Chavez Studies

UFW boss abused girls and raped women.

Lloyd is up first on this breaking story.

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“Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977,” the New York Times reports. Another victim was United Farm Workers colleague Dolores Huerta:

One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California. . .

A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them. Instead, many of the women say they were discouraged from speaking out in order to preserve Mr. Chavez’s public image.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Cesar Chavez abused girls, raped fellow labor icon Dolores Huerta.” As the New York Post notes Marguia and Rojas “described a pattern of grooming that began when they were as young as 8 or 9 years old.” Huerta “later bore two of his children,” and Chavez “fathered at least four children with multiple women outside his marriage,” and so on. So maybe the UFW slogan “Sí, se puede” was what Huerta, 95, told Chavez back in the day. The two go back a long way.

In 1958 Chavez became general director of the Community Services Organization (CSO) created by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. With CSO colleague Dolores Huerta, Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Chavez was also tight with the Stalinist Bert Corona, founder of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), but they disagreed on immigration. Corona supported open borders while Chavez derided illegals as “wetbacks” and deployed UFW thugs to keep them in check.

In 1994, a year after Chavez died, President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Joe Biden was happy to tag along (though given his own dodgy history, perhaps this was professional courtesy from one abuser to another):

In 2000 California made Cesar Chavez Day a state holiday. On the other hand, not all farm workers support the UFW.

In 2018, workers at Gerawan Farms near Fresno voted 1098 to 197 to reject the UFW as their representative, and the timing was significant. The workers submitted their ballots in 2013 but the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board refused to count the ballots. In effect, the ALRB, a creation of recurring Gov. Jerry Brown, acts as a goon for the UFW.

In light of the “shocking” revelations, the union now declines to celebrate Chavez’s birthday. More than 30 cities will have to make the call on Ceasar Chavez Boulevard, but there may be more to it.

“It’s a matter of who knew what and when,” sexual abuse attorney John Manly told the Los Angeles Times, adding that Chavez’s leadership role could create liability for the UFW. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.

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Steve adds:

When I saw the news Tuesday that the United Farmworkers Union (UFW) had canceled all Cesar Chavez birthday events at the end of this month, I knew the story had to be very very bad. But perhaps the worst aspect of this is something that will slide by in the reportage. Dwell on this paragraph of the NY Times story:

In other words, politics uber alles. The sins of political heroes and champions of “the cause” get a pass. It sent me back to the declaration of a famous American Stalinst (who was also a labor organizer), Anna Louise Strong.* In her 1935 book I Change Worlds, she wrote: "One must not make a god of Stalin; he was too valuable for that."

We’ll see if that same double-standard applies to Chavez. I see news stories about cities already thinking of renaming Chavez streets and parks. My test will be U.C. Berkeley, which de-named Boalt Hall for the law school because John Boalt said mean things about the Chinese in . . . 1890 (which the Chinese Exclusion Acts were in force).

At least Boalt never raped anyone. So will Berkeley de-name this, and run a headline declaring “U.C. Berkeley removes rapist Cesar Chavez from student center building”?

A test of liberal double-standards.

* It was Lloyd who put me onto this gem many years ago. Keep it handy.