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Transcript:
Unfortunate content warning: today I’m going to be talking about, what else, powerful men who sexually abuse women, plus self-harm. If that’s too much for you right now, I absolutely understand and encourage you to switch to watching something happier.
Well, it hasn’t been a particularly great start to the year for progressive “heroes.” Noam Chomsky is possibly the most ironic recent downfall, considering the fact that he made his name in part by talking about how “intellectuals abdicate their moral responsibility to tell the truth about the world in fear of losing prestige and funding” and it turns out that he was secretly hanging out with a billionaire pedophile who flew him all over the world on his private jet. Wow, Chomsky must be like that guy who injected himself with Helicobacter pylori to prove that ulcers were caused by bacteria. Just out there testing his own hypotheses on himself. “Would I give up my own morals for access to wealth and privilege? YEP.” Genius.
And now last week, the world finally learned the dark truth about Cesar Chavez: he spent years raping young girls and women in and around his organization.
If you aren’t aware, Chavez is a very famous American, especially here in California where he founded his organization and did the majority of his work. He was the co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, which eventually merged with another organization to become what is today known as the United Farm Workers union. He and his organization utilized boycotts, pickets, marches, and other nonviolent tactics to successfully advocate for basic needs like higher wages for farm workers, first here in California and then across the United States.
Chavez became a symbol not just for workers’ rights, but also a symbol of pride for Mexican Americans–a call to celebrate their culture and their right to exist and thrive in the US.
He’s so revered that here in California I’m pretty sure that, like, 35% of our streets are named after him. Maybe a quarter of our schools. And of course, we are one of several states that celebrates Cesar Chavez Day every March 31st, his birthday.
But that’s all about to change, now that the New York Times has dropped this bombshell report revealing to the public for the first time the stories of several women who independently confirmed that Chavez raped and abused them. Ana Murguia was the daughter of organizers who worked for Chavez, and so she met him when she was 8 years old, at which point he began grooming her. When she was 13, Chavez began sexually abusing her in his office. By the age of 15, she tried several times to commit suicide. She’s speaking out now, as the city of Bakersfield considered renaming a street near her home, what else, “Cesar Chavez Boulevard.”
Debra Rojas was just 12 when Chavez started molesting her, and 15 when he began raping her. Just one piece of evidence supporting her allegation is this heartbreaking letter that she wrote when she was 13, which has been kept preserved in his archives at Wayne State University in Detroit: “I’m really glad I got to see you & spend time with you, well not like that, but just to know I was near you was enough. I think of you all of the time. Do you think of me?”
Esmeralda Lopez was 19 when Chavez chose her to accompany him on a speaking tour, during which time he “pointed to a street sign outside bearing his name and suggested that he could use his influence to get something named for her if she slept with him.”
I can’t say that this final reveal is MORE shocking than those other stories, but my jaw dropped when I got to the part in the New York Times investigation when they found that Chavez had also raped Dolores Huerta, the legendary woman who helped found the National Farm Workers Association with Chavez, who fought by his side through the decades, and who even coined the organization’s most famous slogan, “Sí, se puede.” Most accurately, “Yes, it can be done,” which was later tweaked and used by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign: “Yes, we can.”
“One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.”
“She described being stunned by Mr. Chavez’s aggression, and then numb to it. She framed her silence at the time not as an absence of pain, but as a kind of strategic necessity, particularly as a woman fighting for respect in the male-dominated world of 1960s union organizing. Now, her accusation shatters what was a widely celebrated — and seemingly egalitarian — bond between two of the most influential Hispanic activists in U.S. history.”
To make things even more tragic, each of the two times Chavez assaulted her, Huerta got pregnant. She concealed the pregnancies under baggy clothes, quietly gave birth, and gave the babies away to be raised by others.
Imagine these women going through all of this, watching Chavez’s fame grow and grow, knowing that if they went to the authorities they would likely be ignored, or mocked, or blamed for the downfall of the cause they were fighting for. THIS is what we talk about when we talk about intersectional feminism: misogyny does not exist in a vacuum. It overlaps with racism, and with classism, and with ableism. Men could be fighting for a just cause and still use their relatively high place of power to abuse the vulnerable women and children beneath them.
All that said, this revelation about Chavez is sadly not shocking if you’ve been paying attention: not just because he was a relatively powerful man surrounded by vulnerable people, but also because his employees, followers, and documentarians warned us for many years that he was a severely fucked up guy.
In one of the earliest works on Chavez, Delano from 1967, author John Gregory Dunne described Chavez as “messianic.” He was obsessed with Catholicism, and adopted a Christlike approach to generating sympathy.
In 2006, Los Angeles Times reporter Miriam Pawel began publishing a series of articles exploring Chavez’s life and legacy, eventually culminating in a book: The Union of Their Dreams — Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. In it, she expands upon his Catholic mysticism: he demanded sacrifice from his supporters, and demonstrated it with hunger strikes (which he framed as penitent fasts) that brought him close to death, and which were resolved by finally accepting communion while being held up by his supporters because he was too weak to stand. His protest marches weren’t just protest marches: they were adorned with crucifixes and saints and some marchers crawled on their knees.
Pawel also described how Chavez’s Christlike image didn’t prevent him from absolutely brutal union tactics, like calling immigration on scab workers to get them deported back to Mexico.
Pawel’s biggest revelation is perhaps the fact that Chavez wasn’t just leading his organization like a cult: he himself fell in with a DIFFERENT cult. “Synanon” began in 1958 as a drug rehab in Santa Monica that was inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous, but the founder, Charles Dederich, actually planned to use it as a launchpad for his vision of a new society, and obviously that meant that it quickly became one of the most violent cults in the United States.
Addicts who joined the group were forced to go cold turkey and just deal with symptoms of withdrawal. They were expected to cut all contact with friends and family from their old life, and then they were told that an addict can never reenter society so this was a lifetime appointment. They also were forced to play “The Game,” in which one person volunteers information about themselves, and then everyone else verbally abuses and insults them for up to 72 hours. Diedrich himself apparently admitted that this was just straight up brainwashing, and he used it to convince people to do whatever he wanted, like getting sterilized, beating people to the brink of death, putting rattlesnakes in critics’ mailboxes, and threatening to kill a small town journalist, who, happily, did go on to win a $100,000 judgment and a Pulitzer Prize.
So, Cesar Chavez saw all that and said, “Great, love it, some for me, too, please.” He happily joined Synanon and started using “The Game” on his own volunteers, who he then verbally abused and fired en masse. Then he decided he wanted to make his own official religious cult, but he never really got one going, and then he died.
And now, all these years later, we learn that this wannabe cult leader was, in fact, doing the thing that pretty much all cult leaders do: he sexually abused women and children for his own sick pleasure.
Where does that leave leftists, who found in Chavez a symbol of hope and a fierce desire to change the world for the better? Many organizations and municipalities are rushing to remove his name from all those schools and scholarships and parades and streets. But what do we replace it with? Does Cesar Chavez Street here in San Francisco simply revert to Army Street? Because, you know, the Army is so great. Do we find another hero? Do we rename it Dolores Huerta Way? I see people on social media rushing to reassure others that it’s okay, we still have heroic men who have not been credibly accused of sexual assault, or of trying to start a death cult. Is that the answer?
Personally, I agree with Chavez’s critical biographer Miriam Pawel, who argued in the Austin American-Statesman that:
“…the debate over Chavez and how his story is taught exemplifies the dangers of oversimplification and the absence of critical thinking.
“His supporters are at fault as well as his detractors. For years, they have mythologized Chavez and fiercely fended off efforts to portray him in less than purely heroic terms. The hagiography only detracts from his very real, remarkable accomplishments. In an era when Mexican Americans were regarded as good for nothing more than the most back-breaking labor, Chavez mobilized public support and forced agribusiness to recognize the rights of farmworkers. His movement brought farmworkers dignity and self-respect, as well as better wages and working conditions. In California, he pushed through what remains today the most pro-labor law in the country, the only one granting farmworkers the right to organize and petition for union elections.
“Chavez’s legacy can be seen in the work of a generation of activists and community organizers who joined the farmworker crusade during the 1960s and ’70s, a movement that transformed their lives. They, in turn, have gone on to effect change across the country, most recently playing key roles in the Obama presidential campaign.
“The decline of the union Chavez founded and the ultimate failure of the United Farm Workers to achieve lasting change in the fields of California — much less expand into a national union — is part of the Chavez legacy, too. Chavez himself played a role in that precipitous decline, and students of history should not follow his example and blame the failures solely on outside forces and scapegoats.
“Chavez, an avid reader of history, preserved an extraordinary record of his own movement: For years, he ordered that all documents, tapes and pictures be sent to the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, the nation’s preeminent labor archive. Chavez told people he wanted the history of his movement to be saved and studied — warts and all.
“Those lessons should be taught in classrooms everywhere.”
That very Library is where New York Times reporters found the handwritten note from one of the children Chavez was abusing.
I don’t think the answer is to simply find new heroes that aren’t fatally flawed. I think the answer is to study what happened here, to grapple with the idea of who gets the spotlight and who gets pushed away, to celebrate the women who persevered through this, to acknowledge the good and the bad, to make sure our activism is intersectional, and to stop future progressive movements from leaving marginalized people behind because we think they’re disposable in light of a greater cause.
