I Knew Chavez Was More Sinner than Saint -- Now Comes Vindication

Ruben Navarrette
Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:37:21 -0700
Opinion

SAN DIEGO — Is Cesar Chavez too big to cancel? Apparently not. The cancellations are happening with lightning speed.

In fact, in a major rebuke, California lawmakers said Thursday they intend to rename the March 31 state holiday commemorating the labor leader's birthday from "Cesar Chavez Day" to "Farmworkers Day."

Disturbing allegations this week that Chavez sexually assaulted girls and women, including his second-in-command, Dolores Huerta, hit the U.S. Latino community — especially Mexican Americans, who make up about 60% of it — like a nuclear warhead.
Updated: Thu Mar 19, 2026

SAN DIEGO — Is Cesar Chavez too big to cancel? Apparently not. The cancellations are happening with lightning speed.

In fact, in a major rebuke, California lawmakers said Thursday they intend to rename the March 31 state holiday commemorating the labor leader's birthday from "Cesar Chavez Day" to "Farmworkers Day."

Disturbing allegations this week that Chavez sexually assaulted girls and women, including his second-in-command, Dolores Huerta, hit the U.S. Latino community — especially Mexican Americans, who make up about 60% of it — like a nuclear warhead.

Huerta, who is now 96, admitted in a statement this week that she had "two separate sexual encounters" with Chavez when she was in her 30s. In one instance, she claims to have been pressured to have sex. In the other, what she describes fits the definition of rape. She insists that both encounters resulted in pregnancies, and she says that she gave the babies up for adoption.

We can expect to hear more about this. And I suspect what comes out will suggest that — notwithstanding the rape allegation — the relationship was more extensive than Huerta lets on. She says she kept quiet to protect the farm worker movement. I suspect she kept quiet to protect Chavez, for whom she developed genuine affection.

My own personal interactions with Huerta over the years have taught me that she is not always believable when it comes to the UFW.

Still, in this case, I can't find anyone who thinks that Huerta and two other women who say they were assaulted by Chavez are lying.

So here we are in the reckoning stage. Many cities, universities, schools and institutions that named things after Chavez to honor him are now quickly hunting for paint, tarps and a lot of masking tape. They want to distance themselves from someone they now view as dishonorable. It's the express version of cancel culture.

The whole messy saga transports me back to February 2025 and the campus of Fresno State, my hometown university. I'd returned to this place that I knew and loved to interact with journalism students as a journalist-in-residence. But, as I stood before a statue of Chavez on campus, I realized that I had also come here to wrestle with ghosts.

This is the university where, in the late 1980's, I enrolled as a visiting student. I devoured Chicano-Latino Studies courses I couldn't find at Harvard. At Fresno State, baby boomer Latino professors fed me a sanitized and sanctified narrative about Chavez, Huerta and the United Farm Workers union they founded in 1962. The UFW aimed to bring dignity to the fields and remind growers that the workers who put money in their pockets and food on our tables are not farm tools but human beings worthy of respect.

That vision is simple. But implementing it over the next three decades, until Chavez died in 1993, turned out to be complicated.

Things sure got complicated for me after I confronted Chavez to his face in a small gathering at Harvard in the Fall of 1989. After he made his pitch in work clothes to a roomful of New England liberals, I stood and asked Chavez how he responded to critics who said that he had — because of his celebrity status — become bigger than the union he represented and could no longer relate to everyday farm workers.

In 2008, at a conference in San Diego, I got on Huerta's bad side when I blasted the UFW for calling immigration authorities to arrest undocumented immigrants who crossed picket lines.

The stories get worse. According to the Village Voice, Chavez's cousin, Manuel, staged a "wet-line" at the U.S.-Mexico border where UFW thugs beat up migrants who tried to cross.

Huerta denied all of it, and then she declared me the enemy.

A couple of years later, I was invited to accept an award from Latino legislators in California. The day before the event, a lawmaker called and took it upon herself to un-invite me. Huerta was getting the same award, and she didn't want me there. I went anyway, accepted the award, and wound up in a shouting match with Huerta — and a handful of Latino lawmakers who took her side.

I took all these experiences with me to Fresno State, and they raced through my mind as I stood before the Chavez statue.

Today, that statue is completely covered in a black shroud. For defenders of the UFW, papering over this horrendous scandal will not be that easy.