Geraldo L. Cadava writes:

For many Latinos, Cesar Chavez seemed like a saint. There have in fact been efforts to canonize him. I lived in Los Angeles for a summer when I was an undergraduate, and I frequently drove down Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Just about every institution I’ve belonged to has named something after him. In Tucson, I’ve met with University of Arizona professors in the Cesar E. Chavez Building. At Northwestern, where I am now a professor, a group of Latino students once invited me to speak on their Cesar Chavez Day of Service, before they went out into the community to volunteer.

The streets, buildings, and commemorative days will likely be renamed, but what will I say now about Chavez in my Latino-history course, which I teach almost every year? A yearslong investigation by The New York Times uncovered accusations that he sexually abused Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas when they were minors, and raped Dolores Huerta, with whom he co-founded the United Farm Workers union. One of the most revered figures of not only Latino history but all of 20th-century United States history can no longer be thought of as heroic. But the movement he led still can be.

In 1965, Chavez led the United Farm Workers during a national and international boycott of California table grapes that led to a landmark contract for farmworkers, signed on July 29, 1970, by 26 growers in Delano, California, including Giumarra Vineyards, the leading table-grape grower. Later in the decade, the union helped outlaw the use of the short-handled hoe, el cortito, because it required laborers to stoop in the fields for hours on end. In the ’80s, the United Farm Workers opened health clinics and launched a “Wrath of Grapes” campaign that drew attention to the harms of DDT and other pesticides. [Continue reading…]

Democracy Now!

The revelations about Chavez’s history of grooming and abuse have sent shockwaves through the labor movement and California, where officials are already moving to cancel or rename public celebrations planned in his honor. Chavez is also accused of sexually assaulting fellow labor rights icon and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, now 95. Huerta says the assaults led to the births of two of her children. She concealed the pregnancies and had kept the children’s paternity secret until now.

Huerta spoke for the first time at length about her new public disclosures in an exclusive interview with Latino USA host Maria Hinojosa, who joins Democracy Now! to discuss how Huerta is “not only coming to terms with her own assaults, [but also] coming to terms with the fact that the movement and the person who she admired as part of the movement is essentially being covered up, disappeared.”