The farmworker movement was about more than Cesar Chavez |
Parents pick up children at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in San Francisco on Wednesday. The school is named in honor of the civil rights icon. A New York Times investigation published Wednesday revealed allegations of sexual abuse of women and girls by Chavez.
For decades, Cesar Chavez has been treated as the moral icon of the Latino civil rights struggle. In San Francisco and other cities and towns across the country, his face appears on murals, his name is stamped on streets and schools, and his legacy is honored with a federal holiday. For many Americans, Chavez represents the fight for justice for farmworkers, and his name is often the first mentioned when people speak about Latino leadership in America.
I remember sitting with my Latino debate group in high school in Texas, where we dedicated a day to watching a 2014 film about Chavez. We were encouraged to admire him, to march in his name and to see him as someone to look up to. He was presented to us as an icon, a good man who fought for dignity and justice for Latino workers.
That was the version of Chavez many of us were taught. But hero worship is dangerous.
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A New York Times investigation published Wednesday has brought renewed attention to allegations that had circulated for decades that he sexually abused, raped and groomed women and girls connected to the farmworker movement. Survivors described abuse at the movement’s headquarters in California, including allegations involving girls as young as 13. According to those accounts, these were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern enabled by a culture that prioritized protecting Chavez’s image over protecting the women and children within the movement.
The reporting shocked many readers. But the truth is that Chavez’s reputation was already strained long before this week’s headlines; historical records from 1979 show a long history of his divisive rhetoric and troubling internal practices.
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The silence surrounding Chavez was not accidental. Movements often protect their leaders in order to protect the cause itself. In Chavez’s case, preserving the heroic narrative became more important than confronting the harm. Women were discouraged from speaking out, and exposing misconduct was framed as a betrayal of the movement that would destroy the union and undermine the struggle for farmworker rights.
This is the cost of leader-centered narratives. When a movement allows its history to revolve around one man, speaking out against him begins to feel like betraying the revolution itself. Truth becomes secondary to protecting the image of the leader.
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This dynamic is a moral and structural failure. Federal sexual harassment law under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 recognizes how authority figures can exploit power over subordinates. The farmworker movement of the 1960s and 1970s operated in deeply male-dominated spaces where that power often went unchecked. Chavez’s saint-like public image became a shield that rendered victims invisible.
But the fall of an icon does not require abandoning the cause. When an icon collapses, people often feel forced to choose between defending the man or abandoning the movement he represented. That is the wrong choice. The farmworker movement was never Cesar Chavez alone.
Hero worship does more than distort history. It protects abusive men while erasing the collective effort that builds movements in the first place. The farmworker struggle was carried forward by thousands of workers who organized, marched and risked their livelihoods to demand dignity in the fields. Families fought for fair wages, safer working conditions and the basic right to organize.
And it was built by leaders like Dolores Huerta, who also recounted being sexually abused by Chavez.
While history often casts Huerta as Chavez’s ally or second in command, she was in fact a central architect of the United Farm Workers. She co-founded the union in 1962, helped lead the 1965 Delano grape strike, negotiated the union’s first contracts and coined the movement’s most enduring rallying cry: “Sí se puede.” She was a strategist, an organizer and a negotiator who helped sustain the movement through some of its most critical moments.
Yet Huerta rarely occupies the same place in American history. Our culture has long struggled to see women as the face of revolutions, and misogyny has often pushed women’s leadership to the margins. Movements that are centered around a single, male hero frequently push women’s contributions into the background. Once a man becomes the symbol of a cause, protecting him can become synonymous with protecting the movement itself.
The problem is not only what Chavez did. It is that the farmworker movement allowed its history to revolve around one man in the first place. This “great man” theory of history erases the collective labor that builds social movements and creates the hero worship that allows misconduct to remain hidden for decades. As history shows, unchecked power often leads to exploitation; Chavez used his position to subject women and girls to years of systemic mental and physical abuse
Since this moment forces a reconsideration of Chavez’s legacy, it should also force a correction in how we tell the story of the farmworker movement.
The movement’s history does not need to disappear because Chavez failed to live up to the heroic reputation built around him. And it needs to stop revolving around him. Recognizing the leadership of Huerta and the thousands of unnamed farmworkers who built the United Farm Workers is a good place to start.
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.
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Justice movements cannot depend on heroic narratives. They must be strong enough to confront the truth.
The farmworker movement was never just about one man. It was always a collective struggle for dignity and justice. And if history is going to remember that struggle honestly, it must finally give the people who built it the recognition they deserve and ensure that those who abuse power are never again protected by the narratives we build around them.
Briana Torres is an attorney and the Maeve McKean Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and the National Health Law Program. Her work focuses on health law, reproductive justice, civil rights and gender equality.