Ross taught Huerta to make demands of people, she said, especially public officials. He also instilled the importance of voting.

While at CSO, Huerta founded the Agricultural Workers Association, led voter registration drives and met Cesar Chavez in 1955, while he was an organizer with CSO. Chavez would later become CSO's executive director in 1959.

Ross died in 1992, but Huerta described Ross as her "spiritual father" for the rest of her life, and the first person to teach her and Chavez community-organizing techniques.

In 1962, Huerta and Chavez left CSO to found the National Farm Workers Association, which would later become UFW, a union that continues to advocate for the rights of agricultural workers.

They were motivated to found the association after hearing from scores of California farmworkers working under harsh conditions: no benefits, low wages, and no access to bathrooms or water while in the fields. The Bracero Program, established through a 1942 agreement between the U.S. and Mexico, recruited Mexican workers to address wartime agricultural labor shortages and continued until 1964.