On Chavez, People, and Power

Last Wednesday, I was confronted with a shattering reality. A person whom I had known, learned from, and worked with for many years had, at the same time, been inflicting devastating harm on girls and women vulnerable to his assaults. To Ana Murgia, in particular, whom I knew then, I ask your forgiveness for not seeing you. And I want to thank you and your companions for finding the courage to speak out about your abuse and share your deep pain: choices that we can only meet with care and respect.

Like many of you, I was shaken by what came to light about Cesar’s abusive behavior. So I want to offer my own perspective—not because it settles anything, but because I lived some of this history and want to speak honestly of what I saw, what I didn’t see, and what I believe we now must reckon with together.

I first met Cesar in 1965. I worked alongside him, learned from and with him, and served beside him for seven years—on the union’s national executive board—and admired him deeply for many years. The movement that thousands of us had built had, for a time, transformed the lives of thousands of farmworkers and their families across California, Florida, Texas, and beyond. Boycotts we organized across North America united urban supporters, people of faith, labor activists, civil rights veterans, opponents of the Vietnam War, veterans of the civil rights movement, students, and many others. And the movement brought recognition, dignity, pride, and power to the Latino community. Many were immigrants or the children of immigrants, inspired not by political, military, or business leaders but by a movement in which one’s grandmother, working in the fields near Fresno, was now, suddenly, on a UFW picket line fighting for her rights. For the first time in history, a movement effectively challenged the system of exploitation rooted in California agriculture.

The movement also became a school of leadership, organizing, and action in which so many found the courage and the mentorship to risk, to try, and to learn. Any survey of California unions, community groups, elected leaders, educators, and more would reveal so many people who got their start as volunteers with the farmworkers. I was no exception. I got my first lesson in electoral politics when assigned in 1968 to getting out the Latino vote in East LA and winning the June 6 California primary for Bobby Kennedy.

The people who built the movement also paid the price—not only by surviving on donated food or serving as full-time volunteers supported at only $5 per week—but some had their lives taken. The first person who lost her life was an 18-year-old college student from Boston, Nan Freeman, crushed to death by a truck while picketing a sugar plant in Florida. Naji Daifullah, a strike leader, an immigrant from Yemen, beaten to death by a Kern County deputy sheriff. Juan de la Cruz, an immigrant from Mexico, shot by a sniper on a picket line south of Bakersfield two days later. And Rufino Contreras, from Mexicali, murdered by a foreman supervising strikebreakers in Imperial Valley.

One day, almost five years ago, a young woman earning her master’s at Harvard’s Ed School dropped by my office. She had come, she said, to deliver a greeting from her grandparents. They had been farmworkers, had helped to build the movement—a movement that had everything to do with her getting to graduate school.

Cesar’s leadership contributed enormously to all of this, but it was never “his” movement. It belonged to all of us. It was real. It mattered. And it must not be erased.

The truth is always more complex than the mythology. By the mid-1970s, as the union was growing rapidly, something had broken in him and the Cesar we thought we knew became a negative of himself: Vision gave way to paranoia, courage to fear, relationships to isolation, and curiosity to suspicion. Organizing gave way to purges, witch hunts, and absolute personal loyalty, and within a few short years much of the organization we had built was in shambles.