For a lot of Latinos, Cesar Chavez appeared like a saint. There have the truth is been efforts to canonize him. I lived in Los Angeles for a summer season after I was an undergraduate, and I regularly drove down Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Nearly each establishment I’ve belonged to has named one thing after him. In Tucson, I’ve met with College of Arizona professors within the Cesar E. Chavez Constructing. At Northwestern, the place I’m now a professor, a gaggle of Latino college students as soon as invited me to talk on their Cesar Chavez Day of Service, earlier than they went out into the neighborhood to volunteer.
The streets, buildings, and commemorative days will doubtless be renamed, however what’s going to I say now about Chavez in my Latino-history course, which I educate virtually yearly? A yearslong investigation by The New York Instances uncovered accusations that he sexually abused Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas once they had been minors, and raped Dolores Huerta, with whom he co-founded the United Farm Employees union. Some of the revered figures of not solely Latino historical past however all of Twentieth-century United States historical past can now not be regarded as heroic. However the motion he led nonetheless might be.
In 1965, Chavez led the United Farm Employees throughout a nationwide and worldwide boycott of California desk grapes that led to a landmark contract for farmworkers, signed on July 29, 1970, by 26 growers in Delano, California, together with Giumarra Vineyards, the main table-grape grower. Later within the decade, the union helped outlaw the usage of the short-handled hoe, el cortito, as a result of it required laborers to stoop within the fields for hours on finish. Within the ’80s, the United Farm Employees opened well being clinics and launched a “Wrath of Grapes” marketing campaign that drew consideration to the harms of DDT and different pesticides.
Chavez actually labored with others, however the union’s achievements couldn’t have occurred with out him. He was the primary individual to convey the plight of Latino agricultural employees to the eye of Individuals throughout the nation. Non-Latino faculty college students impressed by the farmworker motion joined the trigger. Chavez was on the duvet of Time journal. A picture of Robert F. Kennedy, taken in March 1968, when he was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, reveals him seated subsequent to Chavez on the finish of one of many labor chief’s starvation strikes. Kennedy relied on Chavez to assist him with the Mexican American vote. When Kennedy gained the California main, he credited the UFW and talked about Chavez by identify.
A month earlier than Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, he spoke on the dedication of the Cesar Chavez nationwide monument in Keene, California, the place the UFW headquarters, referred to as “La Paz,” has been positioned since 1971. I used to be within the viewers, shading my eyes from the solar as we watched Obama’s helicopter land, noticed the president strut to the rostrum, and heard his greeting, “Good morning! ¡Buenos días! ¡Si, se puede!” Obama’s remarks targeted as a lot on the motion Chavez helped construct as on Chavez himself: “Cesar can be the primary to say that this isn’t a monument to 1 man. The motion he helped to steer was sustained by a era of organizers who stood up and spoke out, and urged others to do the identical.” Obama went on to reward Chavez and the UFW for bringing collectively Individuals of each race and each background to march collectively for financial and social justice. “The place there had as soon as been despair,” Obama mentioned, “Cesar gave employees a motive to hope.”
We’ve given Chavez an excessive amount of credit score for the union’s victories. Huerta, not Chavez, stood onstage with Kennedy at his victory celebration on the Ambassador Lodge in Los Angeles. (A couple of hours later, Kennedy was assassinated.) The union gained partly as a result of Chavez cast shut connections with spiritual leaders who interpreted his starvation 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 is going to be inconceivable to show any of those histories with out Chavez, however any further, I’ll spotlight the motion over the person. I’m undecided that my college students shall be glad. The UC Berkeley professor Lorena Oropeza’s 2019 e book, The King of Adobe, a biography of the New Mexico civil-rights chief Reies López Tijerina, revealed that he sexually violated his daughter. My college students, most of them younger Latinas, concluded that Tijerina was an irredeemable character. His crimes far outweighed the tens of 1000’s of Mexican Individuals he impressed to pursue their land rights within the Southwest.
A reassessment of Chavez was beneath manner even earlier than the Instances documented these new, and extra horrifying, abuses. The historians Miriam Pawel and Matt Garcia, of their respective books The Union of Their Goals and From the Jaws of Victory, highlighted the cultish points of Chavez’s management model, how he demanded fealty, and the ways in which he blamed others for the union’s failures. Additionally they wrote about Chavez’s relationship with a teenage lady that led to his separation from his spouse. Printed in 2009 and 2014, the books by Pawel and Garcia challenged us to sq. Chavez’s selflessness along with his egotism, his religion along with his ethical failings. After the Instances report got here out, Pawel advised me that, for her, the latest revelations are extra of the identical—“the following chapter in our evolving understanding of a sophisticated man.”
Stephen Pitti, one other historian who has written about Chavez, advised me: “Chavez was somebody so many people revered. Now we all know that he was a rapist and sexual abuser of kids. We admired him for doing a lot for poor folks, particularly farmworkers. Over 40 years he helped create a civil-rights motion and alter understandings of financial poverty. He registered tens of 1000’s of voters, he formed new ecumenical dialogues, and he animated requires peace and social justice. He even marched for LGBTQ rights within the Eighties.” However, Pitti continued, “the sexual crimes he dedicated had been the very reverse of his name for self-denial, respect for human our bodies, and justice for the weak. We have now to rethink his politics, his persona, and his life. And, extra broadly, our management and organizational fashions. We should always hearken to those that emphasize that the UFW was by no means a one-person operation and that the farmworker motion’s commitments right this moment stay highly effective and pressing. We should always help the victims. And we must always help teams that don’t defend abusers.”
I rewatched Obama’s speech after I learn the information about Chavez, and I discovered it shifting once more. It made me suppose that, with respect solely to Chavez’s potential to encourage collective motion, we’d like extra Cesar Chavezes, not fewer of them. Justice for farmworkers remains to be a far-off dream. The newest proposal to rent extra immigrants to choose our crops, by way of the H-2B visa program, proposes to pay them much less for his or her work as a substitute of extra. Paying agricultural employees much less might lower growers’ labor prices, but it surely actually gained’t higher the lives of the individuals who feed us.
After I watched the speech, I remembered how, after Obama completed, I walked the grounds of La Paz, to see Chavez’s grave and its surrounding rose backyard, and to see into his book-filled workplace, the place we now have motive to consider that he raped younger women. That darkish truth hangs over, and maybe overshadows, all the things else I noticed and heard that day.
But perhaps the farmworker motion, which has at all times been inextricably tied to the determine of Chavez, will eventually have the ability to liberate itself from him. My lectures have already been shifting on this route. On the very least, I’ll place an enormous asterisk subsequent to Chavez’s identify by speaking about his sexual violence in opposition to women and girls. However I can even use the story of the UFW to remind college students that patriarchy and gender violence plague many organizations led by highly effective males.
