In the days after revelations about Cesar Chavez and his abuse of two young girls more than fifty years ago, I rewatched Dolores, the 2017 PBS documentary about Dolores Huerta and her founding role in the United Farm Workers (UFW)—a role equally as important as Chavez’s. In 1968, she had moved to New York to work on strategy for the famous farmworkers’ grape boycott. There she met with Gloria Steinem, who helped her begin to think about women’s rights within the larger labor movement. “I was in New York when the feminist movement was being born,” Huerta recalls in the documentary, “but my mind was focused on getting all of those women at those conventions to support the farm workers.” There were few women of color identifying as feminist at the time, as Angela Davis explains, making Huerta’s involvement all the more important, given she was also the only woman on the executive board of the UFW.
Yet despite her role, her vision, her political connections, and her skills in coleadership with Chavez, Huerta was the target of sexism and misogyny—not only from men who were opposed to the movement, but also from those within it. The film depicts the tragic and infuriating moment when Huerta is passed over as Chavez’s successor to lead the UFW after his death. Her struggle against the male leadership’s treatment of her eventually led her to step down from the executive board and leave the UFW altogether. Those within the Latino community who have criticized Huerta for waiting until now—after the revelations about Chavez and at the age of ninety-six—to reveal that he had raped her can’t appreciate that the culture within the movement would have made it impossible for her to do so any earlier. Indeed, if anything, these criticisms suggest that the misogyny of the 1960s and ’70s still persists today.
Huerta was in fact raped twice by Chavez—both times becoming pregnant and giving birth to children she placed with other families. “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” she said in her statement. “The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way. I channeled everything I had into advocating on behalf of millions of farmworkers and others who were suffering and deserved equal rights.”
Huerta had no prior knowledge of the allegations brought by Chavez’s victims, Ana Murguia (who was sexually abused for four years beginning at age thirteen) and Debra Rojas (who was abused when she was twelve and again at fifteen). According to the report, Chavez’s grooming of them began when they were just eight or nine. Both girls were daughters of UFW organizers and volunteers, people who admired and trusted Chavez.
Of course, Chavez had inspired millions more beyond the movement, in time entering the pantheon of labor- and civil-rights leaders in this country. Streets and schools were named after him, and statues and murals went up in cities and towns throughout the West and Southwest. But within hours of the revelations, the honors and memorials were being withdrawn, removed, or painted over. A statue in San Fernando, California, in one of the country’s largest Cesar Chavez memorials, was among the first to come down. The UFW canceled its participation in upcoming Cesar Chavez celebrations, issuing a statement that called the allegations “shocking, indefensible and something we are taking seriously.” On March 19, Los Angeles canceled all Cesar Chavez celebrations and proclaimed the last Monday of March Farmworkers Day. California governor Gavin Newsom followed suit on March 26, signing a bill to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day just days before the annual statewide observation.
The swift reaction of civic and community leaders outpaced receipt of the news by many in the Latino community—who saw images and references to their Latino hero vanishing before they could even digest the reporting about his abuses. On social media, many male Latinos lamented this loss; others, angry, interpreted the removal of Chaves’s name and likeness from public spaces as an erasure of Latino U.S. history and the dismantling of Chavez’s legacy. Others called for the same swift justice for those named in the Epstein files, arguing that the only reason images of Chavez were removed so quickly was because he was a brown man—not white, wealthy, or the president of the United States.
Yet there was little to no mention of the justice owed to Chavez’s survivors, including Huerta. The women who came forward were accused of knocking down a Latino civil-rights hero at a time when anti-immigrant violence and rhetoric against Latinos is being normalized by the federal government. But focusing on preserving the image and memory of Chavez at the expense of his victims is a continuation of the same misogyny that enabled Chavez to commit his crimes in the first place—and that kept his victims from coming forward until now.
In the PBS documentary, there are scenes of men criticizing Huerta as “a loud woman” who “talked too much,” a woman whose values were questionable because she had eleven children from different men and outside of marriage. The Times even acquired audio in which Chavez is heard calling Huerta a “stupid bitch” during a UFW board meeting where she was the only woman present. It is hard to imagine how she carried on as long as she did, before finally resigning from the UFW in 2002. The documentary goes on to show how in the years to come, Fox News and conservative politicians dismissed her as a nobody. Tom Horne, who was the Arizona State Superintendent in 2006, famously reduced her to “a former girlfriend of Cesar Chavez.” Angela Davis insists on the importance of recognizing “the extent to which Dolores was viewed as a subsidiary figure…the assumption was he [Chavez] was the leader and Dolores was the housekeeper of the movement.”
In her farewell address at the annual UFW convention in 2002, Huerta made what seemed to be a final push for women’s leadership: “It is very important that we always have women in our committees. I will continue to work for you. Not in this board here, but I will always be there working for the farmers, working for our children, working for our Latino people.”
Our Latino people haven’t been given the opportunity to honor the many leaders of social-justice movements, women’s work and queer work especially. Instead of viewing the removal of Chavez’s name and image from public spaces as a loss, we should act thoughtfully but swiftly to fill those spaces with memorials and tributes to the communities that have reclaimed their power and agency. Examples include the Filipino farmworkers community led by Larry Itliong, which participated in the 1965 Delano grape strike, and the farmworkers and students who formed El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers Theater), a troupe led by Luis Valdez, whose performances both empowered the resolve of the actors and educated the farmworker audiences about their plight and their rights. We need to remember the leaders and activists whose collaborative work exemplifies the power of a united vision for justice and equity.
Those who stoke fear of and hatred for Latinos in this country no doubt relish the disappearance of Chavez’s name from streets, schools, and parks, these inconvenient reminders of the power of the Latino community. But the community must also reckon with our own demons. We need to ensure a stronger and more equitable coalition among leaders and movements, and to unite for justice. The farmworkers’ movement was never meant to be about one man (or men), but the people—all the people. In the aftermath of the revelations about Chavez, that’s the ideal we must continue to pursue.
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