For decades, Dolores Huerta told an inspiring story about the union she and César Chávez built and how it changed the lives of farmworkers.
The two activists famously formulated a plan for what would become the United Farm Workers in a kitchen in Boyle Heights. They were partners in decades of labor battles, boycotts, protests and political alliances. Huerta said they didn’t always agree, but she and Chávez shared a mutual respect and obsessive sense of mission.
But over the last two weeks, portions of the UFW history have been rewritten, in large part through the words of Huerta herself.
She and others made sexual abuse allegations against Chávez that are adding to a reassessment of the union that already had been underway — one that tries to deal with the failures and problems in ways the myths have not.
“What’s now being exposed is that the wheels had fallen off years before César Chávez died and for reasons that have to do with his megalomania, his bad decisions and the internal strife” inside union headquarters, said Matt Garcia, a professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies, history and social relations at Dartmouth.
It began with an investigative story in the New York Times that reported allegations that Chávez had sexually abused Huerta and two girls. Huerta said Chávez pressured her to have sex with him during a trip to Southern California in the 1960s and, years later, sexually assaulted her in a secluded grape field on the outskirts of Delano. In subsequent interviews, Huerta portrayed Chávez as an abusive, sexist bully who demeaned her and undermined her so much that at one point she left the UFW headquarters for several weeks.
“He had an evil side to him,” Huerta told ABC News.
The revelations have sparked a movement to remove Chávez’s name from hundreds of schools, parks, streets and other institutions. They also are likely to change the way history books and classrooms present the farmworkers union — one of the most consequential labor movements in U.S. history that has inspired decades of activism, particularly in the Latino community.
Chávez died in 1993, and Huerta, now 95, rose to take his mantle as the hero of the movement. She was credited with helping women advance in the union. But the UFW is a shadow of its former self, marginalized by decades of infighting, bad decisions and what critics say is gross mismanagement.
Newspaper reporting and books over the last 20 years had already tarnished the halo some affixed to Chávez after his death, Garcia said.
For example, a 2006 L.A. Times investigation uncovered the grim conditions faced by farmworkers despite the UFW, which had dramatically declined in size, and how the union had turned to political fundraising that did not benefit those working the fields. There have been books that added to that reporting.
But the latest allegations against Chávez are going to require more accountability and reassessment.
La Paz, the UFW headquarters in Kern County where Chávez moved the union operations in the 1970s, is a national monument. It’s also where he is alleged to have sexually assaulted underage girls, Garcia said.
“What do you do with that? It’s going to be complicated,” he said.
Huerta says Chavez raped her in the 1960s, an incident she had kept a secret until allegations surfaced in the New York Times that he had also sexually abused two girls in the 1970s.
Huerta could not be reached by The Times for comment, but in recent interviews she’s described a culture that permeated the UFW in which women struggled to be heard and receive accolades for their work. Some women were berated. And criticism of Chávez or his ideas was not accepted.
In one instance, after spending four months in 1986 successfully lobbying lawmakers in Washington to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act that granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants, Huerta said, she wasn’t invited to a news conference to celebrate the win. Chávez instead requested that she head to Florida to handle a nonexistent crisis, what she calls a “straight male-chauvinist trick” to take credit for the work.
“Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects,” Huerta told the New York Times.
She ultimately kept the alleged assault under wraps, she said, out of fear that it would upend their movement and efforts to better farmworkers’ lives.
Over the years, Huerta has mentioned working to make the UFW more progressive toward women but did not speak about the level of abuse she and others faced.
The UFW’s membership has dwindled since its peak of about 80,000 unionized farmworkers down to roughly 5,000, according to recent estimates. The organization recently has tried to distance itself from its founder, canceling César Chávez Day celebrations this month after the allegations surfaced.
“As a women-led organization that exists to empower communities, the allegations about abusive behavior by Cesar Chavez go against everything that we stand for. These disturbing allegations involve inappropriate behavior by Cesar Chavez with young women and minors, they are shocking, indefensible and something we are taking seriously,” the organization said in a statement.
But the cracks in Chávez’s legacy had been visible for years for those willing to look, Garcia said.
In the 1970s, Garcia said, Chávez aggressively worked to “weed out people that he thought were betrayers of the movement and were not loyal to him. They called it ‘the game.’”
Others close to Chávez in the union “participated in some of the most heinous attacks on women,” Garcia said. “They attacked Dolores mercilessly and her daughters, calling them the worst names you could imagine for a woman in the ‘70s.”
Huerta would get angry and quit, but would return and try to smooth things over with Chávez, a situation that Garcia called an “abusive relationship.”
More than a decade ago, Garcia said, one of the women at the center of the New York Times investigation accused Chávez of assaulting her when she was 12 years old, writing in a private Facebook group for UFW veterans: “Wake up, people. This man u march for every year molested me and many, many other young girls.”
She took down the post after union veterans accused her of tarnishing the movement, he said.
“So much of the success, so people thought, was wrapped up in César Chávez being a great leader and a virtuous man,” Garcia said. “So if César was exposed as being the problematic individual we now know him to be, then maybe the union and the movement was also problematic and so people stayed quiet.”
After Garcia’s book, “From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement,” was published in 2012, he said, he received intense scrutiny for his complicated portrayal of the union leader. But he also heard from people who spoke of Chávez’s alleged abuse of women.
The #MeToo reckoning came later, resulting in powerful men being held accountable for alleged sexual assaults and harassment across Hollywood, politics and corporate America. Women, many of whom had spent years living with painful secrets, found support when they came forward.
That shift in culture probably contributed to the willingness of the women Chávez is accused of assaulting to come forward as well, said Maria Quintana, associate professor of history at Sacramento State University.
“There’s so much happening right now and so many conversations around gender and sexual violence and exploitation that it does make sense, in some ways, that it’s happening at this moment,” Quintana said.
Quintana said Huerta deserves her place in history.
A consumer boycott of grapes under Huerta’s leadership led to the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which paved the way for farmworkers to push for better working conditions and pay. She coined the rallying cry: “Sí, se puede,” translated to “Yes, we can!”
“We forget that Dolores Huerta had this incredible role,” Quintana said.
