Against the Cult of Personality: César Chávez and the UFW

Picture: Dolores Huerta, one of Chávez's alleged victims, speaking at a press conference alongside him.

Back in March, a New York Times article reported on serious abuse of women and girls by the lionised leader of the American union United Farm Workers (UFW), César Chávez.

Two of the women who have come forward are from families involved in the union. They were very young – in their early teens – when they helped in the UFW office and were abused by César Chávez. Debra Rojas says that Chávez raped her while travelling on the historic farmworkers’ march of 1975, when she was 15. ‘There’s so many secrets that have done so much harm,’ she says. The women now speaking out are joined by Dolores Huerta, a founder and leader of the union.

The UFW was formed in the early 1960s from the National Farm Workers Association and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. The union became well known nationally in the Delano grape strike of 1965–70, which involved a national grape boycott, and it was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. It engaged in many militant strikes, especially in California in the sixties and seventies, and was an important pole of struggle in the Chicano and Mexican communities in the South-West.

It has been well-known for decades that César Chávez was controlling and would purge people from the union for disagreeing with him. After the successful 1979 vegetable strike – which had been won due to on-the-ground escalation, against Chávez's orders – the workers 16 elected representatives for the first time, many of them from the strike committee. When these reps continued to push rank-and-file interests within the union, Chávez fired them.

Dolores Huerta, a decades-long activist in the UFW, says she did not say anything about her own abuse out of fear it would harm the movement. She felt compelled to speak only after other women shared their own experiences. Huerta also stated that the assaults resulted in two pregnancies, and that the two children were raised by other families.

Huerta says that she now feels deeply distressed that not speaking out at the time may have allowed Chávez to abuse more young girls. Other women involved have said they did not speak out earlier because they thought they would be called liars and attacked. Both of these fears are grounded in reality: at the time, farmworkers were shot dead during strikes; the union faced real repression; and women were routinely attacked, disbelieved, and called wreckers.

The common tendency to treat the UFW’s struggles and victories as the result of Chávez's personal brilliance, and to perceive the union itself as his creation, is part of the problem. Chávez didn't create farmworker struggle: there were militant strikes in the fields in California for decades before the UFW started. Glorifying individual leaders and conflating their personal status and authority with the movement makes abuse easier, as well as making for a worse union movement.

In a 2010 survey of farmworker women in California, 80% of the women surveyed said that they had experienced sexual harassment at work. The violence these workers routinely experience carries on within their unions. The cumulative violence women experience – in the workplace, within unions, in their communities, and through interactions with the state – produces conditions in which they feel trapped, silenced, and crushed.

The answer is not to say that women need to ‘speak up’ or ‘be strong’, but rather to collectively confront and challenge the conditions that keep victims silenced – the hero worship of leaders, the lack of truly democratic structures, the vilification of dissent as treachery, and the widespread culture of ignoring, belittling and blaming women.