What do we do with Cesar Chavez’s memory now?

Countless streets, parks, and schools across America are named for Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers union organizer and 1960s icon of Latino activism and the labor movement. There is even a holiday commemorating his life and legacy, on March 31, that is formally observed by four Western states (and less formally by many others): Cesar Chavez Day. But on Thursday, lawmakers in one of those states — Chavez’s native California — announced that they will change the holiday’s name to Farmworkers Day. Other states and municipalities are likely to follow suit.

That’s because on Wednesday, the New York Times published an explosive, harrowing report detailing Chavez’s sexual abuse of two young girls, Debra Rojas and Ana Murguia, who spoke publicly about their experiences for the first time with the Times. Rojas was only 12 years old when the abuse began; Murguia was just 13. 

In the same story, Dolores Huerta — Chavez’s close union ally and a historic figure and labor hero in her own right — recounted that in 1960, he had pressured and manipulated her into sex, and that in 1966, when she was 36, Chavez raped her. Both encounters resulted in pregnancies; Huerta gave birth to two of Chavez’s daughters, and arranged for them to be raised by other families. (Huerta further says that she has long since reconnected with the daughters and that they have become close.) 

The revelations are a shock to anyone who has spent decades understanding Chavez as a hero — an icon honored in murals and statues for fighting tirelessly and courageously to uplift his fellow workers and Latino Americans. It’s now clear that he was, as another survivor put it in the Times story, “just a man” — one who committed a series of horrendous acts. 

To better understand the needed reckoning with Chavez’s memory, I spoke with Matt Garcia, a professor of history and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth, and the author of the 2012 Chavez biography From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement. 

In Garcia’s eyes, the Chavez revelations aren’t just the story of one man’s crimes, but of a larger movement and its affiliated organizations that were prone to emotional coercion, internal purges, and hero worship — all of which made it harder for victims to come forward.

Our discussion, carried out over two days, touched on what activists and ordinary Americans should take away from this story, how it affects both Chavez and Huerta’s legacies, and what accountability for these crimes — given that Chavez died in 1993 — might look like. An excerpt of our conversations is transcribed below; it has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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When did you first hear about these allegations?

So I published a book in 2012, and I disclosed some extramarital affairs that Cesar had in that book. I didn’t know at the time, though, that it was a young woman who wrote to his wife Helen and precipitated her leaving him for a time. That came to light afterwards, and then it took some years for that to settle. And then in a closed email Facebook group amongst the veterans of the movement, some of the victims started to speak. 

The veterans knew that I was a critical voice, and they asked me to facilitate contact with a news outlet that could pursue this. I had deep ties to the New York Times, and so I facilitated the whistleblowers in 2021. It was June 7, 2021, that I contacted Manny Fernandez, who is now the author of this [New York Times story] with Sarah Hurtes. I’ve been involved from the beginning and before actually.

Were there any other hints or implications in the research of your book that this kind of abuse of underage girls — or an inappropriate attraction to minors — was something to look into? Did that come up at all while you were researching the book? 

Not in a sexual nature. I do document Cesar’s purges of volunteers and people, the residents of [UFW headquarters] La Paz. There was aggressive behavior against people he perceived as betrayers of the movement and of him.

Are you in touch with any current UFW members or Latino labor activists, particularly in California? And if so, how are they reacting to all this?

Most of those people actually knew of these allegations. They’re the people that felt like it was long overdue that the women have their say. So there’s a bit of relief, but there’s also a sense that it’s overdue. And there’s also a feeling that there needs to be more accountability within the community and with the remaining leaders that were culpable in the 1970s and ’80s.

What do you think that accountability should look like?

I think for one, the Cesar Chavez Foundation and the UFW profited handsomely from the legacy of Chavez that we now know was fraudulent, and given how sexual assault and the legal consequences have changed since [Harvey] Weinstein, I wonder whether these victims have recourse.

I would be all for that, just as some of the victims of [Jeffrey] Epstein have done the same, and as well as [those of] Weinstein. So I think these are questions that we should be asking. We should be thinking in the future, not only in the past.

Are any of these organizations already discussing remaking Chavez’s central role in their narratives now? 

There’s a great example of an organization that I think took the right course of action. This is the San Antonio chapter of the Cesar Chavez…I don’t know the full title, but a foundation that has Cesar Chavez as its namesake [Editor’s note: The César E. Chávez Legacy & Educational Foundation]. And they just disbanded. They literally called it off and said, we’re done. 

One thing I really disagree with — and some people think this is a virtue; I think it’s a vice. [The Cesar Chavez Foundation] set up a confidential channel or hotline for possible other victims of Chavez and [is] asking them to report to them. I think this is at a stage where I think, certainly, the California state government or maybe even the federal government should set up those hotlines and manage intake at this point.

There are murals of Chavez all over California and far beyond. There’s all these streets and parks and schools that are named for him all over the country. His movement has been this model and inspiration for labor organizers and protesters of all kinds on the left for decades. I’m wondering what you think about those memorials and activists, and about people who are involved in these movements. What should they do with these revelations? Do you think these honorifics should all come down?

I think that there are certain things you can’t do. I suppose that you could be like Fresno State; they threw a black curtain over their Cesar Chavez statue that can’t last forever. Walls that have been beautifully rendered in terms of murals of Chavez — it’s hard to whitewash them. They are actually keepsakes and valuable community symbols across the country. 

But I also want to just say that this kind of thinking, that we’ve got to hold onto him, is what allowed these women to suffer for so long, and for us to hold onto the notion that Cesar was an enlightened leader for the union. In fact, my argument is that the union succeeded most when it acted collectively, and in some cases defied Cesar Chavez. 

So my feeling is that we need to kind of democratize the honoring of the movement. I would like to see individual communities with Cesar Chavez buildings and statues and honorific symbols replace them in the ways that they think are appropriate. 

There were leaders, there were community activists — there were movements in places like Bellingham, Washington, and Woodburn, Oregon, and places all over the country, big and small that were touched by Chavez. But the movements there were led by their own community. And so I think that would be really fitting for us to remember the farm workers movement as that collectivity that had its various colors and permutations in these specific places. And to have the art and the honorific symbols reflect that.

I don’t think anybody’s thinking about that right now, though. Most people — I mean, I’ve seen on social media, people are saying: Well, let’s just replace Chavez with [Dolores Huerta]. And I think that’s highly problematic.

Dolores Huerta is a historic figure in her own right. Now she has revealed that Cesar Chavez raped her, and fathered two children with her whom she placed in other homes. She says she stayed silent until now out of fear that it would hurt the movement, and because she worried that no one in the union would believe her. It’s a lot. She’s almost 96 years old, and she is this living icon and symbol of the movement. 

How does this story affect our understanding of her role in this movement?

I think it’s very fluid. It should be. I think there are people rushing to judgement, saying that she is simply straightforwardly a survivor. She is that, but I think it needs to be seen in the wider context of what was happening in the mid-’70s, and how she also participated in the purges of innocent volunteers sometimes.

To be clear, you’re not talking about sexual abuse, right?

No. Not sexual abuse, no. But that [other] abuse is talked about, explained in great detail in my book. 

She was someone that participated in the purges of people that were labeled, as Chavez said, “assholes.” And what he meant by that is people that betrayed the movement. 

There was also psychological abuse in the context of “The Game,” which was a critical part of the community where people were encouraged to yell at one another, to call one another names, and to make false accusations of misdeeds and just overall kind of counterproductive behavior in the movement, and specifically at La Paz. 

[Editor’s note: Huerta did not talk to Garcia for his book, but his account is corroborated by tapes from the period, eyewitnesses who spoke to him, and other scholarship. She was asked about this period of internal purges by the Los Angeles Times in 2006 and said some of the paranoid atmosphere had been caused by death threats against Chavez.]

I think the broader picture that you’re painting here is a group that is full of people who are paranoid, in the sense of looking for the traitors next door, the traitor inside, trying to point their finger at whoever might be out to get them within their own movement.

And that might lead to the kind of atmosphere where if somebody did know about Chavez’s sexual abuse, they might be hesitant to share that or reveal that, let alone if they were the victims themselves, because the person they tell — in their minds — might be looking to use that information to punish them or stab them in the back.

Yeah, I think that’s definitely now something that we have to consider: that Cesar had a secret to keep, and he knew that that secret, if it was revealed, would hold him accountable for not only criminal behavior, but for losing focus on the [movement’s] primary goal — which was achieving farm worker justice. So yes, he knew he was more vulnerable.

What about ordinary Americans and people who might only know or remember the basics of the movement, but are still shocked to hear this? How should the rest of us understand the legacy of Cesar Chavez in its totality now?

It’s part of the American history that we’ve been coming to terms with for several years now. First in Me Too, in the Weinstein revelations, and then more recently in the Epstein file revelations. 

What we’re seeing here is that we have all, regardless of our ethnicity and race, participated in a kind of pathological patriarchy, or allowed it to flourish, and we need to question it. 

So whether you know what Cesar Chavez represented and what he achieved with that social movement that I’ve just described is really not the point. The point is that he’s yet another unchecked man who abused his power, because we in society turned a blind eye to it, and we allow it, and we actually frankly enable it. So I think that’s the larger lesson, and I really want people to make the connections across time and space, because they’re all there for us to learn from.