Coming to Terms with César Chávez

Image source: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

The revelations about César Chávez’s sexual misconduct with girls and women have been devastating.

As those of you acquainted with my writings know, I approach most topics from a macro-sociological perspective. This includes my last essay on today’s accelerated implosion of the U.S. social formation, which is generating state violence and social & political chaos under the weight of innumerable pathologies spread by the MAGA movement in power -- among which, prominently, we must include the scandalous impunity surrounding the decades-long sexual trafficking of thousands of girls by and for the so-called “Epstein class,” of which Donald Trump is its most prominent and repugnant representative. As I was tracing Trump’s intensified violent assaults at home and unprovoked imperialist wars abroad, the news of Chávez’s sexual predatory behavior on girls and abuse of women dropped like a neutron bomb, tearing at the very heart and soul of our Latino communities, who revered him. How could he have betrayed us like that - not just the victims, but the activists of the movement he led, and the broader community he claimed to champion?

I have always understood that my macro-historical approach to explaining our social world is necessary if we are to avoid missing the forest for the trees, but admittedly insufficient – we need to study the trees, too. The Chávez revelations, and the internal dynamics within the farm worker movement he led, though grounded in the long history of anti-systemic social struggles against labor exploitation and racial & gender oppression in the United States, has forced me to turn to other scholarship at the micro (individual, familial), and meta (institutional, organizational) levels of analysis, to take into account the pathologies nestled in the domains of interpersonal and organizational relations, manifested not only across all social institutions, but within our social movements as well. It is in all these spheres of social interaction that patriarchy and gendered violence are experienced, enabled, and socially reproduced, as well as confronted.

It is in this spirit that I am sharing here three sets of articles and videos that I hope you will find illuminating, helpful, and useful: 

(1) three superb articles on gendered violence, the traumas it causes & the healing processes and protective practices that are required here, here, and here.

(2) a New York Times article on the cult of Chávez's within the U.F.W, and a three-part video reel that applies “cult theory” to Chávez’s cult leader dynamics within the UFW, which enabled him to engage in sexually predatory behaviors: here, here, here, and here. 

(3) five reports that address the prevalence of sexual violence in the fields, against both farm worker women and girls, at the hands of the growers, contractors, and fellow workers: here, here, here, here, and here. This rampant gendered violence in the fields is systemic and ignored. 

This appalling situation is intolerable and cries out for major societal intervention to elevate the rights and protections of farm workers, men, women, and children, documented or not, on par with all other workers, women, and children in our society, which has never happened. It also vividly illustrates one of the worse outcomes of our broken, anachronistic immigration regime, and the urgent need for fighting for radical reforms to establish a bold new system of just, flexible, and unfettered human mobility - one based on universal human, social, and labor rights, not maximizing profits, much less appeasing white nationalists and religious zealots. Farm workers, like the abundant food they produce, should know no borders, should be sheltered, honored, and lovingly cared for. 

Missing still, and indispensable to understand what actually happened to the UFW - and many other social movements born of the social rebellions of the 1960s - is an in-depth critical study on the manner in which the UFW and its offshoot affiliated organizations allowed themselves to become increasingly coopted within the power dynamics of the U.S. duopoly. 

A study needs to be made on how the UFW and its two affiliated foundations adopted a “branding” PR strategy to affect social change, based on the ceaseless promotion of the cult of personality of their two historic leaders, CC & DH; and how these organizations willingly repurposed themselves away from their prior militant and autonomous organizing for social justice, foremost towards the farm workers, and towards doing what can only be described as  legitimation work for the Democratic Party. 

I can offer a few preliminary observations: The gamble initially, understandable in the early period of supreme liberal hegemony in American society, epitomized by the Kennedy family aura, was that such a choice – working within the duopoly system on the triumphant liberal Democratic side – had a better chance of achieving gradual but steady progress than organizing militant collective action in the streets and fields of America. 

The problem was, of course, that the timing was fatally off by the time of Richard Nixon and especially Ronald Reagan, given the sharp decline of liberalism from the 1980s onwards and the ascent of conservatism, in the global context of the decline of U.S. global hegemony and the increasing elite consensus to roll back the New Deal/Civil Rights social advances. 

The social movements that opted for this strategy in this post-liberal era of diminishing returns have, indeed, very little to show for then and now (perhaps for the UFW, the passage of the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Law was its last singular achievement). 

Today, the party and its many civil society instruments (“allies” is the polite term) lie practically paralyzed – if not vanquished - by the aggressive, emboldened, empowered Maga-Trumpist juggernaut that came roaring into power in 2017, and again in 2025. The duopoly is broken. The time for autonomous and militant collective action has returned. 

Can the legacy social movements like the UFW-led farm worker movement that once challenged the oppressive agricultural relations and waged class struggle and bolstered the Chicano ethnic insurrection so effectively, but then fatally tied themselves to the ineffective and discredited liberal wing of the duopoly, admit and atone for their failed strategy since the 1990s, change course & rectify in time, and rejoin the now unfolding mighty social resistance movements not tied to, funded by, or allow to become subordinated to any faction of the power elite?

We shall see, but a first step towards such rectification is to abandon all notions of “branding” these legacy movements via the cult of their leaders. For, in the case of the farm worker movement especially, it is important to note the intimate relationship between the UFW’s branding strategy and their alliance with and service to the Democratic Party. 

This branding and hero-worship worked both ways: it provided legitimacy and loyal support for liberal candidates and Democratic administrations at a time when the liberal establishment panicked and began to retreat from the social contract they help establish, which favored the working classes since the New Deal, and communities of color since the Civil Rights Laws, and embrace “neoliberal policies” that favored the elites. Income & wealth inequality skyrocketed. Worse, the Democratic Party establishment began to “triangulate” support for immigration and mass incarceration laws against Black and Brown communities that were much more restrictionist and punitive. This shift to the Right, begun in the Bill Clinton era, would continue – and worsen – as Democrats became enablers of the Bush era of endless wars and financial recklessness, exacerbated during the Obama and Biden administrations characterized by bailing out Wall Street, continuing the Bush wars, and turbocharging mass detentions and deportations, only to capitulate twice to the hostile takeover and assaults on the republic by a MAGA fascist regime. Not a record to proudly stand on!

In return for all that unwavering loyal support to the Democratic Party and all their watered-down, compromised policies in areas such as health care, immigration, the environment, and foreign policy – even farm worker rights! – the UFW “family” of organizations were handsomely rewarded with funding from various major liberal foundations and government agency grants and contracts, their “brand” given unique, powerful symbolic recognition: CC’s bust in the Biden Oval Office, presidential medals to both CC & DH, national and state proclamations of CC Day, national park proclamations, and an endless list of schools and streets named after them, murals painted and monuments erected in their honor.

In all fairness, none of this felt strange for most folks; rather it did the trick, not just culturally but politically, of completely naturalizing hero-worship as we became accustomed to celebrating our past farm worker movement and our ethnic pride through these icons, while many have long abandoned our farm worker communities’ urgent, desperate calls for justice today. And so have many behaved towards related new social movements, such as the immigrant rights movement – coopted and repeatedly betrayed by the Democratic Party establishment (with honorable exceptions as is the case in California) and, through their acquiescence, its most loyal allies in civil society.

But now that the spell has been broken, and we are left with only we, the people, unencumbered by cult leaders tied to the machinations of a dying duopoly, and suddenly freed to renew the Good Fight with more defiance, resolve and bolder aims, perhaps we shall look back at all those medals and murals and hero worshipping rituals and feel strange about them – a sign of political maturity. 

For, as one of CC’s victims stated, “The movement — that’s the hero.” And as they say in the streets of L.A., “Solo el pueblo salva el pueblo” – only the people can save the people.