Monica Ramirez has spent much of her life spotlighting the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women farmworkers. She, like many in that movement, considered civil rights leader Cesar Chavez an icon.
Since allegations came to light this week that Chavez sexually assaulted women and girls as young as 12 — including fellow movement leader Dolores Huerta — Ramirez and the larger farmworker community have been left reeling. Now, they’re trying to reconcile how this man who so many revered — whose name is on streets, schools and even a holiday — could perpetrate the violence that has plagued women farmworkers for decades.
The community has been “shaken to its foundation,” said Ramirez, the founder of Justice for Migrant Women, a civil rights organization focusing on farmworker and migrant women. She and other leaders are now trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women — not just Chavez — spearheaded.
“The farmworker movement is a leaderful movement, and women have always been part of that leadership,” Ramirez said. But their work has often been made invisible, sometimes by the very men who stood beside them in building worker power for Latinx people in the United States.
“In order to have a movement, in order to have a boycott, in order to organize any kind of action, it’s often women who are helping to organize the meetings, helping to bring their compañeras,” Ramirez said.
Chavez was one of the most revered figures in the Latinx civil rights movement. The labor leader cofounded what became the United Farm Workers union alongside Huerta, and was most known for a series of strikes and protests that grew unionization efforts across California. After Chavez’s death in 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2014, former President Barack Obama designated his birthday, March 31, as a federal holiday to celebrate his legacy, which many states had already marked.
Now, many of those celebrations are being canceled or renamed after a bombshell, yearslong investigation published by The New York Times Wednesday found evidence of a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Chavez. Two women said Chavez sexually abused them for years as girls, when the organizer was in his 40s and had already become a powerful global figure. Ana Murguia said Chavez first assaulted her when she was 13; Debra Rojas was 12.
In the years following the abuse, both suffered from depression, panic attacks and substance abuse.
“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Rojas told the Times. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”
Huerta, the renowned activist who coined the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” spoke at length about emotional and physical abuse from her longtime organizing partner — a disclosure she had never made publicly. She told the Times that he raped her in a secluded grape field in 1966, and had pressured her to have sex with him another time during a work trip in 1960. Both encounters resulted in children. Huerta concealed the pregnancies and arranged for the baby girls to be raised by others.
She was shaken upon hearing the allegations from other women, and told the Times she struggles to reconcile the man she knew and the one who assaulted her.
(Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/AP)
In a statement released Wednesday, Huerta said she carried her secret for 60 years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”
She said she spoke up because she learned there were others coming forward.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
Magaly Licolli knew exactly what Huerta was talking about in her statements about Chavez.
Licolli is the co-founder and executive director of Venceremos, an organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas, and she’s heard stories about sexual harassment and assault on women for years.
Before she started Venceremos, she was fired from another poultry worker organization after speaking up about multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault against a well-known organizer.
“Women came forward and accused the organizer of sexually assaulting them or sexually harassing them. When I brought that to the board, they didn’t believe it,” Licolli said. “I had to stand with the women … I cannot do this work pretending I’m doing justice when I’m hiding injustice.”
Licolli felt that echoed this week.
“Women of color, we are not trusted on what we go through. We have to prove with pictures, with testimony, our own stories for our own stories to be validated,” she said. “I’m happy that now it’s something that people are talking about, and I’m happy that people are now reflecting about what is the role of women in the movement and when we have to be silenced toward that kind of injustice to protect the work that we do.”
A growing share of farmworkers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: about 26.4 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Most are Latina.
A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, found that women farmworkers are often at risk of sexual harassment or assault, with virtually every worker interviewed for the report saying they either had experienced harassment or assault or knew someone who had. Farmworkers work in mixed-gender settings, and they have limited worker protections But women typically lack avenues to report their experiences, the report’s authors wrote, in large part because of immigration status. As of 2022, most farmworkers were immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
“Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers,” the report said.
A 2024 review published in the Journal of Agromedicine suggested that as many as 95 percent of women farmworkers in the United States have experienced workplace sexual harassment.
None of the women in the Times story spoke publicly until recently because of the shame and fear associated with reporting abuse against prominent organizers.
But over the past decade, after the growth of the #MeToo movement and the release of millions of Epstein files that have implicated numerous people in powerful positions, survivors have been more willing to speak up about their experiences.
Ramirez, who also founded the public awareness campaign known as the Bandana Project to raise awareness of sexual violence against farmworker women, said she now expects more women to come forward with their own stories. At an event Wednesday night shortly after the news broke, she said one woman came up to her to tell her how sexual assault was a problem in the fields where she worked as a teenager.
“Now that we understand clearly that this issue of sexual violence is an endemic problem in our society … the question we have to answer is: Knowing that, how serious are we going to get in our commitment to ending the problem?”
California lawmakers already plan to change the name of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 to “Farmworkers Day,” and efforts are underway to remove his name from landmarks. But the real work to come will be about investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who worked in organizing before entering politics, said it was “devastating” that the claims took so long to come out. She said when she became an executive director of a nonprofit at 21, she, too, had faced situations that in hindsight were not appropriate, and left the organization with a responsibility to create safer environments for other young women.
“Oftentimes women, especially women of color, we end up having to hold so many things for the sake of the movement, family, community,” Delia Ramirez told the 19th. “I don’t believe that there is one hero for our movements. Movements are led by a collective, and you can’t create some pedestal for one person, because humans will always fail you.”
(Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/AP)
Moving forward, Monica Ramirez said people will be watching how leaders in the farmworker movement respond to the allegations. Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts? The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people.
Licolli, the poultry organizer, said she has “never romanticized the immigrant community and the immigrant movement.” Sexual abuse happens in every movement and it doesn’t negate the work that’s been done to secure worker power, she said.
And for the farmworker women who are leading this work, it feels more urgent than ever that they continue leading.
Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer in Washington state, leads Community to Community Development, an explicitly feminist and women-led organization — a perspective that she said lends itself to advocating for workers who are also parents, and that she said offers space for women farmworkers to assert their needs.
Guillen never met Chavez but was inspired to devote herself to organizing on behalf of farmworkers after his death. The news has been a “revision of everything that many of us know about the farmworker movement,” she said.
Her organization is removing images of Chavez from its office, Guillen said. “We revisited our values and principles in how we work together, reiterating there is no room for that,” she said, referring to sexual misconduct.
On Wednesday, while staff were still processing the reports, five farmworkers walked in. They had just lost their jobs.
Her staff switched gears, turning to figure out what those workers needed and how they could support them.
“They walked in reminding us this is the focus,” Guillen said. “This is why we’re here: To protect farmworkers.”