In Memoriam: Dolores Huerta (1930–2026), A Life of Activism, Resistance, and Cinema

Dolores by Peter Bratt

Dolores Huerta, the pioneering Mexican-American labor leader, feminist, and civil rights activist whose tireless advocacy helped transform the struggle for social justice in the United States, died Wednesday, October 28, at her home in Bakersfield, California. She was 96.

One of the most influential figures in the history of the Chicano movement, Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which later became the United Farm Workers, helping lead historic strikes and boycotts that secured landmark protections for agricultural workers. Over more than six decades, she championed labor rights, immigrant rights, women's equality, and political empowerment, inspiring generations with the rallying cry she coined: "¡Sí se puede!"

Her extraordinary life and legacy have also been extensively documented on film, making her a recurring presence in the history of Chicano and Latino cinema. From the pioneering documentaries of the 1970s to contemporary films exploring labor struggles, feminism, and cultural identity, Huerta's appearances on screen reflect both the evolution of Latino filmmaking and the enduring relevance of the movements she helped shape.

Among her earliest cinematic appearances was Yo Soy Chicano (1972), the groundbreaking documentary produced and written by pioneering Chicano filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño and directed by Barry Nye. Considered the first Chicano-produced documentary about the Mexican-American experience to be broadcast nationally, the film explored the history of the Chicano movement and its struggle for political and cultural empowerment.

Huerta also contributed her voice to Chicana (1979), the groundbreaking short documentary by filmmaker Sylvia Morales, which recovered the often-overlooked contributions of Mexican and Mexican-American women to history, culture, and political struggles. Three decades later, Morales returned to Huerta in A Crushing Love: Chicanas, Motherhood and Activism (2009), an intimate documentary examining the lives of five prominent Chicana activists navigating the competing demands of motherhood and political commitment. Alongside figures including Cherríe Moraga, Elizabeth Martínez, Alicia Escalante, and Martha Cotera, Huerta reflects on the personal sacrifices and complexities of dedicating a lifetime to social change.

Her central role in the farmworkers' movement has been chronicled in numerous documentaries, including The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers' Struggle (1997), The Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers (2014), which recovers the contributions of Filipino agricultural workers, and Food Chains (2014), an examination of labor exploitation in the American food industry.

Perhaps the most significant cinematic portrait of her life came with Dolores (2017), the acclaimed feature documentary by Mexican-American filmmaker Peter Bratt. Executive produced by musician Carlos Santana, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before receiving a theatrical release and a national PBS broadcast.

Through extensive archival footage and intimate interviews with Huerta, her family, and fellow activists, Bratt's documentary offers a sweeping account of her political achievements while confronting the sexism, personal sacrifices, and historical marginalization that shaped her experience. More than a conventional biography, Dolores challenges the male-centered narratives of the American labor movement, examining how Huerta's contributions were often overshadowed in historical accounts and bringing renewed attention to her independent leadership and achievements.

Her influence also extended into narrative cinema, with actress Rosario Dawson portraying her in Cesar Chavez (2014), the biographical drama directed by Mexican actor and filmmaker Diego Luna.

Huerta's appearances in films such as Miss Representation (2011), Carlos Almaraz: Playing with Fire (2019), and A Song for Cesar: Beware a Movement That Sings (2021) further demonstrate the breadth of her cultural and political influence, connecting her activism to broader conversations about gender, art, and the role of cultural expression in social movements.

More recently, she appeared in American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez (2026), David Alvarado's award-winning documentary about the pioneering Chicano playwright and filmmaker whose work with El Teatro Campesino emerged from the farmworkers' movement. Winner of the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, the film revisits the cultural and political ferment of the Chicano movement and the essential role of theater in the struggle for labor rights.

Huerta was also the subject of the 2025 documentary short Seeds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Dolores Huerta, directed by Ari Fishman, in which she reflected on her decades of organizing and the importance of passing the struggle for justice to future generations.

Earlier this year, Huerta revealed that César Chávez had sexually abused her in the 1960s and that she had remained silent for decades to protect the farmworkers' movement. The revelations have prompted a reassessment of Chávez's legacy and the history of the movement they helped build together.

Over the decades, Huerta appeared in numerous documentaries, speaking about the struggles she helped lead and the people she worked alongside. These films also capture her humor, candor, and unwavering commitment to activism, offering a portrait of a woman who continued organizing well into her nineties.

From the early days of Chicano cinema to the documentaries of recent years, Huerta remained a familiar and formidable presence on screen. Her passing marks the end of an extraordinary life, but her voice and her story live on in the films she leaves behind.

Nicole Costa’s NO MONEY NO HONEY Wins Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Feature at NewFest

No Money No Honey Director Nicole Costa with protagonist Máxima Mauricio

No Money No Honey, the new feature documentary by New York-based Chilean filmmaker Nicole Costa, has won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary/Nonfiction Feature at the 38th NewFest, New York’s LGBTQ+ Film Festival.

The award follows the film’s acclaimed world premiere in competition at the Camden International Film Festival and its New York premiere at NewFest, where it competed in the festival’s documentary section.

Blending personal VHS footage spanning 1991 to 2004 with contemporary material filmed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, No Money No Honey traces the life of Máxima Mauricio, an Argentine nonbinary/travesti sex worker whose journey unfolds across Buenos Aires, Miami, and New York City. Through an intimate portrait shaped by decades of friendship, migration, and personal transformation, Costa explores queer memory, survival, and the ongoing struggle for self-determination.

The documentary also evokes the legacy of pioneering transgender activist Lorena Borjas, situating Máxima’s personal story within a broader history of trans and immigrant communities in the United States.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian feature The Riverbank / A Margem do Rio, directed by Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias, received a Special Mention in the International Narrative Feature competition. The film follows Izaquiel, a cleaner in the Brazilian city of Recife whose encounters with a fisherman draw him into a world of desire and violence amid the region’s mangrove forests. The debut feature by Carvalho and Farias previously won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

Reimagining the Possibilities of Trans Cinema: An interview With MICKEY Director Dano García

By: Guili Barki Minkovicius 

Mickey, the acclaimed feature documentary by award-winning trans Mexican filmmaker Dano García, had its New York premiere at the 38th NewFest: The New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival (October 15–25). Following its world premiere at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival, where it won the Global Audience Award, the film has continued an extensive international festival run.

Filmed over ten years, Mickey centers on Mickey Cundapí (she/her), the multidisciplinary trans artist known as Mis$ Mickey, and her longstanding friendship with García. The two first met at age 14 as students at a Catholic school in Mazatlán, Sinaloa. Through archival footage, artistic reenactments, digital avatars, and intimate conversations, the film revisits their shared history while exploring how memory can be reclaimed to imagine new ways of inhabiting the present.

Much like the film itself, my conversation with García unfolded in fragments. We first spoke before the screening at Nitehawk Cinema, ahead of official festival photographs. Afterward, a post-screening Q&A moderated by NewFest programmer Anton Astudillo opened up the central questions of the evening around representation, archival agency, and the possibilities of trans cinema.

Guided by Astudillo’s moderation, memory emerged as a primary focus—not as a static record of what happened, but as something that can be revisited, challenged, and transformed. Through reenactments, archival material, and play, Mickey creates room for subjects to return to difficult experiences without remaining confined to the meanings those experiences once held.

The evening concluded with a collective ¡Viva el cine trans!—an affirmation of the film's commitment to expanding not only who appears on screen, but who gets to shape cinema's formal language. The conversation that follows moves between these distinct moments, reflecting a work that resists linearity and easy categorization.

Mickey by Dano García

Since its world premiere at SXSW, Mickey has reached audiences across different festival circuits. How has it felt to see people embrace a film that takes such an unconventional approach?

It was subversive to bring a film like this to such an important festival and see audiences embrace it so warmly. The film is quite alternative in its approach, so it was beautiful and hopeful to discover that these new ways of telling stories—ones that don't fit the traditional documentary mold, or even the conventions of experimental cinema—could connect with so many people.

We made it in a very independent, almost homegrown way, with the intention of showing what trans cinema can be and what it means to make films from our own perspectives. Through cinema, we can exercise agency and create the possibility of changing things.

How did the project begin, and how did it evolve into a feature made over ten years?

Mickey began recording herself when she was around eleven. When I met her, she was already experimenting with makeup and cat ears, and her performances were disruptive in the context of the Catholic school we attended in Sinaloa. For me, meeting her was extraordinary. I didn't have many clear references for what I was seeing, and she was already finding ways to express herself.

Years later, when we were living together in Mexico City, we started playing with the material she had accumulated. I made a short film, and the project gradually grew into something much bigger. At first, we had no funding. We began recording conversations about the film with a webcam, talking about what it could become. Those conversations eventually became one of the film's central elements.

The project developed over ten years. As it grew, we received support that allowed us to expand its possibilities, including the reenactments and other fictional elements. We were bringing together different languages that already existed in our lives, from social media and online identities to video games and cinema.

How did Mickey's presence shape the film's form?

I think each film has its own rhythm and its own search. I connect strongly with dreams, and that often leads me toward forms of storytelling that aren't conventional or linear.

With Mickey, the form responds to Mickey's freedom. She is free, diverse, joyful, and full of life. The film had to find a way of being as free as she is. That freedom became contagious: it shaped not only my own process, but also the experience of everyone involved in making the film.

Ultimately, I think this is a film made with a great deal of love. It grew out of a friendship and a shared desire to imagine what cinema could be.

There are several mirrors and projections throughout Mickey. The film opens with a projection onto the body, and later there's a projection inside the cave. How did you think about the relationship between looking, projection, and self-recognition?

Cinema was born, in a sense, as a mirror of the colonizer—a way of seeing and representing the world through a colonial gaze. The obsidian mirror offers a different possibility: instead of simply reflecting an image outward, it invites us to look inward.

I think it was through Mickey that I was able to tell this story. Mickey's diary was important in allowing us to access different parts of her life. Through writing, she confronted her past and her shadows. I accompanied her through that process, and the film emerged from being alongside her as she revisited those experiences.

Mickey by Dano García

Did the film's structure emerge as you were editing, or were these connections already part of the project from the beginning?

We were editing and filming at the same time, so the process remained very alive. I would be working on the edit and then call Mickey to ask her to send me new videos. She would send them, and I would incorporate them into the film. The film kept evolving as we worked on it.

The film brings together archival footage, digital avatars, online culture, and reenactments. How did you develop this visual language?

I think it matters enormously where a film comes from, who is telling the story, and from what position it is being made. Mickey is trans cinema, made by trans and nonbinary people. It doesn't come from a hegemonic gaze, and it doesn't follow the linear narrative we've traditionally been taught to expect from documentary filmmaking.

The film is free in its form. It moves through dreams, desires, and different ways of searching for identity. Trans experiences are often represented as a linear journey, as though you move from one point to another and eventually arrive at a definitive version of yourself. But that reduces the experience. Being trans is also about desires, dreams, and other possibilities of becoming.

I think it's beautiful that the film resists categorization. That resistance is connected to the trans experience itself: people constantly try to put us into categories, but we don't necessarily fit within them.

There's an avatar that guides the film and takes us through Mickey's memories. We wanted to approach the past through the logic of a video game, using the avatar to revisit different moments in her life. Images that might seem insignificant—videos casually recorded on a phone, for example—acquire a different weight. They become gestures that help build a much larger story.

The digital world is also important because we construct parts of our identities online. We wanted to bring those forms of self-representation into conversation with fiction and cinematic language. The glitch can also become a way of disrupting forms, breaking them apart, or transforming them.

This interview has been translated from Spanish and edited for length and clarity.

Venice Selection A LOOSE END by Daniel Hendler Named Uruguay’s Official Oscar Submission

A Loose End (Un cabo suelto), the third feature film from acclaimed Uruguayan director and actor Daniel Hendler (The Candidate, Norberto's Deadline), has been selected as Uruguay's Official Submission for Best International Feature at the 99th Academy Awards®. The film had its world premiere in the Venice Spotlight section at the Venice International Film Festival, following industry recognition at San Sebastián, where it won the prestigious WIP LATAM Industry Award and received a Special Jury Mention.

A co-production between Cordón Films, Wanka Cine, and Nephilim Producciones—led by producers Micaela Solé, Ezequiel Borovinsky, Jorge Moreno, and Luis Collar—A Loose End showcases Hendler’s signature blend of subtle humor and quiet suspense. The film is anchored by a magnetic lead performance from Sergio Prina (The Snatch Thief) as the fugitive cop, alongside celebrated Argentine actress Pilar Gamboa (La Flor).

The film follows Santiago (Prina), an Argentine cop on the run who crosses into Uruguay to escape his own colleagues. There, he navigates a series of unpredictable obstacles, relying on his quick wit and the unexpected kindness of strangers. As he begins to build a life he never imagined, he discovers a fragile sense of belonging and meets a woman, Rocío (Gamboa), who might be the love of his life. What starts as a desperate flight evolves into an offbeat journey of reinvention, chance, and quiet resilience.

Blending dark comedy, western, road movie, and police thriller elements, A Loose End explores the fragile illusion of starting over and the fluid boundaries of identity and territory. Through Hendler’s precise direction and Prina's charismatic lead, the film delivers an inventive, deeply human, and delightfully unpredictable portrait of a life in transit.