Cesar Chavez Accused of Abuse

Mar 30, 2026

During recent interviews for a New York Times investigation, three women accused Cesar Chavez of sexually abusing them in the 1960s and 1970s. Chavez, a co-founder and leader of the UFW (United Farm Workers) from 1962 until his death in 1993, had been honored and held up as a saintly figure for decades.

One of the women is Dolores Huerta, another co-founder and revered leader of the UFW, who worked closely with Chavez for more than three decades. Huerta said that Chavez forced himself on her twice when she was in her 30s. She said the first time she felt pressured to have sex with Chavez. The second time, she said, it was outright rape. Both times she got pregnant and had two daughters, whom she arranged for other families to raise.

Huerta, who is 95, explained why she kept all this secret for 60 years. “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work.… I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way,” Huerta wrote in a statement.

It obviously was a very difficult decision for her. At a time when it was practically unheard of for a woman to occupy such a high-level position in a union, business, or any other kind of organization, revealing the abuse would have very likely meant giving up her leadership position in the UFW.

The two other women, Debra Rojas and Ana Murguia, said that they were 12 and 13, respectively, when Chavez began to molest them—which makes Chavez’s alleged predatory behavior all the more odious. Rojas and Murgia, both daughters of UFW organizers, knew Chavez, and looked up to him, from a very early age.

Like Huerta, Murguia and Rojas also said that they kept silent because they did not want accusations against Chavez to hurt the farm workers movement. But Murguia also said that she probably would have been blamed for what Chavez did if she spoke out. That was how it worked back then, she said, when girls were abused by family members or people close to the family.

In that time period, such predatory behavior was much more tolerated by society than it is today, and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were not immune to it either, even though women played a prominent role in those movements. So, some male participants of those movements also engaged in harassment and abuse of women, while they professed to be working for a more just and egalitarian society. Those men, including some in leadership roles, undermined, and thus betrayed, the very movements they were part of.

Today, half a century later, it is still common for men, who have authority over others, to use their position to try to force themselves on women. And such men often target working-class women who are under the pressure of keeping their job. Look, for example, at testimonies of women farm workers who, when working in the field, are under the constant threat of sexual assault by managers.

But this societal scourge does not affect working-class women only. The #MeToo movement, for example, showed how sexual harassment of women employees of all levels is an everyday reality of the American workplace, and the Epstein files are a daily reminder. It’s a reflection of human relations in capitalist society, where exploitation—of workers by capitalists, and women by men—is the very basis of the economy.