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BAKERSFIELD — United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta remained in critical condition Tuesday after undergoing surgery to stem bleeding from a rare opening in an artery. 

Family members gathered at the bedside of the 70-year-old labor and women’s rights activist in the intensive care unit at Bakersfield Heart Hospital. Huerta was on life support and sedated, but was beginning to open her eyes and reach for respiratory tubes running into her throat, giving her family hope that she will recover. 

“With prayers and that great fighting spirit we’ve come to know her by we’re hoping it all comes together for her,” said Emilio Huerta, one of her 11 children. 

After surgery Monday morning to repair an aortic artery in her intestines, her progress was monitored by the minute for the first three hours. 

“They told us that the odds were against us at that point,” Emilio Huerta said. “She has improved in the sense that her bleeding has stopped and she didn’t have any cardiac arrest and the likelihood of that is less and less.” 

Huerta was first hospitalized last Wednesday for treatment of a bleeding ulcer, and was released Friday. She began feeling ill again the next day and was readmitted Sunday, family members said. 

Huerta was a young elementary school teacher in the farm-rich San Joaquin Valley when she decided to follow another calling in 1955. 

“I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she once said. “I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.” 

She began working with Cesar Chavez and in 1962 co-founded the National Farm Workers Association – the forerunner to the UFW – where the single mother of seven earned a reputation as a fearless fighter. Chavez died in 1993. 

Emilio Huerta was optimistic that his mother would show the courage she did 12 years ago when she recovered after being critically injured during a San Francisco rally called to protest presidential candidate George Bush’s opposition to the UFW grape boycott. 

The 5-foot, 100-pound woman suffered three broken ribs, a pulverized spleen and required more than a dozen blood transfusions after being caught between advancing police officers who were thrusting their batons into the crowd of demonstrators. 

The city paid about $850,000 to settle her lawsuit in what was the city’s largest-ever police misconduct settlement. A grand jury investigating the matter chose not to bring charges, but recommended sweeping changes in crowd-control policies. 

Huerta stepped down as the UFW’s secretary-treasurer in September to help campaign for Al Gore. 

Last year she was honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights by President Clinton for her lifelong work as a labor activist.