Dolores Huerta

Dolores Fernández was born in 1930 in a mining town in New Mexico, and after her parents divorced she was raised by her mother in Stockton, California, where her mother ran a hotel and let farm workers' families stay for free. She trained as a teacher, but later said she quit because she could not stand seeing children come to school hungry and shoeless when their parents were working the fields.

In 1955 she joined the Community Service Organization, where she met César Chávez, and in 1962 they founded the National Farm Workers Association. She was its main negotiator, sitting across from growers who had never dealt with a woman, let alone a Mexican-American one, and in 1970 she negotiated the first union contracts in the grape industry. She ran the boycott in New York, lobbied to end the bracero programme of imported contract labour, and pushed through the 1975 California law giving farm workers the right to organise. Through much of this she was raising eleven children, often leaving them with supporters.

In 1988, at 58, she was clubbed by San Francisco police at a peaceful protest against George H. W. Bush, suffering broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. She won a settlement and the police changed their crowd-control rules.

She has said her role was long overlooked because she was a woman. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and in her nineties still runs a foundation that trains community organisers.