Dolores Huerta says Trump does not know history, urges Latino voters to act

Dolores Huerta said Donald Trump’s disparaging remarks about Mexicans showed he “does not know history,” and she urged Latinos in California, Texas and other states to push for change in the November elections.

Huerta, born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, has spent more than six decades at the center of Latino labor and civil-rights organizing. She co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chávez in 1962, and that group later became the United Farm Workers. Her own political identity was forged in the California farmworker movement, where the Delano grape strike that began in 1965 became one of the defining organizing battles of the era.

That history matters because Huerta’s appeal was not just a rebuke of Trump’s rhetoric. It was a call to use the kind of grassroots discipline that built the farmworker movement in the first place: register voters, turn out families, and translate cultural memory into electoral power. The United Farm Workers has long pointed to the low pay farmworkers faced in 1965, when grape pickers were making an average of 90 cents an hour plus 10 cents per lug picked, as an example of the exploitation that helped drive the movement’s organizing.

Huerta’s comments landed as the 2026 midterm cycle takes shape ahead of the general election on November 3. California already held its state primary on June 2, and Texas remains a state where statewide races are part of the current cycle. In both states, Latino voters can help decide contests for governor, Congress and other offices, making Huerta’s message as much about strategy as symbolism. Her warning to Trump was rooted in the past, but her target was the November electorate now taking shape across some of the country’s largest Latino communities.