We covered this yesterday but today there’s a follow up focused on Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of the UFW. She is now 95-years-old and for the first time this week has revealed that she was the victim of sexual assault by Cesar Chavez. She says she stayed quiet all this time because she didn’t want to hurt the movement.
Ms. Huerta said the assault occurred in the winter of 1966, when she was at the People’s Bar and Cafe in Delano, Calif. — a well-known hangout for farmworker organizers. She was having a beer when Mr. Chavez stormed in, tapped her shoulder and asked for a word.
Assuming that the matter concerned an upcoming strike, she said, she followed him outside. It was common for them to have meetings in the car — Mr. Chavez worried that his office was bugged. He drove her to a secluded grape field on the outskirts of town, she said, and assaulted her…
“I saw him, again, as my boss, as my hero, as, you know, somebody that would do the impossible,” she said. “I never talked about it to anybody and the reason I didn’t is because I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”
Sexual assault wasn’t the only issue she faced in the UFW. She also remembers being moved out of the way so Chavez and others could take credit for her work.
In the days after Thanksgiving in 1986, Dolores Huerta was ready to celebrate. As one of the co-leaders of the United Farm Workers union, she had spent four months in Washington lobbying lawmakers to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act, landmark legislation that granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants.
A news conference was scheduled to celebrate the victory, but Ms. Huerta said she was not made aware of the event. Instead, she said, her fellow U.F.W. leader, Cesar Chavez, told her there was a crisis in Florida that required her immediate attention. Ms. Huerta flew to Florida, only to realize that the emergency was nonexistent and no one was expecting her. She spent the next few days speaking at senior centers.
“I realized afterward they just wanted to get me out of the way so they could take credit for the work,” she said of her male co-workers in an interview last week.
Even when she was present, she frequently became a target of verbal abuse by the men.
“Don’t say nothing, dilapidated bitch,” one male union board member could be heard telling her during a meeting in April 1978, a recording of which was reviewed by The Times. He then told her to “shut up” as Mr. Chavez berated her with even worse invective.
Huerta says Chavez eventually offered her a kind of general apology. It was decades later in 1993. He admitted that he’d treated her and other women differently from his male colleagues. Maybe that would have been the start of further discussions about his past behavior. Huerta will never know because a few days later Chavez died. The told the Times, “That took him out before he would have to face his wrongdoings.”
As for why she waited so many decades to finally come forward, Huerta said she decided to do so now becausee she learned (from the NY Times) that she wasn’t the only person that Chavez had assaulted.
I am telling my story because the New York Times has indicated that I was not the only one — there were others. Women are coming forward, sharing that they were sexually abused and assaulted by Cesar when they were girls and teenagers.
The knowledge that he hurt young girls sickens me. My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years. There are no words strong enough to condemn those deplorable actions that he did…
I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.
Both times she was assaulted by Chavez she became pregnant and had two children which were raised by other families. She said those children are now in close contact with her other children from her marriage.
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