According to an exposé published March 18 by the New York Times, the late Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, groomed and sexually abused girls in the 1970s, including two daughters of longtime organizers. The Times relied on interviews with more than 60 people, including two women who agreed to go public with their accounts of having been sexually abused by Chavez starting when they were as young as 12 and 13. As the Times prepared to publish the story, UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta added her own account, that she’d been raped by Chavez in 1966 after having been pressured into having sex with him in 1960; both encounters resulted in children that she gave up for adoption.
In a statement the day before the publication of the exposé, UFW said it had “learned of deeply troubling allegations” but had no firsthand knowledge of misconduct. But according to the Times story, union leaders had been aware of sexual misconduct allegations for years and did not appear to make any effort to investigate. Instead, to preserve Chavez’ image, accusers were discouraged from speaking out.
While the accounts involving underage girls are public for the first time, there was already plenty of tarnish on Chavez’ halo. Starting in 2011, three major biographies of Chavez documented both his rise as a charismatic union leader who inspired many and his decline as a paranoid authoritarian who presided over the dramatic deterioration of his union.
Born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927, Chavez worked as a farm laborer in California after serving in the Navy. In 1962 he and Huerta formed a farmworker community group in Delano, California, that set up a credit union and published a newspaper. In 1965, when striking grape workers asked the group for help, Chavez and the group became devoted full time to strike support. The group merged in 1967 with a Filipino farmworker organization and affiliated with the AFL-CIO, eventually becoming the United Farm Workers in 1973.
Chavez deployed distinctive tactics drawing on the Catholic penitential tradition, including attention-getting public fasts and physically grueling 300-mile marches in which supporters would carry crucifixes and images of the Virgin Mary. UFW also drew support from thousands of volunteers who helped publicize boycotts that were meant to support striking grape workers.
At its height from 1968 to 1973, UFW won contracts with growers that delivered significant wage gains, and after it helped pass the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act into law in June 1975, its membership peaked at more than 60,000.
But as several biographers have outlined, Chavez’ own conduct and decisions, combined with unrelenting hostility from growers, contributed to a steep decline in membership — to about 5,000 — from which the union never recovered.
In his 830-page 2011 book Trampling Out the Vintage, Frank Bardacke traces the faults pretty much to the beginning with Chavez’ effort to control every aspect of the organization he founded. His penchant for declaring public fasts kept the attention on himself. His emphasis on cultivating urban liberal support for boycotts took the focus away from organizing farmworkers. So did the union’s big turn toward electoral politics (At one point in the 1970s, UFW was one the largest political donors in California.) Chavez also led periodic purges of perceived rivals in the union and of those he suspected of disloyalty.
In 1972, Chavez led the union to move its headquarters to a 200-acre compound in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, far from the workers they represented. With the compound perimeter patrolled by armed guards, as many as 200 supporters lived and worked there in a commune-like fashion. On Sundays they engaged in a practice borrowed from a cult leader Chavez had befriended: group meetings in which the group would single out individuals for lengthy and profane verbal attacks.
The New York Times outlined some of that history in a second piece published March 29. But the cultish practices were an open secret to those close to the union.
Chavez was a household name from the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s, and yet you don’t hear much about him from 1980 on. That trajectory is also reflected in this newspaper. Beginning in 1965, the Labor Press reported on Chavez and his movement with sympathy and interest, but coverage peaks in 1969, fades through the 1970s, and disappears from 1981 until his death in 1993 at age 66.
After his death, an image was cemented of Chavez as a saintly figure representing the aspirations of oppressed and exploited farm workers and of Latinos generally. Since his death, he’s received public acclaim well out of proportion with anything he achieved as a labor leader. Streets and schools have been named for him, monuments have been dedicated in his honor, and his birthday became a paid holiday for state workers in California. Now, the sexual abuse allegations reported by the Times are prompting a re-evaluation of all of that.
If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the painful disillusion, it’s that unions aren’t about the person at the top. Their force and their moral value come from the collective effort of their members.
