FRESNO, Calif. – For weeks, events commemorating the late civil rights leader Cesar E. Chavez began to get cancelled abruptly across multiple states. The only reason given was that it was over a "sensitive matter.”
At first, speculation suggested it may have been fears of immigration agents targeting events that would draw immigrants and farmworkers. A national crackdown on immigrants under the second Trump administration unleashed a wave of fear across communities.
And the labor movement Chavez co-founded has over the decades turned into a de facto defender of immigrants who make up a large portion of farmworkers in the country.
But on Tuesday, official statements from the United Farm Workers – the union Chavez built in the early 1960s – pierced through all of the speculation.
“The UFW has learned of deeply troubling allegations that one of the union’s co-founders, Cesar Chavez, behaved in ways that are incompatible with our organization’s values. Some of the reports are family issues, and not our story to tell or our place to comment on. Far more troubling are allegations involving abuse of young women or minors. Allegations that very young women or girls may have been victimized are crushing,” an online statement from the UFW issued Tuesday morning read.
A mere 24 hours since that statement was issued, communities across the western U.S. where Chavez’s movement has deep ties, especially in California’s San Joaquin Valley – where the modern farmworker movement was born – began to sour on Chavez.
A subsequent New York Times story about Chavez that had apparently been in the works since 2021 was also published hours later on Wednesday morning.
The story lays out in detail that Chavez molested young girls and raped the co-founder of his labor movement, Dolores Huerta. Huerta, in a statement shortly after the national story was published, said Chavez fathered two children with her as a result.
But she didn’t raise the children. She left them in the care of other families who could better care for them, she said. Chavez died in 1993.
Huerta had never before shared that part of her life. She said she felt coming forward sooner would hurt the farmworker movement that had worked so hard to fight for labor rights.
Even on Wednesday, as communities took in the news about Chavez, the UFW had rallied outside a federal courthouse in Fresno while a court hearing where the UFW is a plaintiff played out.
The UFW sued the Trump administration in November and is asking a court to reverse wage rules for guest workers who work under what are known as H-2A visas – the union’s latest fight.
The union says the federal Department of Labor cut the wages of H-2A workers between $5 to $7 per hour. The number of guest workers has ballooned in recent decades, and the union says the new wages are suppressing wages of domestic workers.
Bertin Flores Esteban, a mushroom farmworker who traveled to Fresno for the hearing from Gilroy, in California’s Central Coast, said he supported the union’s fight – and that the union still has much to get done.
“We have a strong future. As long as this organization exists, as long as it stays alive and standing, many people will benefit,” he said.
The rally to support the a court fight for the largest farmworker union in the country played out in a split screen. On the other side, elected officials were sending off statements one by one, each denouncing the actions revealed about its founder.
“It was stomach turning, I got lightheaded. It's devastating news,” Miguel Arias, a Fresno City Council member and son of farmworkers, said.
Arias had moved in the hours since the Chavez revelations to strip a major south Fresno roadway of Chavez’s name. He said it was the right thing to do. One hundred miles south, in Bakersfield, city officials said they would end a push to name a street after Chavez there, too.
But the reaction wasn’t limited to the Valley. Democratic U.S. Senator Alex Padilla and State Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria released statements in support of Huerta and calling for any possible change they could.
Republican State Senator Shannon Grove also proposed renaming “Cesar Chavez Day” as “Farm Worker Day.” Republicans in the state legislature later announced an official effort to rename the state holiday, which is held on March 31st.
At the Fresno State campus, a statue of Chavez was covered in a black cloth. The university president said it would soon be removed.
Nearly 90 streets, monuments, libraries, parks, buildings, and schools bear Chavez’s name in California alone. Communities are now wrestling about where to go next.
In the immediate aftermath of Chavez’s revelations, many have turned their focus on the two women from Bakersfield who say they were abused by Chavez. And they showered Huerta with support for revealing the abuse she, too, endured.
Huerta said over the years she developed a close relationship with the children she had with Chavez. Nobody, she said, knew the full story of how those children came into the world – until now.
She said she felt she needed to suffer in silence in order to allow a movement that was seeking to help farmworkers in the United States grow and accomplish meaningful goals.
That movement still exists today nearly 65 years later.
“The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way,” Huerta, who will turn 96 in April, said.
