In today’s news and commentary, Dolores Huerta, labor leader, feminist, and civil rights icon, dies at 96.

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers and cemented her place in history as one of the nation’s most influential labor leaders, passed away in her home on Wednesday.

Huerta was born in New Mexico and moved to California with her mother and brothers as a child. She began her career as an elementary school teacher, but, frustrated by her students’ poor living conditions, left to become an organizer with the Community Service Organization, a Mexican American civil rights group. There, in 1955,  she met César Chávez who was working as an organizer. In 1962 the two founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers, to organize the largely Mexican American and Filipino laborers who picked the nation’s crops. The union fought for higher wages, clean drinking water and toilets in the fields, rest breaks, and protection from pesticides, along with the right to bargain collectively.

Huerta helped lead the 1965 Delano grape strike and the national grape boycott that followed; she was the union’s chief negotiator for its landmark 1970 contracts with grape growers. In 1972 she coined the rallying cry “Sí, se puede,” Spanish for “Yes, we can.” She founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002, and in 2012 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, Huerta said Chávez, who co-founded the farmworker movement with her, sexually abused her in the 1960s, leading to the birth of two children. She kept it secret, she said, out of fear that going public would jeopardize everything the movement had achieved for workers.

Though she was best known for her leadership in the United Farm Workers, Huerta remained committed to social and political activism throughout her life. Even into her 90s, Huerta marched in protests and spoke in cities across the country about race, poverty, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights. The Dolores Huerta Foundation, based in Bakersfield, will carry on her work organizing low-income communities, as she did until her final months. More than half a century after she coined it, “Sí, se puede,” still echoes at farmworker marches, immigrant-rights rallies and union halls.