My father grew up in both Delano, California and East Los Angeles — epicenters of farmworker activism and the Chicano Movement, both social justice campaigns which revered César Chávez. To say that I was stunned and sickened by the lengthy New York Times article detailing graphically the pattern of sexual abuse by Chávez would be a colossal understatement. Like many others, and as a Latino Studies scholar, I am gutted.
Up until just last week, I regularly taught about César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers (UFW). Even as I would draw lessons and inspiration from the UFW, I regularly unpack these histories to reveal the thorny factors in Chávez’s legacy. As a union leader — and like most other unions prior to 2000 — Chávez was openly anti-migrant, privileging Mexican American labor over undocumented workers as well as lawful but highly exploitable guestworkers, or braceros. Whereas the union eventually tempered this position, in his later years, with the UFW on the decline, Chávez was also known for being autocratic, paranoid, patriarchal, and un-afraid to red-bait rivals and dissenters. His strong Catholic religiosity provided both organizing opportunities and serious limitations, especially regarding gendered leadership. Teaching and learning all the messy contradictions of Chávez and the UFW are critical.
But now, this. Until this past week, I had never heard of Chávez’s sexual crimes or any allegations. His long-term organizing relationship with Dolores Huerta projected an egalitarian work partnership and seeming mutual respect. This is obviously not the case. I wholeheartedly believe the constellation of sexual violence disclosed by Huerta, Ana Murguía, Debra Rojas, and Esmeralda López. Their experiences must now be heard, digested as part of Chávez’s legacy going forward, and sexual abuse within all social justice movements must be condemned and consciously rooted out.
While reading the gut-punching details of the New York Times article, even though it was spring break, I immediately wrote all my students from this semester. In two courses, we had just discussed the UFW and the aforementioned complexities and we will have undoubtedly heavier conversations when my students return. Losing an icon will never compare to the burden that Chávez’s victims bear and have carried in silence — often with the survival of the farmworkers movement in mind. Their painful experiences are forever-central to the story and will stir emotions in victims of sexual violence everywhere.
The first priority since the Chávez revelations should be accountability, healing, and repair— looking at individual offenses but also the broader, systemic, and societal issue of sexual abuse. Signage and name changes are already underway. Statues are coming down. But one issue going forward is how to teach Chávez and the UFW in their fuller complexity. Too often Chávez was presented as the unitary figure of this collective struggle, especially at the expense of women leaders and the larger collective. One profound omission is the foundational presence of Filipino farmworkers and their leadership — Larry Itliong, Pete Velasco, Philip Vera Cruz, and likely other unnamed Filipina leaders. The Filipino community put the “United” in the United Farm Workers.
Scholars and popular writers have produced numerous hagiographies of Chávez (including dozens of children’s books), and within scholarship of the Chicano Movement, Chávez is often presented as one of four male leaders in the struggle for Latino civil rights. Whereas feminist and queer scholarship has produced a necessary and cutting-edge corrective to these tendencies, I am not sure how much this curriculum exists outside of higher education, especially in K-12 ethnic studies initiatives.
The hagiography trap is more than simple historical erasure. Recall that many of Chávez’s victims remained silent to protect Chávez himself — certainly because of his outsized power, but also because his image was popularly and mistakenly equated with the movement, a struggle in which they deeply supported.
In campaigns for social justice, we shouldn’t be looking for messianic heroes, handing them power over grassroots activists, including over their bodies. Such hero-worship casts the shadow where sexual violence festers and victims can be silenced. The bigger, complex stories of solidarity and collective efforts toward justice for farmworkers, and other marginalized communities, must coexist with the mandatory work of acknowledging and confronting sexual abuse.
David Hernández of Northampton is an associate professor of Latinx Studies & Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College.