For a quarter century, the state of California recognized March 31 as Cesar Chavez Day, the birthday of the late civil rights icon.
It was the first state to honor the man who launched a movement to bring dignity and basic human rights to farm workers and became a hero to generations of Mexican Americans. But California is now erasing Chavez from the public consciousness after devastating accusations of sexual assault came to light on March 18 with a multiyear investigation published in The New York Times that documented allegations that Chavez had sexually abused women and girls — including, shockingly, Dolores Huerta.
Chavez and Huerta were partners in the labor rights fight and, along with another organizer, cofounded the United Farm Workers union. Huerta said that Chavez raped her twice in the 1960s, resulting in two pregnancies that she hid from him and the world to protect the movement. She finally broke her silence, she said, in order to support other women who had come forward with stories of abuse by Chavez.
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The news tore through California’s Democratic establishment, casting Chavez — who had achieved near-mythical status after his death in 1993 — in a new and terrible light.
To many people, Chavez may be a distant historical figure, but in California his name still carries tremendous power even three decades after his death. Many Democratic officials, including former governor Jerry Brown, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas have touted their personal and family connections to Chavez and the social justice ideals he embodied.
But Huerta is a legend in her own right and has forged deep connections in the state’s political world. After Chavez’s death, she took over as standard-bearer of the farm workers movement and built her own legacy. (She’s credited with coming up with the now-ubiquitous rally slogan “Sí, se puede.”) Even at 95, she is still sought out by up-and-coming politicians wanting her endorsement, and her presence at campaign events and rallies is considered important.
Susan Brenneman
At an unrelated press conference the morning the story broke, Governor Gavin Newsom struggled to express his feelings about the victimization of a woman he calls a close friend by a man he once revered. “How many days I’ve marched, how many times when I’ve been with students talking about the movement. How many photographs I have in my house of Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez,” he trailed off.
Within hours of the publication of the Times story, many of those who had once exalted Chavez led the dismantling of his legacy. Celebrations were canceled. Statues were removed from public spaces. Murals were painted over. Local officials began the process of renaming the dozens of schools, streets, and plazas that bore the Chavez name. California’s state and local officials rushed through legislation to rechristen Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day and to reframe it as an event celebrating the people who toil in harsh conditions to “feed this nation.”
Who says the government can’t move quickly when it wants to?
The speed with which California’s Democratic establishment cast off Chavez like a smoldering blanket is admirable in an era when a sexual predator sits in the White House, but the erasure left many Latinos grappling with the stunning downfall of one of the few Mexican Americans lauded in history books.
“It’s a profound change in our understanding and reading of Latino political history,” Republican strategist Mike Madrid explained to me. “But I don’t know if it changes its trajectory.” In fact, he said, it’s healthy to shift focus from one flawed human to the movement that became so much bigger than Chavez. “This should never have been about one person. He was not a demigod.”
Paul Thornton
Certainly not. While Chavez’s accomplishments earned him a place among other social giants of the civil rights era, such as Martin Luther King Jr., he certainly wasn’t a saint. Biographies have shown a complicated and flawed leader who demonized undocumented immigrants, forced out adversaries from the union, dabbled in cultish practices, and became corrupted by his own power.
So as painful as the new allegations were, they weren’t entirely surprising, said Manuel Pastor, professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, particularly given “how much sexism, patriarchy, assault, exists in our communities.”
So what comes next? “We need to speak to the pain and the grief of both the direct victims and so many people who are losing a hero,” Pastor said. “And provide support for that, and provide a path to understand that it’s not the icons, it’s the movement. It’s not the individual, it’s the people.”
Amen to that. Happy Farmworkers Day!
This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe, where I am a contributor to the Opinion section. It is reprinted with permission.
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