Dolores Huerta

co-founder, United Farm Workers of America

Dolores Huerta is president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which is dedicated to community organizing. She co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and is also an active member of the Fund for the Feminist Majority. As legislative advocate for the Community Service Organization and the United Farm Workers Union, she was instrumental in passing historic legislation which included securing disability insurance for farm workers, printing voting ballots in Spanish, issuing drivers licenses in the driver's ethnic language, insuring public assistance eligibility for resident immigrants, and legalization for 1 million farm workers under the Immigration Reform Act of l984-85. Huerta has received numerous awards, among them the Eleanor Roosevelt Humans Rights Award from President Clinton in 1998, the Puffin/Nation Award for Creative Citizenship, the Ohtli award from the Mexican government, the Smithsonian Institution James Smithson Award, and nine honorary doctorates from universities throughout the United States. She was also named one of Ms. Magazine's three most important women of 1997 and Ladies Home Journal's 100 most important women of the 20th Century.