The Dethroning of Cesar Chavez
· The Atlantic
For many Latinos, Cesar Chavez seemed like a saint. There have in fact been efforts to canonize him. I lived in Los Angeles for a summer when I was an undergraduate, and I frequently drove down Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Just about every institution I’ve belonged to has named something after him. In Tucson, I’ve met with University of Arizona professors in the Cesar E. Chavez Building. At Northwestern, where I am now a professor, a group of Latino students once invited me to speak on their Cesar Chavez Day of Service, before they went out into the community to volunteer.
The streets, buildings, and commemorative days will likely be renamed, but what will I say now about Chavez in my Latino-history course, which I teach almost every year? A yearslong investigation by The New York Times uncovered accusations that he sexually abused Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas when they were minors, and raped Dolores Huerta, with whom he co-founded the United Farm Workers union. One of the most revered figures of not only Latino history but all of 20th-century United States history can no longer be thought of as heroic. But the movement he led still can be.
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In 1965, Chavez led the United Farm Workers during a national and international boycott of California table grapes that led to a landmark contract for farmworkers, signed on July 29, 1970, by 26 growers in Delano, California, including Giumarra Vineyards, the leading table-grape grower. Later in the decade, the union helped outlaw the use of the short-handled hoe, el cortito, because it required laborers to stoop in the fields for hours on end. In the ’80s, the United Farm Workers opened health clinics and launched a “Wrath of Grapes” campaign that drew attention to the harms of DDT and other pesticides.
[Michael Podhorzer: The paradox of the American labor movement]
Chavez certainly worked with others, but the union’s achievements couldn’t have happened without him. He was the first person to bring the plight of Latino agricultural workers to the attention of Americans across the country. Non-Latino college students inspired by the farmworker movement joined the cause. Chavez was on the cover of Time magazine. A photo of Robert F. Kennedy, taken in March 1968, when he was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, shows him seated next to Chavez at the end of one of the labor leader’s hunger strikes. Kennedy relied on Chavez to help him with the Mexican American vote. When Kennedy won the California primary, he credited the UFW and mentioned Chavez by name.
A month before Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, he spoke at the dedication of the Cesar Chavez national monument in Keene, California, where the UFW headquarters, called “La Paz,” has been located since 1971. I was in the audience, shading my eyes from the sun as we watched Obama’s helicopter land, saw the president strut to the podium, and heard his greeting, “Good morning! ¡Buenos días! ¡Si, se puede!” Obama’s remarks focused as much on the movement Chavez helped build as on Chavez himself: “Cesar would be the first to say that this is not a monument to one man. The movement he helped to lead was sustained by a generation of organizers who stood up and spoke out, and urged others to do the same.” Obama went on to praise Chavez and the UFW for bringing together Americans of every race and every background to march together for economic and social justice. “Where there had once been despair,” Obama said, “Cesar gave workers a reason to hope.”
We’ve given Chavez too much credit for the union’s victories. Huerta, not Chavez, stood onstage with Kennedy at his victory celebration at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. (A few hours later, Kennedy was assassinated.) The union won in part because Chavez forged close connections with religious leaders who interpreted his hunger strikes as acts of prayer, penance, and love. Chavez cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophies of nonviolence as influences.
It will be impossible to teach any of these histories without Chavez, but from now on, I will highlight the movement over the man. I’m not sure that my students will be satisfied. The UC Berkeley professor Lorena Oropeza’s 2019 book, The King of Adobe, a biography of the New Mexico civil-rights leader Reies López Tijerina, revealed that he sexually violated his daughter. My students, most of them young Latinas, concluded that Tijerina was an irredeemable character. His crimes far outweighed the tens of thousands of Mexican Americans he inspired to pursue their land rights in the Southwest.
A reassessment of Chavez was under way even before the Times documented these new, and more horrifying, abuses. The historians Miriam Pawel and Matt Garcia, in their respective books The Union of Their Dreams and From the Jaws of Victory, highlighted the cultish aspects of Chavez’s leadership style, how he demanded fealty, and the ways that he blamed others for the union’s failures. They also wrote about Chavez’s relationship with a teenage woman that led to his separation from his wife. Published in 2009 and 2014, the books by Pawel and Garcia challenged us to square Chavez’s selflessness with his egotism, his faith with his moral failings. After the Times report came out, Pawel told me that, for her, the most recent revelations are more of the same—“the next chapter in our evolving understanding of a complicated man.”
Stephen Pitti, another historian who has written about Chavez, told me: “Chavez was someone so many of us revered. Now we know that he was a rapist and sexual abuser of children. We admired him for doing so much for poor people, especially farmworkers. Over 40 years he helped create a civil-rights movement and change understandings of economic poverty. He registered tens of thousands of voters, he shaped new ecumenical dialogues, and he animated calls for peace and social justice. He even marched for LGBTQ rights in the 1980s.” But, Pitti continued, “the sexual crimes he committed were the very opposite of his call for self-denial, respect for human bodies, and justice for the vulnerable. We have to rethink his politics, his persona, and his life. And, more broadly, our leadership and organizational models. We should listen to those who emphasize that the UFW was never a one-person operation and that the farmworker movement’s commitments today remain powerful and urgent. We should support the victims. And we should support groups that don’t protect abusers.”
[From the July/August 2011 issue: The madness of Cesar Chavez]
I rewatched Obama’s speech after I read the news about Chavez, and I found it moving all over again. It made me think that, with respect only to Chavez’s ability to inspire collective action, we need more Cesar Chavezes, not fewer of them. Justice for farmworkers is still a far-off dream. The latest proposal to hire more immigrants to pick our crops, through the H-2B visa program, proposes to pay them less for their work instead of more. Paying agricultural workers less may cut growers’ labor costs, but it certainly won’t better the lives of the people who feed us.
After I watched the speech, I remembered how, after Obama finished, I walked the grounds of La Paz, to see Chavez’s grave and its surrounding rose garden, and to peer into his book-filled office, where we now have reason to believe that he raped young girls. That dark fact hangs over, and perhaps overshadows, everything else I saw and heard that day.
Yet maybe the farmworker movement, which has always been inextricably tied to the figure of Chavez, will at last be able to liberate itself from him. My lectures have already been moving in this direction. At the very least, I will place a huge asterisk next to Chavez’s name by talking about his sexual violence against girls and women. But I will also use the story of the UFW to remind students that patriarchy and gender violence plague many organizations led by powerful men.