Cesar Chavez allegations remind us we must hold all abusers accountable

When the news broke last week of sexual assault allegations against legendary farmworker leader Cesar Chavez, I wish I could say I was shocked. 

I was devastated for Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas who bravely told The New York Times they had been sexually abused as children in the 1970s, and I was heartbroken for United Farm Workers union co-founder Dolores Huerta, who told the world she had been raped by Chavez 60 years earlier. 

Huerta not only kept this secret for decades but said she bore two children conceived through Chavez’s rape and coercion whom she arranged for others to raise, an unimaginable pain and sacrifice. Huerta said she kept silent in part out of fear of damaging the movement she spent her life fighting for. “I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here,” she said in The New York Times.

The fallout from the Chavez revelations has been swift, with statues removed and celebrations canceled across the country. Many events have been renamed after Huerta. This rapid response is in sharp contrast to other high-profile cases like that of President Donald Trump, who lost a civil case accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll and then won a second term. He is appealing the case to the Supreme Court.

But as much as I would like to be surprised about Chavez, as a Gen X woman I have a lifetime of experience seeing how pervasive sexual abuse is. From the neighborhood flasher in elementary school to incidents as a teen and young adult, like almost every woman I know, I have seen firsthand how abuse knows no particular race, background or political orientation. 

Movements like #MeToo that went viral in 2017 broke all of that into the open, with millions of people around the world sharing their own stories of harassment and abuse and exposing the truth about many held up as heroes. Yet despite the many courageous voices who came forward, silence persists, as the Chavez story illustrates too well. 

Unlike what some people might think, sexual assault is usually committed by people victims know, not a stranger jumping out of a bush. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 92% of female victims of rape reported being raped by an intimate partner or acquaintance. According to the organization, 81% of women and 43% of men nationwide experience some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime.

Even before the Chavez story broke Wednesday, I had been thinking a lot about sexual abuse, the culture of silence and complicity and the protection of beloved figures at all costs. 

The KUOW investigative podcast series “Adults in the Room,” which launched last month, explores those issues through the experience of KUOW Managing Editor Isolde Raftery, who was a student journalist at Seattle’s Garfield High School in the late 1990s. Her student reporting on allegations that a popular teacher had abused students led to a school district investigation and, in her account, adults and students alike rallying around the teacher, Tom Hudson. Before the investigation was complete, Hudson died by suicide.

While I can’t remember if I had Hudson as a teacher, the series hits very close to home. I was a student at Garfield in the early 1990s when Hudson taught there. I was also the co-editor of the student newspaper a few years before Raftery. A lot of my classmates were involved in the outdoors activities Hudson was renowned for.

The circumstances are different but the parallels between Chavez and the situation at Garfield are still striking. In both, an overriding concern is preserving the legacy and reputation of an influential and powerful figure over the protection and truth of survivors. 

Kate Garvey, the CEO of King County Sexual Assault Resource Center, said after listening to “Adults in the Room” and then reading The New York Times’ story, “the overlap is incredible.” Both deal with trusted people in positions of power and the role of grooming, she said. 

Agustina Colombo Eiff, a bilingual therapist and director of clinical services for the center, said the news about Chavez was emotional in many ways. Eiff said she came to the U.S. from Argentina with a background in labor and had always looked up to the organizing power of farmworkers. 

Eiff said that what Huerta went through was not too different from what she hears from their clients. 

“(Huerta) was put in this position of having to make a choice, either coming forward or preserving the movement, and she chose to preserve the movement over her own well-being and dignity,” Eiff said. “And no one should be put in a position of having to make this impossible choice. And yet this is what we see with the families we serve.”

Eiff said she couldn’t wrap her mind around how someone could leverage the farmworker rights movement to prevent people from coming forward. 

“It’s such a vile thing to do to take something virtuous, pure, beautiful, meaningful for so many people, and hide behind it,” she said. The harmful message to survivors is, “All of this will be undone, and it’ll be on you. No one will believe you anyway,” she said.

The truth of the courageous survivors who have spoken up should only serve to make movements for justice stronger, with these movements grounded in integrity, the protection of the most vulnerable and allowing all leaders to lead. As another woman who came forward, Esmerelda Lopez, said in The New York Times, “The movement — that’s the hero.”

Huerta, credited with coining the rallying cry “Si, se puede” or “Yes, we can” deserves to see her powerful legacy preserved and protected, Eiff said.

“We’re not allowing this to rob us of the power of those words. We’re absolutely not,” she said. “We should have banners because, yes, that is still true and this evil act will not take that away from us. We still can. Si se puede louder than ever!”