The California Reckoning After Cesar Chavez’s Fall

LOS ANGELES — Cesar Chavez’s name and likeness are swiftly being stripped from public landmarks. But the labor rights leader’s now-disgraced legacy cannot so easily be excised from the California identity.

There are few figures as quintessentially Californian, who have done more to shape the political and social forces that define the state today. And there are few people so mythologized that they are transformed from a flawed human to a symbol for an entire community.

The New York Times investigation detailing allegations of him sexually abusing two underage girls and repeatedly raping his movement co-leader Dolores Huerta stunned an entire nation. But it slammed into California like a meteor. And it has left the state’s Democratic power structure, especially Latinos, grappling with how to proceed with this uglier understanding of the leader of the farmworker movement — and mourning the loss of a hero they thought they had.

“Our community has very few national icons,” said Yvette Martinez, the former executive director of the California Democratic Party. “Cesar Chavez is one of them. Dolores Huerta is one of them. There are streets and parks and schools and holidays for these two. And so I think that's why it's so devastating for the Latino community.”

The reckoning will come in stages, beginning with processing the perspective of the victims, predicted John A. Pérez, the former Assembly speaker who came up through the labor movement.

“Then over time, there's going to be the question of ‘how do you balance that and have a nuanced view of who he was, and not have all his wrongs crowd out the real success of the farm workers union?’” Pérez said. “And how do you have a more honest conversation about the fact that these were not his singular achievements? They were achievements of lots of leaders and lots of people who literally put their lives on the line.”

Part of the reason Chavez’s fall from grace is so dizzying is because he was so firmly fixed in the state’s historical memory. The logo of the United Farm Workers, with its signature black eagle against a red background, is one of California’s enduring political images. The grape boycott that he co-led became a national consumer movement centered around an iconic California crop. He is forever linked to Robert F. Kennedy, who allied with the farm workers movement and relied on Chavez to mobilize Mexican American voters to win the state’s Democratic primary in 1968, just before Kennedy’s assassination.

“How many photographs I have in my house of Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said, soon after the Times story was published. “Woke up this morning and it was right there.”

His story is also entwined with former Gov. Jerry Brown’s during the push to enshrine farmworker’s right to collective bargaining in law. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 was a landmark that secured protections that no other state in the country has replicated to this day.

The accomplishment was so central to Brown’s political ambitions that Chavez delivered the nominating speech for Brown’s presidential run at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

Chavez was also a symbol of the emergence of a new, distinctly Californian labor movement. While workers’ rights in the Northeast was primarily a movement of Irish, Italian and Jewish laborers, and Germans and Eastern Europeans dominated organized labor of the Midwest, the cause in the West was powered by a multi-racial coalition of Anglos, Asian Americans and, especially, Latinos.

That labor movement, in turn, became an engine for California’s political metamorphosis.

“How did California go from a red to blue state? It’s because of the farmworkers,” said Jim Araby, a longtime labor leader in the state. “Miguel Contreras, who organized with Chavez, took over the Los Angeles Federation of Labor, and with Maria Elena Durazo, they instituted the program that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta built in LA and drove the transformation of LA, which ultimately drove the transformation of California politics.”

Durazo is now a state senator. Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles’ first Latino mayor and current candidate for governor, met Chavez and Huerta when he was a 15 year-old inspired by the grape boycott.

“If you look at the hundreds of people that came through the farmworker movement to go do other things, it’s the who’s who of the labor movement and the Democratic Party,” Araby said. “It’s highly concentrated in California, but also nationally, so many people came through that movement.”

Most of the current Latino leaders, however, had less direct history with Chavez, who died in 1993. Their political awakening was largely the 1994 anti-immigrant ballot measure Proposition 187, which is credited for activating a new generation of Latino voters.

Kevin de León, who was the first Latino leader of the state Senate in more than 100 years, is among that class of politicians. He only met Chavez one time, but the revelations have been dominating his conversations.

“I’ve talked to so many folks, and they feel completely discombobulated and crestfallen,” he said. “There’s an array of emotions from sadness to disbelief to anger.”

There was also the whiplash of seeing the swift rejection of a person who had been venerated as an icon, he said.

“We all do this mythologizing,” he said. “It’s a collective complicity of building someone up — and you see then this rapid teardown.”

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