On the Chavez Revelations

Paul mentioned this below, but as our resident labor person here, I have to comment on the revelations that Cesar Chavez not only groomed young girls and started forcing them into sex at the age of 13 but that he also raped Dolores Huerta and got her pregnant twice, children she gave up both times to people she knew after hiding the pregnancy.

The specifics are new. I’d like to say I’m surprised. I am not surprised. That’s because the general outline of these things have been known for a long time now. In the early 2010s, Frank Bardacke (who was part of the movement) and Matt Garcia (a well-respected historian) wrote books showing that, basically, Chavez was an awful person. He was a great organizer. But there’s long histories of organizers being terrible to other people. By the early 70s, he was full on cult leader, the cult revolving around loyalty to himself. He enacted The Game, borrowed from Synanon, but which was basically something out of Cultural Revolution, with self criticism sessions and others screaming your faults in your face. People were routinely kicked out of the movement for a lack of loyalty. He was sleeping around all over the place, forcing the wives of his fellow organizers into sex. He treated Huerta like shit, screaming at her in public and berating her constantly. He actually hated being a union head because that took power away from him. He undermined his own workers’ demands because he thought they do something else. He loved the boycott campaigns because these were cadres of mostly whites completely loyal to him, unlike the actual workers who would talk back. He supported the deportation of undocumented workers he considered competition for his own members, even though these were the members of his workers’ families.

This was all known for 15 years. In fact, the United Farm Workers is still basically a cult of personality around the Chavez memory. They have about 5,000 members is all but given that you can just pay them $20 for a membership, I’m not sure how many farmworkers with contracts they even have at this point. A few, but not many.

A lot of attention in recent years has moved from Chavez to Huerta, based in part on this stuff. But Huerta also treated people in the UFW horribly. She always defended him. She enforced his cult of personality expulsions. When I wrote my chapter on her in Organizing America, I explained it this way:

Since the early 70s, Huerta’s status within the union had taken a serious hit. Chavez used her as a punching bag when he felt like attacking someone or made her praise him when he felt the need for that. That made her feel more insecure and more needing to lash out at those below her in the organization. In response,  she picked fight with the younger volunteers, who saw her as a bully. She said that “conspirators” were “trying to fuck her, fuck Cesar, and fuck the union.” In short, the UFW became a highly dysfunctional organization. That came from the top, which was unquestionably Chavez, but it also very much came from Huerta. Some even accused her of using anti-Semitic language against Jewish UFW organizers she had turned against, such as Marshall Ganz, one of the most committed organizers in the movement.

This is hard to read. We want to make Huerta a hero, not a flawed organizer who made mistakes while under stress. As for whether we should discuss this information in a history or organizers, I unambiguously say it is necessary. If we are to learn from our organizers and the great movements of the past, we have to be honest about their failings. Heroes don’t help anyone succeed. Again, we have to take down the Mt. Rushmore model of studying history. We compare ourselves to great organizers such as Huerta negatively, as if we can never live up to their greatness. But maybe we can do better than they did, especially if we know what really happened. They were just people trying to figure it out. They had huge egos. The corruption that comes with too much power affects nearly everyone who achieves it. We have to be honest about all of this, not to slam on the past, but because it matters so much for us today.

Chavez’s obsession with loyalty and control meant that he suspected even Huerta. That’s not to excuse the way she lashed out at others in the UFW, but it does help explain it. Moreover, both Chavez and Huerta forgot the key lesson of the CSOs—keep yourself in the background and let the people lead. When they forgot that, they let their own interpersonal problems get in the way of organizing the workers. We should all remember this lesson.

This is before I actually knew that he raped her of course. But knowing what I did know, there was no way I was going to write a chapter lauding Chavez.

The only word to describe all this is sad.

The other thing I would say is that if you want heroes, don’t read any history, don’t engage in history, just embrace myth. Because people are not heroes. People are screwed up. I’ve become more interested in the question of what people want from history. This was brought to my mind again a couple of days ago when a commenter was struggling a bit with the labor history posts about what they are supposed to do for us given that these pasts are not heroic and the workers never win. The answer is that I don’t know. I guess what I would say is that reading history helps us understand the times we are in, for better and very much for worse. It helps us learn strategies that worked and when and why and failed for the same reasons. It helps us explain a lot of things. But if you are wanting to read history to be inspired, don’t. Because people of the past are just as screwed up as they are today. Martin Luther King was a womanizer, W.E.B. DuBois was a slumlord, Margaret Sanger was an eugenicist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony became intense racists, Thomas Jefferson was a slave raper, I could go on and on and on. What I would say if that if you don’t want answers, don’t ask questions.

And Cesar Chavez was a rapist child molestor.