After a shocking report of Chavez’s abuse and sexual harassment of women in the labor movement, a reckoning is rippling through progressive spaces.
In an explosiveNew York Times investigation published this March, the Times reported that the late Cesar Chavez sexually assaulted at least two girls, as well as his union cofounder, the iconic civil-rights leader Dolores Huerta .
The report said Chavez groomed and sexually abused Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, two daughters of longtime organizers within the United Farm Workers , throughout the 1970s, while he was president of the organization. At least a dozen women also described being sexually harassed by Chavez.Details of Huerta’s abuse at the hands of her closest ally and colleague were among the most harrowing. The 95-year-old activist described being assaulted by Chavez in 1960, once during a work trip and then again in 1966, when she said he raped her inside a vehicle parked in a secluded field. Both instances resulted in pregnancy, after which she relinquished the infants to others to raise, the Times reported. Huerta told the Times that she kept the assaults quiet for over 60 years. Harper’s Bazaar has reached out to the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which declined additional comment through a representative.Huerta’s experience in particular sent immediate shockwaves throughout Latino institutions across the country, its organizations, academia, and local communities. The fact that disclosures of Chavez’s abuse came from Huerta made them even more shocking. She is not an outsider but is woven into the fabric of the movement for farmworker rights. Her story revealed a stark truth—that in the search for the higher ideals of equality for the disenfranchised, the specter of machismo and patriarchy looms.“Movements can fight oppression outwardly while still reproducing hierarchy, patriarchy, sexism, and silence internally, as we are all witnessing now in the legacy of the UFW with Cesar positioned as both leader and icon,” Claudia Serrato, a cultural anthropologist, tells Harper’s Bazaar.“What is shaken is not the cause itself—at least that is what we hope—but the myth we built around leadership. The myth around Cesar Chavez that because he practiced nonviolence, he was nonviolent in all aspects of his life. What we are seeing now is that those assumptions can collapse,” Serrato says. There is a long history, she notes, of silencing women to protect a collective, as Dolores Huerta felt was necessary. “Breaking that silence is not betrayal. It is a refusal to pass that harm on to the next generation.”Writer and social activist Myriam Gurba tells Harper’s Bazaar, “No man abuses without a community of apologists and enablers facilitating his abuse. Often, the man surrounds himself with a female network of enablers who will vouch for his goodness. Abuse is never a solo project. It’s always collectively enacted. That makes abuse profoundly destructive.”Indeed, instances of abuse and its flawed reckoning are present across history and even among Chavez’s contemporary civil-rights movements and leadership. Throughout the Mexican Revolution, women were active participants in its activities and leadership, and some of them sought to hold men accountable for their abuse of women. Indigenous journalist and activist Juana Belen Gutierrez de Mendoza, made a colonel under revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, not only sought out dissolution of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz but also demanded the rights of women, workers, and Indigenous people and was disillusioned, ultimately, by the revolution’s impact.Shortly after the assassination of Zapata, she wrote, “In my view, the general situation is neither better nor worse than when this movement started at the end of the last Century … And what I say regarding the situation I say of the men; I have not seen one better or worse than the rest.... There must be no stopping in the middle of the path, lost in the ruins; it is necessary to pass over all this wretchedness and arrive, the victors, at the summit, where we will join all those who are fighting for an ideal.”In her memoir A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, activist Elaine Brown recounted her ascent from foot soldier to Black Panther Party chairwoman from 1974 through 1977 and her experience with the patriarchal power dynamics that would sow the seeds of the party’s demise. “A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of the black people,” she wrote.These examples, both historical and contemporary, share a legacy of the aftershocks of violent colonialism, of a hostile takeover of people and land by patriarchal colonial European forces and, later, by a nascent United States upon its populace. Huerta’s experience is not singular, but it’s emblematic of the countless women who have suffered decades of wave after wave of generational harm. Chavez is not singular either. His behavior is emblematic of the countless marginalized men who have taken their patriarchal, supremacist, violent learnings and wielded them with impudence, following the structures of power laid out by their own conquerors in search of scraps of power.In her first interview after the New York Times investigation was published, Dolores Huerta spoke with Latino USA’s Maria Hinojosa. “I do believe that that would have been the end of the movement pretty much at the very, very beginning,” Huerta said, referring to what she thought might have happened if she had disclosed Chavez’s abuse earlier. “And I can see all of the accomplishments … the millions of farm workers that have been helped throughout the United States of America. And it was my personal pain; it was my personal problem. And, you know, I think it was worth it, you know, because it was my cross to bear.”After six decades, keeping secret her abuse and its impact on her family is no longer Huerta’s cross to bear, but it is the public’s duty to carry the truth and its lessons forward. When progressive movements sacrifice women’s bodies to a mesmerizing leader, the ideals of those movements become poisoned at their core. But communities can reclaim those movements by centering those who were harmed instead of protecting leadership. A good thing to remember is that these movements were built on principles like mutual respect, justice, and reckoning—beliefs that are stronger than any one individual, no matter how charismatic he may be. The activists, movement workers, and cultural workers who care about a just future have to make the difficult but necessary call to sever the movement from the abusive individuals who claim to represent it.
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