By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, March 19, 2026
There are more than 100 places in the United States named after labor
leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez — streets; libraries; elementary,
middle and high schools; buildings on college campuses; and campuses
themselves. Berkeley, Colton, Denver,
Las Vegas, Long Beach, Modesto, Oakland,
Sacramento, San Diego, and Seattle
have parks or plazas named after Chavez. His birthday is a state holiday in California.
Chavez’s home and grave are parts of a national monument. The U.S. National Park
Service writes that Chavez is “widely recognized as the most important
Latino leader in the United States during the twentieth century.”
Everything named after Chavez is going to have to be
renamed, Californians had better make plans to start going back to work on
March 31, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen to the Cesar E. Chavez
National Monument.
Because it turns out that Cesar Chavez was a serial
rapist and sexually pursued and molested girls as young as twelve, and groomed
them from the ages of eight or nine.
Chavez was, up until the New York Times’ bombshell exposé Wednesday, about as revered a figure as
you would find in America’s Latino communities:
Ms. Ana Murguia and another
woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when
they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a
powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of
farmworker rights.
Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when
Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, groping her breasts in the same
office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to
have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said,
and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was
not old enough to consent. (Ms. Murguia said Mr. Chavez molested her but never
had intercourse with her.)
The abuse allegations appear to
be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which
has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez
also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his
own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement,
Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a
disclosure she has never before made publicly.
Then, shortly after the Times article came out, civil rights leader Dolores Huerta issued a statement:
“I am nearly 96 years old, and
for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the
truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting
for.
I have encouraged people to
always use their voice. Following the New York Times’ multi-year investigation
into sexual misconduct by Cesar Chavez, I can no longer stay silent and must
share my own experiences.
As a young mother in the 1960s, I
experienced two separate sexual encounters with Cesar. The first time I was
manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t feel I could
say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the
movement I had already devoted years of my life to. The second time I was
forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped. . . .
Both sexual encounters with Cesar
led to pregnancies. I chose to keep my pregnancies secret and, after the
children were born, I arranged for them to be raised by other families that
could give them stable lives.
The Cesar Chavez Foundation had more than $40 million in revenue in 2024, and more than $260 million
in assets. The foundation issued a statement stating, “We are deeply shocked and
saddened by what we are hearing.” You must wonder how much longer they will
still be called “the Cesar Chavez Foundation.”
If you went to school in the 1980s or later, there’s a
good chance that there was a picture of Cesar Chavez in one of the later
chapters of your history textbook. The U.S. Department of Labor has him in its “Hall of Honor.” His jacket is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
American History. He’s had his own Hollywood biopic.
If there’s such a thing as secular sainthood, Chavez attained it in the years
after his death.
The three most recent Democratic presidents all
celebrated Chavez and his legacy loudly and proudly over the decades, often
using terms that are cringe-inducing, considering what the world now knows.
Upon his death, President Bill Clinton declared, “We can be proud of his enormous accomplishments
and the dignity and comfort he brought to the lives of so many of our country’s
least powerful and most dispossessed workers. He had a profound impact upon the
people of the United States.” Clinton later posthumously awarded Chavez the Medal of Freedom, the
nation’s highest civilian honor and said, “He was, for his own people, a Moses figure.”
In 2012, President Barack Obama traveled to Keene,
Calif., to dedicate the national monument. Obama said, “More than higher wages or better working
conditions, that was Cesar’s gift to us — a reminder that we are all God’s
children, that every life has value. . . . He believed that when a child
anywhere in America can dream beyond her circumstances and work to realize that
dream, it makes all our futures just a little bit brighter.”
About two years later, President Obama proclaimed March
31, 2014, as Cesar Chavez Day, calling him “one of America’s greatest champions for social
justice. . . . Cesar Chavez devoted his life to correcting these injustices, to
reminding us that every job has dignity, every life has value, and everyone —
no matter who you are, what you look like, or where you come from — should have
the chance to get ahead. . . . The values Cesar Chavez lived by guide us still.
. . . Throughout his lifelong struggle, Cesar Chavez never forgot who he was
fighting for.”
Upon taking office, President Joe Biden chose to display
a bust of Chavez in the Oval Office. Biden said,
“When I became President, I proudly placed a bust of Cesar Chavez in the Oval
to serve as a reminder of the values he embodied, the vision of freedom he
fought for, and his commitment to justice and dignity that we must uphold each
and every day.”
Of course, none of those presidents knew about Chavez’s
horrific sexual abuses. But the hagiographic portraits painted by those
presidential statements reflect the fact that after Chavez’s death, his fans
and supporters airbrushed his image quite a bit.
Mark Krikorian liked to remind progressives that Chavez was
a proponent of a secure border and restricting illegal immigration, because
illegal immigrants competed with native-born and legally immigrated farm
laborers and drove down wages. Chavez referred to Mexican illegal immigrants as
“wets,” and his United Farm Workers union engaged in violent vigilantism at times. Chavez reportedly
made antisemitic comments and warned about Jewish conspiracies.
Subsequent histories have argued that Chavez was a
remarkable self-promoter who downplayed the contributions of others in the
formation of the UFW. And in his later years, he acted more erratically and
strangely. From the New Yorker:
Chavez became openly paranoid
during the seventies. Increasingly seized by what Pawel calls a “basic mistrust
of almost anyone with outside expertise,” he began purging associates from the
upper ranks of the union — quietly at first, and then in public confrontations.
In 1977, taking a cue from Mao, he staged shouting matches at meetings to drive
out colleagues. Sometimes he accused them of being spies for the Republicans or
the Communists. (“You’re a f***ing agent,” he seethed at a confused plumber.) The
paranoia was not baseless — Chavez, like many figures on the left, was under
F.B.I. investigation — but the reaction was extreme. When some he expelled
tried to use the phone, La Paz security threatened to eject them forcibly.
By the late seventies, the
union’s California roots were bearing pop-psych fruit. Chavez was much taken
with Synanon, a rehab center turned life-style cult, originally based in Santa
Monica. Synanon’s lucrative work revolved around an activity called the Game,
in which community members attacked one another with true or invented
accusations. Therapeutic work or even enlightenment — Synanon had already
declared itself a religion — progressed by lobbing the hot potato of blame to
someone else. Chavez loved the Game and wanted to start practicing it at La
Paz.
No pun intended, but the phrase “taking a cue from Mao”
is a red flag. (Although I suppose now we know that Chavez and Mao shared
another trait; they both enjoyed having sex with underage women.)
Believe it or not, kids, but there was a time when the
headline “widely beloved powerful man turns out to be a sexual predator and a
creep” was genuinely surprising. There is danger in putting someone up on a
pedestal, and there is particular risk when a heroic mythology gets cultivated
around a particular leader, or when the man and the cause become so intertwined
that what’s bad for the man is seen as dangerous for his entire movement.
One of the reasons Chavez’s victims remained silent for
all these years was their sense that telling anyone what he had done to them
could somehow hurt the causes he led. As noted above, Huerta wrote that she
“believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have
spent my entire life fighting for.” The Times article states, “Many of
the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of
tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil
rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in
California.”
Man, have we seen that phenomenon before. We can’t be too
honest about priests sexually abusing young people, because it would be bad for
the image of the church. We can’t be too honest about the sexual misconduct of
the president, because it would be bad for the party. We can’t be too honest
about the out-of-court settlements of the sexual harassment lawsuits of the
CEO, because it would be bad for the company and the stock price.
Powerful and corrupt men have an ingeniously sinister
ability to turn their personal misdeeds into problems too dangerous for their
organizations to confront. Through some sort of corruptive alchemy, trying to
hold someone accountable for his actions becomes a betrayal of the cause.
You’re expected to avert your eyes from wicked actions, in the name of some
nebulous greater good. The shameless abusive guy at the top did something
terrible — but you’re the one who’s going to be blamed for the fallout
if you don’t help cover it up. (I am reminded of former North Carolina Senator
John Edwards convincing his own married aide, Andrew Young, to take the fall for impregnating Rielle Hunter and to falsely
claim paternity of Rielle Hunter’s child.)
No movement, faction, faith, or organization seems
completely immune to this phenomenon. For a long while, I suspected that the
progressive mentality of the inherent righteousness and self-evidently moral
virtue of their causes led them to believe that they were entitled to some
indulgences. (Yes, that word choice is deliberate irony.) “I’m saving the
world, therefore, I’m entitled to use the interns as sex toys.” “I’m a male
feminist, therefore, nothing I do can be considered harassment.”
But a whole lot of people on the right are every bit as
convinced that their work is saving the world, and every bit as capable of
talking themselves into believing that moral compromises are necessary to serve
the greater good. A particular human being may come to be perceived as a
symbol, but in the end, a human being is not an abstract symbol. They’re flesh
and blood, as flawed and fallen as the rest of us.
ADDENDUM: This morning, U.S. Department of
Homeland Security employees who were deemed essential reported for work without
knowing when they would get paid for the 76th time in the past 138 days. This is a disgrace.
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