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.
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.