A recent New York Times article goes deeper into the allegations of sexual assault against Cesar Chavez that they reported earlier this year. The report stated he’d abused young women in the union, including Dolores Huerta. The newest report stated that the abuse and sexism did not stop with Chavez but were from multiple men in the organization through the mid 1990’s. In the latest article, other victims state that Huerta did not support them when they came forward about the abuse and sexism within the organization.
In recordings of meetings that the New York Times reporters listened to, Huerta is heard siding with Chavez, who accused the women he’d been having affairs with of just wanting to take down the union.
“Both he and Ms. Huerta accused some of the women in the union of acting as manipulators, informants or sexual agents intent on disrupting loyalty within the movement. ‘They’re lighting them up, they go into bed with them, they’re getting a whole second relationship,’ Ms. Huerta said,” stated the NY Times article.
The article stated that in the recordings they listened to, Chavez continued to use the same abusive language pointed at Huerta, often telling her to shut up, calling her stupid, and using other derogatory terms.
According to the NY Times article, Huerta did not recall dismissing rape accusations but stated that the men in the union did not care to investigate sexual misconduct. The article states that Huerta and other women in the 1980s compiled a report of the sexual misconduct in the union; however, after it was given to union executives, nothing came of it.
The acceptance of the culture by Chavez was also shown in his response to other women who reported assault or harassment. Anita Romero Torres told the NY Times that when she began working for the union in 1977, when she was 17 years old, her supervisor would call her multiple times a day letting he know they’d be in the fields together alone and nobody would know where they were.
“He was basically telling me that he was going to take me out in a field somewhere and rape me,” Romero Torres told the NY Times.
She reported what was happening to Chavez, but he told her the man was too important to the movement to remove, so he transferred the man’s wife to the department to “keep an eye on him.” But the harassment didn’t stop as other men continued to assault and harass her until she quit after working there for three years.
Liz Sullivan is one of the women named in the recent article who worked for the union in the 1970’s. She recalled giving two men a ride home after a meeting, and on the way, her car got stuck in the soil. The men demanded to have sex with her, and when she tried to run away, they dragged her by her legs and raped her.
When Sullivan walked into the union house after and told her supervisor, David Martinez, and one of the directors, Ruth Shy, what happened, she was just sent to the clinic to get Valium for her nerves and told to get the union car she’d left in the field.
She did not report the rape to the police due to the fear of how they treated people within the union. After the rape, she was given a bodyguard when attending the ranch where it happened; however, other women did not have protection, and another woman faced “sexual insults” on the same ranch.
Sullivan, Phyllis Hasbrouck, Linda Rodriguez, who is Chavez’s daughter, and several other women started a group to address what had been happening in the union and how they could stay safe. Shortly after, Sullivan and Rodriguez told the NY Times that an all-staff meeting was called, where they were accused of trying to ruin the movement by three of Chavez’s top lieutenants, Eliseo Medina, Marshall Ganz, and Jim Drake. Harbrouck was forced to resign, according to the NY Times.
In 1997, the article states that two women, Leticia Maravilla and Gloria Perales, attempted to sue the union, alleging that Efren Barajas, who headed the organizing campaign in Watsonville, told them to sleep with strawberry farmworkers to get them to join the union.
The union denied the allegations, and according to the NY Times, Huerta stated at the time that the allegations were “an attempt by the strawberry industry to derail union organizing.”
The current president of the United Farm Workers Foundation, Teresa Romero, created a way for women to start telling their stories, according to the NY Times, and there is a 24-hour crisis line available.
A media request form was filled out on the Dolores Huerta Foundation website. At the time of this article, we have not received a response.
