Cesar Chavez, one of the founders of the United Farm Workers, who died in 1993, led a movement for the rights and dignity of a long-abused, neglected and exploited agricultural workforce. Through a series of marches, hunger strikes, boycotts and union drives, Chavez and his movement succeeded in winning crucial labor and civil rights protections and advancing the cause and status of the Latino civil rights movement nationwide.
He also, according to a new report from the New York Times, sexually harassed and assaulted women in his movement, and sexually abused and raped the daughters of some UFW organizers when they were girls.
The Times report provides extensive corroboration of allegations by two women, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, both now 66, that they were repeatedly molested by Chavez more than 50 years ago, beginning when they were 12 and 13 years old. The report also contains newly public allegations by Dolores Huerta, the renowned trade union activist and co-founder of UFW, that Chavez once pressured her to have sex with him on a work trip and then later raped her in a parked car – encounters that Huerta says led to pregnancies, which she strove to conceal before giving the resulting daughters away to be raised by others.
Murguia and Rojas, the women who say they were abused by Chavez as children, describe remarkably similar patterns of conduct by the union leader. The daughters of organizers, the girls had been raised to revere Chavez as a hero; early in their adolescence, they were each summoned by Chavez to his office, where he initiated sexual abuse. Both women say that the abuse went on for several years, while they were still children; Rojas says that when she was 15, Chavez arranged for her to travel with him from her home in La Paz, north of Los Angeles – where she lived with her parents in a community devoted to Chavez’s work, and near his compound – to Stockton, California, for a UFW march. While there, she says that Chavez took her to a motel and raped her. (Murguia says that Chavez’s sexual abuse of her did not include intercourse.) In her account to the Times, Rojas described looking at Chavez’s gun on the hotel night stand during the rape; he told her that he carried it for protection after receiving death threats.
Allegations also emerged in the investigation from two women who both say that they were sexually harassed by Chavez as young women in the movement. Esmeralda Lopez was just 19 when Chavez, then 61, offered to advance her career in exchange for sex while the two were on a work trip. She rebuffed him, and called her mother, Cynthia Bell, who was also a longtime union organizer in Chavez’s organization. On hearing her daughter’s story, Bell shared her own account of having been sexually harassed by Chavez when she was in her early 20s.
The breadth and consistency of these accounts of sexual misconduct by Chavez provided by five different women to the Times, all of whom knew the union leader through his activist work, suggest a long-term pattern of conduct by Chavez, and raise the possibility that other accusers may come forward in the future.
The Times also reviewed a letter that Rojas sent to Chavez in 1974, at the age of 13; by that point, he had been abusing her for several months. In the letter, which was written on children’s stationary in a bubbly, girlish hand, Rojas alternates between updates on her childhood friendships – “I might go roller skating next Friday” – and bashful, childlike allusions to sexuality. “I’m really glad I got to see you and spend time with you,” she writes. “Well, not like that. … I think of you all the time. Do you think of me?”
The letter is a disturbing document of the mind of a child who has been told that what is being done to her is love. “He did his grooming very well,” Rojas told the Times. “He should get an Academy Award for all he did.” She and Murguia both trace subsequent mental health struggles to their experiences of childhood sexual abuse at Chavez’s hands, with Rojas later struggling with drugs and alcohol and Murguia attempting suicide multiple times in her adolescence.
Rojas’s childhood letter to Chavez, alluding to her abuse, has been freely available, in Chavez’s personal archive at Wayne State University, for decades. But then, rumors of Chavez’s sexual behavior have also been swirling for years. Though the UFW championed sexual abstinence and respectability, and long opposed abortion and contraception, Chavez himself has long been known to have carried on multiple extramarital affairs, many of them with women in the movement; this much has already been documented in biographies of Chavez. In addition to the eight children he had with his wife, he fathered at least four others by other women, including the two he fathered via his nonconsensual encounters with Huerta.
But those who were close to Chavez or who value the legacy of the UFW have long been protective of Chavez’s legacy, and have allegedly discouraged women victimized by him from speaking out. Huerta, who will turn 96 in April, described her longtime reluctance to come forward about Chavez to the Times as a mixture of shock and various fears of alienation and disbelief, a combination that will be familiar to survivors. Huerta “said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her”.
Subsequent events suggest she may have been right to feel that way. After Rojas posted about her abuse in a private Facebook group devoted to those who had worked alongside Chavez more than a decade earlier, some who saw the comment accused her “of jeopardizing all that had been accomplished not only by Mr Chavez but her parents and those they marched alongside”.
It was in fact Chavez who endangered those accomplishments; Chavez who discredited his own legacy; and Chavez who should be considered responsible, now, for tarnishing the reputation of the union and endangering the reputation of Latino civil rights activism at a moment when immigrant laborers are facing horrific persecution by the Trump administration.
The embarrassment and grief that is now attached to these revelations about Chavez’s conduct are not the women’s responsibility or a result of them coming forward. They are Chavez’s responsibility, a result of his choices to harass, molest and rape.
The legend of Cesar Chavez will never be the same. The boulevards and elementary schools named for him across California will now be seen as insults to the women he abused; the public murals that honor him and the California state holiday that bears his name will now be known as monuments to a rapist.
But the righteousness of the trade union struggle – the rightness of the movement for the dignity of workers, for the rights and respect of Latinos and for a future in which there is more freedom and possibility for poor people – these cannot be tarnished by Chavez’s behavior. The rightness of that struggle persists even in the face of a man who chose not to live up to them.
Later in her life, after her rape by Chavez, Huerta, who had initially considered feminism a middle-class phenomenon, came to embrace feminist politics. More people should do so now, and not only because Chavez’s story illuminates how persistent misogyny and sexual abuse remain across the political spectrum.
Feminists have long struggled with the fraught pasts, bigotries and hurts perpetuated by its one-time leaders. As the UFW looks to move forward, with an understanding of Chavez’s conduct that contradicts his longtime use as a symbol, perhaps they can look to feminism for guidance. Feminists, after all, have learned how to commit to a principle even as one must discard a cult of personality.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
