Was wondering why local organizations were saying they were offering to help rename Cesar Chavez streets and buildings and paint over murals and then I realized I missed a huge news item lately. Surprised I haven’t seen anyone talk about it much on this site, but that’s what I get for ignoring domestic news lately because it’s so depressing.
Really sucks to see this happen to a big figure in the labor and civil rights movement, but so was Dolores Huerta and it’s shitty what happened to her. It’s time to take all honors from that movement and give it to her instead maybe, although I know it wouldn’t do much to undo the harm that was done to her and other girls in this guy’s orbit.
His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.
Many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.
The findings are based on interviews with more than 60 people, including his top aides at the time, his relatives and former members of the U.F.W., which he co-founded with Ms. Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails and photographs, as well as hours of audio recordings from U.F.W. board meetings.
The accounts of abuse from Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas were independently verified through interviews with those they confided in decades ago and in more recent years. Elements of their stories were also corroborated in documents, emails, itineraries and other writings from union organizers, supporters of Mr. Chavez and historians.
The Times spoke at length with Ms. Huerta, the renowned Latina activist who helped run the farmworkers’ union with Mr. Chavez and coined the social-justice rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” loosely translated as “Yes, we can.”
She said she has held on to a dark secret for nearly 60 years.
CW:Really Bad SA
One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked andremovedd her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.
My partner pointed out how this reveals one big difference between the left and the right.
When the left gets enough evidence, they are willing to say someone was a piece of shit and start replacing murals and street signs, and that’s happened within a day it looks like.
Meanwhile it’s been months of the Epstein reveals and the right and rich liberals keep doubling down to protect them and hide them from any consequences.
In this case, Chavez’s personal failings are exactly that, it doesn’t damn labor organizing or labor militancy. So it’s easy to condemn that part of what he did.
With Epstein, that wasn’t just his personal failings, that was an entire system the oligarchy ghouls used for their institutions. Condemning that is condemning the way the elites operate. And libs aren’t going to condemn that.
Seems pretty straightforward. There were other ppl in the movement, there’s no need to hang on to this dude AFAIK.
However, the replacement should also be from the movement, people like Huerta or others. Ideally ones that didn’t hate the undocumented.
True, a good thing about the left is that we try to be mass movement based, so it’s not so dependent on one individual person. This is another good example of why that’s important (along with all the decapitation strikes the US and Israel have been doing lately).
this fukken sucks. always skeptical when they come after lefties but this all seems well substantiated.
It sucks sooooo much. It hit me really hard today. But trying to look at the bright side. Our movements on the left aren’t based on a single person. And it’s good Huerta is being believed.
I wonder how long The Times has been sitting on this.
It sounds like they took a lot of time and effort to verify their claims. The Times does good journalism once in a while.
The navy is gonna have a hard time deciding whether or not to rename https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Cesar_Chavez
Should have known something was up because of the UFW flag
I had always heard that cesar was a rabid anticommunist and did not want them in the UFW whatsoever and the flag really put that into place for me.
