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Revelations that the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union sexually abused young girls and women, including fellow civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, has set off a bomb in Latino communities and movement spaces
Like many others, I’ve spent the last few days looking at the many iconic photos of Dolores Huerta, the renowned feminist, labor organizer, and powerhouse co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) Union. In one of my favorites taken in Salinas, California, Huerta gently holds a microphone up to her mouth with a slight smile on her face, her other hand in the air commanding the attention of the room.
The photo was taken during a UFW rally in 1970, just a few years after Huerta said she was raped by Chicano civil rights leader and union co-founder, César Chávez. For Latinos nationwide grappling with Huerta’s recent revelation, Chávez’s legacy is forever fragmented: the time before and the time after we learned he was a rapist.
As part of an investigation by The New York Times published March 18, Huerta for the first time publicly disclosed the sexual and emotional abuse she experienced at the hands of her comrade while they were the public faces of the Latino-led farmworker organizing movement. Together, they helped obtain union contracts, higher wages, and more dignified working conditions for farmworkers, in part by organizing a grape boycott. It was also in a secluded grape field where Chávez raped Huerta—a tactic commonly deployed by other rapists against their unsuspecting compañeras in agriculture who toil alongside them.
While Chávez died in 1993 at the age of 66, Huerta, now 95, said she felt forced to keep the abuse a secret for fear no one would believe her, and because the revelation had the potential to delegitimize the movement. Her decision is surely not unfamiliar to women abused by men in social justice movements.
Alongside Huerta, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas also detailed their experiences with Chávez. Now in their 60s, both women were the children of UFW staff members, and Chávez was a figure they revered for his power, influence, and commitment to justice. He wielded these attributes to groom Murguia and Rojas and sexually abuse them for years—a dynamic not unfamiliar to many survivors.
It is a stunning revelation that the most prominent Mexican American leader in U.S. history, a man who helped transform labor rights for those working in conditions akin to slavery, was also a pedophile and rapist.
Or is it?
“Cesar Chavez is just a man,” said Esmeralda Lopez in the Times investigation. Lopez, also the daughter of a UFW staff member, was a teenager in 1988 when she became the target of 61-year-old Chávez. Though she successfully rebuffed his advances, the experience stuck with her. “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” she said. “The movement—that’s the hero.”
But a hero he was. A 1983 Los Angeles Times poll revealed that Chávez was the Latino that Latinos in California admired most. Intentional or not, Chávez’s outsized presence and position as movement figurehead eclipsed the sacrifices, contributions, and efforts of countless farmworkers, activists, and organizers—especially women. Even decades after his death, our communities have actively maintained Chávez’s hero status, even as his legacy was already frayed at the edges.
When I was a child, my father made sure I knew César Chávez’s name. I had never heard of Dolores Huerta. The same was true in my California public school. I was 8 years old when Chávez died. He is the only Mexican American I can ever recall being introduced to as part of my K-12 education. Still, learning about his achievements as a young person led to a powerful realization: Everyday people can rise up against injustice. Chávez was “our people,” my dad would say, and this instilled in me a sense of pride I didn’t previously carry.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how directly Chávez’s work impacted my family. When my dad came to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant, it was activists with El Movimiento, or the Chicano Rights Movement, who helped him enroll in community college classes and learn English. Thanks to the organizing work of UFW, a farmworker family member who first came to the U.S. as part of the brutal Bracero Program later experienced vastly different working conditions as a citizen in California’s Central Valley, where two generations in our family once worked the grapevines.
As a movement journalist covering injustices in agriculture, I have thought of Chávez often, mostly of his initial disdain for undocumented workers, his eventual evolution on the subject, and the countless ways that conditions in American fields have worsened since his death. My investigation of gender-based violence in agriculture, published last September, now feels more prescient than ever.
The truth is that any of our families and movements are shadowed by César Chávezes, and ours is a country and a culture haunted by the specter of sexual violence.
Revelations of Chávez’s abuse feel earth-shattering, largely because of who we believed him to be. The truth is that any of our families and movements are shadowed by César Chávezes, and ours is a country and a culture haunted by the specter of sexual violence.
Even so, I was completely distraught over the revelations of Chávez’s abuse, even as I’ve reported multiple investigations revealing the dangers and inevitable harms that occur when movements place people on pedestals. All day I fielded messages from other grief-stricken Latinas, including survivors, farmworkers, and organizers. I sobbed reading the accounts from Huerta, Murguia, and Rojas. Because their abuse was ignored. Because they deserved better. Because I understand how culturally—and within our culture—women are sacrificed to protect the men who abuse them. I will never get over how easily we set our women ablaze—especially as someone who’s been licked by the flames.
I dreaded speaking to my dad the day the Chávez news broke. While we are incredibly close, largely because he is now a very different man from the one who raised me, he was my introduction to gender-based violence. The conditions he cultivated in my childhood home led me to internalize a very particular message about girlhood: the safety of the marginalized men who abuse us is predicated on our silence. It is because of my father and other abusive men in my family that I can relate to the way Huerta holds Chávez’s duality. After the revelations were made public, Huerta spoke to journalist John Quiñones, acknowledging that Chávez had “an evil side,” but that she still hoped “his legacy would live on in the things that were accomplished.”
As I suspected, my dad had nothing to say about the allegations against Chávez—that he molested and raped children; that he raped Huerta; that he used his position of power to harm young girls and women. Instead, my dad questioned Huerta’s reason for going public, adamant she aimed to destroy Chávez’s legacy. Nevermind that she has been the torchbearer of that legacy for 60 years, and like Murguias and Rojas, she has been forced to live in the inescapable shadow of her rapist. I abruptly ended our call.
As the media frenzy now ramps up, with legacy outlets competing for more gory details and reporters vying to be among the first to re-traumatize Huerta, a bomb has gone off in Latino communities and movement spaces. In some ways, Chávez was all that Mexican American communities had. We are otherwise not allowed to make history. In broader American culture, we are ahistorical, always foreign or newly arrived. This country could not survive without Latino farmworkers, and Chávez was our small slice of America—proof that there was once a time when people outside of our communities recognized and valued our contributions to this country.
Now, during an era of racial animus toward Latinos and catastrophic conditions for farmworkers and other low-wage workers, how do you erase César Chávez, who is the namesake of streets and parks nationwide? What do parents and educators say to the young Latinas who attend the 86 public schools named after a man now known for using his position as a Chicano civil rights leader to sexually abuse girls like them?
Grappling with Chávez’s true legacy—as a civil rights leader and a rapist—requires more than scrubbing his name from every street sign and school marquee.
Murguia said she decided to publicly share her story for the first time because she learned that a street near her home in Bakersfield, California, was in the process of being renamed Cesar Chavez Boulevard. While there is a growing chorus to purge Chávez from California’s public memory, his victims never had the power or the luxury—even as Chávez’s abuse of young girls and women appeared to be an open secret. UFW’s own archive, the Times reported, contained items such as audio recordings of Chávez repeatedly calling Huerta “a stupid bitch” during board meetings and an unsettling letter a 13-year-old Rojas wrote to Chávez in 1974.
Grappling with Chávez’s true legacy—as a civil rights leader and a rapist—requires more than scrubbing his name from every street sign and school marquee. While these demands are important, how far do they go in a country that only seems to appreciate powerful men who abuse their power? I don’t disagree with removing Chávez’s name from public places, but as a survivor, these efforts feel hollow while living under the regime of a twice-elected rapist. But none of us can really say what justice looks like for Chávez’s surviving victims; that is for them to decide.
What I do know is that next time I see Chávez’s face on a children’s book when I’m browsing a bookstore, or I catch sight of him painted on a mural two stories high, I will not pause to consider his leadership or recount his many achievements for our people. Instead, I will think only of Huerta, Murguias, and Rojas, hoping that by sharing their stories, they finally felt free to step into the light.
Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
Tina Vásquez is the features editor at Prism. She covers gender justice, workers’ rights, and immigration. Follow her on Twitter @TheTinaVasquez.