often accepted invitations from nonprofits as keynote speaker.

She marched down Main Street in Watsonville in 1997 with Jesse Jackson to support strawberry workers, appeared with protesters on a hunger strike in 2004 at Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza to bring attention to education inequities and in 2008, joined Democratic hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at a San Jose rally. And in June, just four months before her death, she showed up at Chase Center for a Golden State Valkyries WNBA game.

To Gabby Chavez-Lopez, executive director of the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley that develops leaders and advocates policy for the Latina community, Huerta was “one of the most iconic figures in our community.”

“She always showed up,” said Chavez-Lopez, including as a speaker at her organization’s 2019 annual brunch in downtown San Jose. “Every time that I would spend time with her, I was just so moved by how much power could be in such a small body and how strong she was in her conviction about justice, equality, dignity, civil rights.”

She first met Huerta in a lettuce field outside of Bakersfield when Chavez-Lopez was a budding activist in San Francisco, joining about two dozen others for a lesson on the health effects of “pesticide drift” and the leadership needed to fight it.

Silicon Valley’s tech economy seemed like a world away from the lettuce field, but “the floodgates were opened and I was like, we’ve got to do this, and like Dolores, it wasn’t just about like me taking that action, but how do I open up doors of opportunity for others to be able to take action?” she said.

Olivia Navarro, who works for Laborers’ International Union of North America and is vice chair of the state Democratic Party’s Chicano Latino Caucus, said she ran for San Jose City Council in 2024 at the urging of Huerta, whom she had known for 12 years and considered a mentor. She lost the race, but was inspired by Huerta’s belief in her and that “we need champions to be fighting for working families.”

In March, Huerta publicly revealed that Cesar Chavez, her fellow farmworker movement leader who died in 1993, had raped her as a young woman. Chavez-Lopez said she had difficulty coming to terms with Huerta’s years of silence.

“I just was proud that she was finally able to share that truth, but was disappointed that she didn’t feel safe enough and supported enough to be able to share it sooner,” Chavez-Lopez said, “and also not surprised considering that she really had this ethos about her that nothing was about her in particular. That this was bigger than her. It was bigger than Cesar. As women, we do that a lot. We don’t make it about us.”

Blanca Alvarado, the first Latina elected to San Jose City Council who once marched alongside Cesar Chavez, was devastated by the revelation. But with Huerta, there was always a “never-ending optimism,” she said.

“In so many ways, as a good Catholic, and Dolores was Catholic too, she was the epitome of loving thy neighbor as oneself,” said Alvarado, who is 95. “Her life was a life of hardship and difficulty, I’m sure. But giving her life to the well-being of others was sacrificial. It was intentional. It was driven.”

The last time the two pioneers saw each other was at an event at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in East San Jose, sometime within the past two years.

“We just held hands and said, ‘life has been good, life remains good, life will always be good,’” Alvarado said. “It was a bond that we shared.”

Huerta’s name graced an Oakland charter school before it closed in 2009, and remains atop a San Jose middle school. Her image is fixed in mosaic tile on an exterior wall at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in East San Jose in a mural that commemorates the visit of Robert Kennedy to the church with Cesar Chavez. She holds a sign that says “huelga,” or strike.

On Wednesday, San Jose City Hall lowered the U.S. flag to half-staff in her honor.

A pre-planned ceremony Wednesday honoring Huerta as the 2026 YWCA Empowerment Award recipient from the Golden Gate Silicon Valley chapter went forward.

“At 96 years old this year, Dolores reminded us once again what it means to be fearless, speaking out about her own sexual assault and supporting the stories of other survivors within the labor movement,” Adriana Caldera Boroffice, the chapter’s CEO, said. “She reminds us of the power of our voices, and that no movement of liberation can silence the people it claims to support.”

Cortese, who attended the YWCA event Wednesday, said he has often reflected on Huerta’s words to him two decades ago about the power of “unconflicted” values. He comes from a longtime San Jose farming family himself, having worked as a child side-by-side with Latino farmworkers picking apricots in their East San Jose orchards. His own father, Dominic Cortese, who also became a local and state Democratic politician, marched with farmworkers despite being a grower himself.

“Your father was one of the good growers,” Cortese recalled Huerta telling him three decades ago.

Over the years, Huerta seemed indefatigable, he said. He recalled Huerta asking him for a ride from their meeting at a Los Gatos coffee shop back to Oakland. When Cortese explained that his trip to Oakland included taking BART from Fremont, she asked to join him. Cortese paused, however, when he was getting off and Huerta — at least 90 then — stayed on to make a transfer to her next destination.

“Don’t worry about me. I know what to do,” she told him.

“And then I’m thinking, how stupid of me to think she wouldn’t know what she’s doing on a damn BART line,” he said. “She’s basically conquered the world.”

Staff columnist Sal Pizarro contributed to this report.