For many, Cesar Chavez had become ‘too big to fail’

By Matt Garcia, especially for CalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Guest Comment written by

Those who quote Shakespeare Julius Caesar often mistake “Et tu, Brute?” as the dictator’s last line when Caesar realizes that his friend Marcus Junius Brutus has stabbed him. With vulgar Caesars dominating the news, from Donald Trump to Cesar Chavez, perhaps Caesar’s actual last line, “Then fall, Caesar,” offers a more relevant lesson for our time.

The charges reported in New York Times that Cesar Chavez, a labor leader and perhaps the most notorious Latino in US history, abused and raped girls and young women will come as a shock to many Americans. For others, especially the victims, this revelation begins a long overdue journey to justice. It also illustrates what victims and some scholars of Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement, including myself, have found to be true in recent years: regardless of his failures, Chavez, like Bank of America during the Great Recession, had become “too big to fail.” As a result, both individuals and the entire movement suffered.

What calculation should these revelations produce now? Many will apologize, especially when powerful people, including the President of the United States, are accused of some of the same crimes. Some may worry that Donald Trump will use this news to further distract the public from the Epstein files. Others may even ask, what does Cesar Chavez’s personal life or his personal words and deeds have to do with the syndicate’s business? For many years this was the attitude of some UFW veterans.

Debra Rojas learned this the hard way. More than a decade ago, she found the courage to reveal Chavez’s assault on her when she was just 12 on a private Facebook account for UFW veterans: “Wake up folks. This man you march for every year is bullying me and many, many other young girls.” Instead of supporting her, my friend The Chavistas accused her of tarnishing the movement to which she and her family belonged. She took down her post.

In 2012, after I posted From the jaws of victoryUFW story that also exposed much of Chavez’s complicated truth, I encountered backlash in that same community. My book describes how in 1977, when the UFW signed a historic agreement to end years of conflict with the Teamsters, Chavez showed more interest in building a community of purpose at union headquarters in La Paz than in advancing the gains made by farmworker advocates in the previous decade. My book also describes the humiliating group therapy exercises Chavez made residents participate in, and some of the infidelities we now know only scratched the surface of his criminal behavior.

Chávez had many aides—some who transported him to and from the sites of abuse—whose blind praise and devotion ultimately harmed the union. Because the UFW’s founders failed to build a democratic structure that would allow members to challenge him, Chavez’s words—no matter how vile or wrong—were accepted as gospel.

I have also described even earlier consequences of this unchecked power. In 1973, Chávez failed to negotiate a contract extension with grape grower John Jumara Jr., citing concerns about Jumara’s failure to stop Filipino workers from having sex with “whores in the camps.” Jerry Cohen, head of the UFW’s legal team, could not convince Chavez to drop the prostitution issue. The Chávez obsession that weakened the union now also seems strangely telling.

Another turning point came in 1976, when Chavez defied the advice of Gov. Jerry Brown and many in the union by supporting a risky ballot measure rather than work within the framework to expand funding for the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act. When the measure lost, Chavez blamed it on UFW volunteers, saying they had passed on his orders or didn’t work hard enough to win. The union descended into chaos, marked by purges of innocent volunteers — alongside the grooming and abuse of girls that has now come to light.

Women were neglected

The abuse occurred at a time when many women dedicated themselves to the movement only to be ignored or driven away by this corrosive behavior. It has become customary to credit Dolores Huerta, who we now know survived Chávez’s mistreatment, as a co-founder of the union. But the significant contributions of other women, including Jessica Govea and Elaine Ellenson, remain mostly hidden from the public eye.

Govea and Ellison’s management of the foreign boycott helped deliver the first farm labor contracts in 1970, although you’d never know it from popular depictions of this story. The 2014 biopic Cesar Chavez, for example, it shows British transport workers dumping grapes into the River Thames alongside Chávez – when it was actually Ellenson. Govea battled sexism in the union while working on the front lines of the Montreal boycott, only to run into it at headquarters when she returned to California in the 1970s and 1980s. Branded a troublemaker by Chavez, she found herself out of the union, working as a labor educator on the East Coast before cancer cut her life short.

Chávez’s sacrifices never achieved a fraction of the influence that Govea fought for or that Ellison temporarily enjoyed. It is impossible to measure how much the union lost in the leaders these girls would never become. It is time for a healing process to begin for the victims of Chávez’s violence and for the full story of the UFW to become public knowledge.

We must recognize that whatever the UFW accomplished, it often did so as a collective. There’s a reason why the UFW slogan “Sí se puede” translates to “Yes, WE can.” History shows us that organizers, workers, and advocates solved problems by coming together, not by blindly following Chávez’s orders. It’s time for Cesar to fall.

This commentary is adapted from an essay created for Plinth Public Square.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.