Director Gregory Nava Remembers Dolores Huerta, the Civil Rights Icon Who Introduced Him to His Wife and Trusted Them With Her Life Story — SkimNews
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- Dolores Huerta, the United Farm Workers co-founder who gave the country the phrase “Sí, se puede,” died Wednesday morning at her home surrounded by family at age 96; a family spokesperson said the cause was cancer.
- Gregory Nava and Barbara Martinez Jitner drove to Bakersfield Tuesday night to say goodbye, calling Huerta “a great light and a fearless warrior for justice” and writing, “The baton is now in our hands. We will carry it forward, Dolores.”
- Barbara Martinez Jitner, Nava’s wife and longtime collaborator since “Selena,” spent the final years of Huerta’s life with the couple as she told them for more than 70 hours things she had never told anyone; she had introduced them and served as a witness at their wedding, and is co-writing and producing Nava’s first dramatic feature about Huerta’s life.
- Cesar Chavez — Huerta told The New York Times in March that the farmworkers movement partner who was her life partner raped her in 1966 in a secluded grape field, a secret she carried for 60 years out of fear it would unravel the union; “My silence ends here,” she said.
- United Farm Workers began as the National Farm Workers Association, which Huerta co-founded with Chavez in 1962; she helped lead the 1965 Delano grape strike alongside Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong and negotiated the first contracts in the fields.
- Dolores Huerta was beaten with a police baton in 1988 outside a George H.W. Bush fundraiser in San Francisco, breaking four ribs and rupturing her spleen; she recovered and spent the next decade recruiting Latinas to run for office, and later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012 and a state holiday, April 10 “Dolores Huerta Day,” in California in 2018.
- Critics Choice Association — at its Oct. 24, 2025 Celebration of Latino Cinema and Television in Beverly Hills, Huerta received the Icon Award from Nava, the last time the two were in a room together, when she was 95 and urged the young people in the room to get off the sidewalk and into the street.
Why it matters: Huerta gave life rights to Nava and Martinez Jitner and spent more than 70 hours telling them things she had never told anyone, so her death hands the filmmakers a first-person record of the movement’s architect. The March account of her 1966 rape by Cesar Chavez, kept secret for 60 years, is now public record for the biopic.
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