“A true American hero” leads the Cesar Chavez Foundation write up about the mascot behind the foundation, a person hiding behind a carefully crafted mask of a civil rights leader that hid the uncomfortable truth that Chavez not only disliked Mexican migrants, often using derogatory terms like “wetbacks” and leading people to beat them back across the border, but was also a sexual predator.
Longtime confidant of Chavez and cofounder of the United Farm Workers Dolores Huerta posted on her social media account that Chavez sexually abused her while they worked on their civil rights projects. The first time, according to Huerta, was when she was a young mother in the 1960s, when she felt “manipulated and pressured into having sex” with Chavez. She wrote that she felt she could not reject him “because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the moment,” the UFW.
Huerta went on to write that the second sexual encounter “was forced, against my will” and that she “felt trapped.”
In a lengthier post on her Medium channel, Huerta added more details to the abuse she endured from Chavez. She added that both sexual encounters with Chavez resulted in pregnancies. She wrote that she kept the pregnancies a secret and after the children were born, she “arranged for them to be raised by other families that could give them stable lives.” Huerta goes on to disclose that she has developed “a deep relationship” with the children and that they are “close to my other children, their siblings.”
She goes on to write that although “I have never identified myself as a victim,” she now understands “that I am a survivor, of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”
Huerta explained that she kept her silence “for the last 60 years” because she wanted to protect the farmworker movement she “had spent my entire life fighting for.”
Chavez Called Mexican Migrants “Wetbacks” and Beat Mexicans Trying to Cross the Border
Cesar Chavez was not just a sexual predator, but a Mexican migrant abuser as well. Although the UFW did its best to hide Chavez’s dislike for Mexicans, both legal migrants and undocumented as well, reframing Chavez in 2018, as a champion for immigration reform, the fact was that Chavez not only used the derogatory term, “wetback” to refer to Mexican migrants but he also encouraged the Border Patrol to deport as many as possible, even going so far as giving U.S. immigration officials “stacks and stacks” of information on where to find undocumented migrants.
But it wasn’t just the undocumented Mexican migrants that Chavez complained about but Mexican laborers in general. Before Congress, Chavez complained about the legal Mexican workers “taking advantage” of their work status to work the grape fields. But Chavez did not stop at complaining about legal Mexican workers and helping immigration officials to deport undocumented Mexicans, Chavez was the first to line the border and physically assault Mexicans back to México.
Before the alt-right anti-immigration vigilantes lined the border to keep Mexicans from crossing it, Chavez used his UFW members to patrol 125 miles of the border, beating migrants with sticks, and in at least one case, “a battery cable,” and rob them or strip them naked leaving them in the desert.
There are many commemorations across the country celebrating Cesar Chavez. One community, El Paso, Texas, is now rethinking its support of Chavez.
Renaming El Paso’s Cesar Chavez Highway
In a telephone call today, El Paso City Representative Lily Limón told us that she will be asking her city council colleagues to send a request to the El Paso state legislation to submit a request to the state to change the name of El Paso’s border highway which is named after Chavez to Benito Juárez. Only state legislators can change the name of the state highway. Changing the highway’s name to Benito Juárez “honors the close friendship Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juárez developed in letters as they fought to defend their countries,” she said.
Benito Juárez and Abraham Lincoln – who never met in person – developed a strong affection for each other through letters they exchanged as each faced war in their countries. Lincoln was fighting the Civil War while Juárez was fighting French invaders.
Limón pointed to the statue of Lincoln in Juárez and the street it sits on – Avenida Juárez, as the reason renaming El Paso’s highway to Benito Juárez is appropriate.
Cesar Chavez is portrayed as a civil rights leader across America but behind the mask carefully crafted by the UFW and his supporters lies the true Chavez, a man who abused women and Mexican migrants alike.
Now the UFW is again trying to rewrite history again this time by relabeling itself “as a women-led organization” and announcing that they are cancelling Cesar Chavez Day activities across the country.
When the first mask became untenable, the UFW is now trying on a different mask in the hope that people will continue to believe the lie that they support workers, when in fact, they have only supported the workers that pay dues to them.
Picture credit: Undated picture of Cesar Chavez from the Cesar Chavez Foundation.
