Toronto It took me a couple of days to finally get past the headlines and read the new exposes from United Farm Workers Union co-founder Delores Huerta and others about sexual abuse and rape at the hands of the other co-founder and longtime leader of the union and icon symbol of the Chicano and Mexican-American community, Cesar Chavez. The reactions have been swift. The Union canceled a celebration marking his birthday at the end of the month. The state of California, that recognizes a holiday in his name, moved quickly to rename it Farmworkers Day. Other states and cities with schools and streets named for Chavez have also indicated they are rethinking their actions, some even suggesting renaming them after the 95-year-old, and almost equally iconic, Huerta. What do we, especially in the work, make of all of this?
No matter what else the #MeToo moment may have taught us, “believe the women” is a touchstone now. Huerta’s credibility has always been virtually unassailable, so even without corroboration of independent incidents about her description of sexual pressure and rape, there is little reason to not believe her. Her narrative of sexual discrimination in the union and often in public by Chavez has been verified and seems to have been well-known inside the movement. The fact that two women have come forward with stories of severe sexual abuse by Chavez in their teens beginning in the sixties that has been verified in numerous ways leaves no doubt or second guessing. The Times’ reporters interviewed a slew of people, so they nailed this hide firmly to the wall.
I met Chavez once at a small demo thing in Washington, DC with George Wiley during the welfare rights days in the late 60’s. He was softspoken and friendly, but neither assertive or overpowering. I’ve known many who worked with and for him and have read a ton of books both praising and critical of him at different stages of the movement. His legacy has always been complicated because of the ups and downs of the movement, its internal life, the synanon and EST stages, when he solidified control and pushed people out, and other well-documented events.
There’s always a difference between the frailty of men and women when they become symbols and their inability to be saints. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, and others no matter how widely praised and missed, were hardly the perfect moral vessels compared to the pedestals where they were often perched. The problem in evaluating Chavez will be the inability to excuse him of criminality by saying he was a man of his time, even though it is equally inarguable that when at his best he was a great organizer and leader with a body of work that was mammoth in aspiration and achievement.
Huerta held onto her truths about Chavez for almost sixty years, as largely did the other women. Many casual readers may not understand her explanation that essentially, she was quiet about her personal struggles and experiences in order to protect the movement, which she believed needed and benefited from Chavez’s leadership. She cites the huge and extensive opposition to the farmworkers’ struggles and those of her people as so immense that it was more important to her to protect the organization than anything else, including herself. No one should question that the fight at every turn against the union was intense, because it was. The record is clear on that score, making it seem obvious why no one wanted this to become public.
What may be harder to reconcile both for outsiders and those in the movement, especially to the degree that these issues with Chavez were well-known by insiders, is why there seems to have been little internal reckoning with Chavez over these issues. One report quotes a minister going to Huerta and asking her why she wasn’t calling him to account, but none report any such efforts by others to hold him accountable, rather than leaving the responsibility to her as the victim. In other movements, these internal efforts and reckonings by insiders through some kind of process have often been reported, even if some outside critics or even some participants critique them later as inadequate or demand, in my view wrongly, that the reckoning should have been public.
The opposition to social change and the fragile movements and organizations that strive mightily to achieve it are serious and they need to be protected by participants. That’s invariably part of the culture of organizing; problems are solved internally, not publicly, and are never a license to excuse all aberrant behavior without consequence. It will be a while before his part of the work and history of the farmworker’s union is sorted.