Gregory Nava Pays Tribute to Dolores Huerta, the Icon Who Entrusted Him With Her Story

Director Gregory Nava is remembering Dolores Huerta, the civil rights leader who died Wednesday at age 96, as both a close friend and the subject of the film he has spent years preparing. Huerta introduced Nava to his wife, Barbara Martinez Jitner, and was a witness at their wedding.

Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers and the figure behind the phrase "Sí, se puede," died Wednesday morning at her home, surrounded by family. A family spokesperson said the cause was cancer.

Nava and Martinez Jitner drove to Bakersfield, Calif., on Tuesday night to say goodbye. In a joint statement, they wrote that they were "blessed to be by Dolores' side" and described her as "a great light and a fearless warrior for justice." They added that she "set the world ablaze with her passion for equality."

The couple have worked for roughly three years on the first dramatic feature about Huerta's life, first reported by Variety in April 2024. Nava is writing and directing, while Martinez Jitner is co-writing and producing. Many filmmakers had sought Huerta's life rights, but she chose the two people she had known for decades. In her final years, she spent more than 70 hours telling them things she had never shared with anyone.

"It has been one of the greatest privileges of our professional lives, and a deeply personal trust," they said, promising to honor it "with tenderness and care." When the project was announced, Nava called Huerta "like an earthquake that shook this country," and she praised him as a maker of "classic movies that are the most authentic and impactful of our American Latino experience."

Nava earned an Oscar nomination for the original screenplay of "El Norte," his 1983 drama about two Guatemalan siblings who cross into the United States. He later made "Mi Familia" and "Selena," the 1997 film that made Jennifer Lopez a movie star. All three are in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. Martinez Jitner has collaborated with him since "Selena," and in 2002 became the first Latina to executive produce a primetime network drama, PBS' "American Family," which Nava created.

Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernández on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico. After a year teaching elementary school, she left the classroom, having seen hungry children arrive barefoot, and decided organizing their parents would help them more. In 1962 she and Cesar Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association, which became the UFW. She helped lead the 1965 Delano grape strike with Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong and negotiated the first field contracts.

In 1988, a police officer beat her with a baton at a protest outside a George H.W. Bush fundraiser in San Francisco, breaking four ribs and rupturing her spleen. She recovered and spent the following decade recruiting Latinas to run for office. President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and California made April 10 "Dolores Huerta Day" in 2018. She had 11 children. In March, she told The New York Times that Chavez raped her in 1966, a secret she had kept for 60 years. "My silence ends here," she said.

Nava presented Huerta with the Icon Award at the Critics Choice Association's Celebration of Latino Cinema and Television in Beverly Hills on Oct. 24, 2025. At 95, she urged young people in the room to get off the sidewalk and into the street. "Today, we mourn," Nava and Martinez Jitner wrote. "The baton is now in our hands." They closed with her signature words: "Sí, se puede."