The explosive New York Times exposé about Cesar Chavez’s abuse of young women has many communities erasing celebrations and commemorations across the country of the civil rights icon. Missing in the reckoning of Cesar Chavez’s legacy is how he treated Mexican immigrants as he sought to empower farm workers. The women abused by Chavez deserve their reckoning. Mexican immigrants deserve their reckoning as well but because the United Farm Workers (UFW), and Dolores Huerta are too focused on preserving the power of the farmworker’s union today, they avoid addressing the abuse of Mexican migrants over the years by the UFW.
Being afraid to speak out because it may hurt the labor movement is not only cowardly but complicit in bad behavior as well.
Chavez, who died in 1993, cannot defend himself against the sexual abuse accusations but the investigation by the New York Times, the accusation levied against him by Dolores Huerta and the public records show that were he alive today, he would at the very least be facing criminal charges.
After Huerta added to the sexual abuse allegations on her social media, questions about her motivations to expose the decades long secret have been raised. Why did she wait until 60 years after she says Chavez abused her to give credence to the years of rumors about how abusive Chavez was to young women?
Also driving the narrative about her motivations is the lawsuit alleging work discrimination filed against Huerta’s foundation by a former employee who alleges that the foundation refuses to pay her what she says they owe her and that the foundation misappropriated funds from grants.
Although Huerta’s possible motivations to expose Chavez have been asked, the unasked question remains, shouldn’t have Huerta defended the women, some as young as 13, from the abuse she faced as well?
Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, argues that Huerta made the sacrifice to remain silent because “the movement is beautiful, it is made up of brothers and sisters in the struggle that are willing to sacrifice time away from their families, their freedom, sometimes even their lives for the liberations of others, for our collective liberation.”
The problem with Gonzalez-Brito’s assessment about protecting “the movement” is that it ignores the suffering of others, who unlike Huerta did not choose to stay silent about the abuse.
Gonzalez-Brito goes on to write that she understood the three women, including Huerta, kept silent because “it would hurt the movement.”
Accepting, for a moment, that her argument is a fair assessment of the choices the three women made, the fact is that “the movement” was no longer about empowering people but instead had metastasized into a movement that tolerated abusing some to supposedly protect others.
“Supposedly” because if empowering farm workers was the movement’s goal, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that all farm workers – even undocumented Mexicans – should be empowered and not just the UFW membership that paid dues to keep the movement that allowed the abuse of women for decades?
Calling the accusations against Chavez “profoundly shocking,” the UFW cancelled its annual celebrations of Chavez. The problem for the union is that it is nearly impossible for them to be “profoundly” shocked by the revelations because rumors within the union, shouting matches between him and Huerta and documents are part of the documentation compiled by the union for decades to preserve the legacy of their icon – Cesar Chavez.
This includes abusing Mexican migrants for “La Causa.”
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Cesar Chavez and the UFW Border Patrol
In recent years, the UFW has taken up protecting undocumented immigrants and supporting programs like DACA. Today, its website leads with the tagline that the UFW serves “farm workers, immigrants and Latinos.” Huerta, for her part, has built a legacy of supporting undocumented immigrants since at least 1986. But this latest embrace of undocumented immigrants, especially those from México, is selective history adopted to changing times.
The sordid history of Chavez’s treatment of Mexican migrants is not well documented today for the simple reason that like the abuse of young women, it is kept out of the historical records to protect the UFW, and Chavez’s legacy.
In the 1970’s, the UFW had little interest in supporting the undocumented farmworkers in California fields. In fact, the UFW actively worked to remove Mexican migrant farmworkers from America by launching its “Illegals Campaign.”
In 1973, the UFW notoriously formed the “wet line” to man posts along the Arizona-México border to beat back Mexican laborers trying to cross the border into the U.S. to work the fields.
Today, if you look through the UFW website, you will not find any mention of its UFW Border Patrol because it is an inconvenient history.
While everyone is rightfully focused on the abuse Chavez perpetuated against women and forcing the union to reckon with that legacy, it is important to shine a light on Chavez’s abuses against Mexican immigrants to protect his members. As the co-founder of the UFW and active for decades in the behind-the-scenes dialogs and the public activities of the UFW against immigrants, Huerta owes it to “the movement” to tell the full story so that the UFW can fully reckon with its past so that it can move forward.
The Dolores Huerta Complicity
Today Dolores Huerta weaves a story around her own abuse arguing that “my silence ends here.” But the problem with Huerta’s new evolving narrative is that she hasn’t always remained silent. Instead, she has spoken up about sexual assault among farm workers labeling it an “epidemic in the fields.” As far back as 2013, Huerta said that she first became aware about sexual assault problems faced by female farmworkers when her mother refused to let her work in the fields. She already knew as a child.
Explaining why sexual abuse was allowed to happen in the fields, Huerta told PBS Frontline that the farm owners relied on contractors for farm labor that are managed by a foreman, who are likely a former farm worker that learned through the years that to manage their workers they needed to rely on the workers fearing losing their jobs. Huerta said, its wasn’t that the woman worried about losing their jobs, but rather that “her husband would lose his job, or her brother or her boyfriend.”
Huerta went on add in 2013 that women had to “agree to perform sexual favors” for her to work, adding that the practice remained true even in 2013. Huerta went on to add that Chavez participated in the “machismo” culture that was prevalent in the union.
But behind Huerta’s allocution of sexual abuse in the fields and her silence about her own experience lies the fact that by 2013 the union’s membership was facing a significant decline. As membership declined, the UFW and Huerta looked for ways to bolster its membership, including reinventing the union as pro-immigrant.
For decades the legacy of Chavez has been built up and protected for self-preservation and political reasons. Books like 1997 The Fight in the Fields, Cesar Chavez, and the Farmworkers Movement and the PBS movie about it help to protect the Chavez legacy by selectively ignoring inconvenient information like the “wet line” and accusations of abuse. These legacies come at the price of silencing victims of abuse.
As Paulina Gonzalez-Brito explains, joining the UFW as a 19-year-old after the death of Chavez, she quickly learned that “as soon as you walk in the door,” of the union she was taught that “nothing was more important than ‘La Causa’.” She added that at the UFW there was a “culture of acquiescence” where abuse, sexual exploitation and beating Mexicans back across the border was just the way the UFW operates. She explained that in the union, “individual harms were seen as less important than the movement itself.”
Dolores Huerta spent decades building and sustaining Chavez’s legacy through the revisionist history of silencing conversations about sexual abuse by remaining silent. Is she doing the same about how Mexican immigrants were treated by the UFW? Does she not owe it to “the movement” to allow the full history of the abuses against Mexican immigrants to be publicly acknowledged so that they to can also have some measure of validation for their suffering as well?
Making things worse for the Mexican migrants abused by Chavez and the UFW is that the New York Times exposé did not once mention the abuse of Mexican migrants in their story, instead continuing to build on the false narrative that Chavez “not only improved wages, living conditions and health care for generations of farmworkers and their families but also strengthening the political power of Latinos, giving their voice and concerns an urgency and moral authority on the national stage.” It is a false narrative because empowering farm workers and giving political power to Latinos came at the expense of the Mexican migrants that didn’t even merit a passing thought in the long exposé.
The New York Times article reveals that “a handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about the various allegations of sexual misconduct,” adding that “there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them.” Apparently that includes the abuses perpetuated against Mexican migrants.