California college instructors are rethinking how they teach the history of the farmworker movement following a bombshell New York Times investigation that detailed decades of sexual abuse allegations against César Chávez, the labor leader long celebrated as a founding figure of the United Farm Workers.
The report, published in March, included an account from UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta, who said Chávez raped her on two separate occasions. The investigation also described a broader pattern of Chávez abusing women and girls connected to the union — revelations that stunned historians who have spent careers researching his life and the farmworker movement he helped lead.
At Bakersfield College, history professor Oliver Rosales was midway through preparing a lecture on the Delano Grape Strike for his course on the History of Chicanos in the Southwest when the story broke. He scrapped his original reading and had students examine the Times investigation instead.
“Some students used words like ‘shock,’ ‘devastating,’ ‘gut wrenching,’ ‘soul shaking,'” Rosales recalled. “I was glad that it’d be in that moment with students at that time. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world, if you will, when that story broke.”
Rosales said he immediately began hearing from fellow historians across the country who were equally blindsided.
“I was in a text chain with different professors from across the country, and we were just in shock, because no historian knew about this,” he said. “This definitely feels like a second, social death.”
Chávez, who died in 1993 at age 66, has long occupied a towering place in California and national history. More than 130 public spaces and monuments across the country bear his name, including more than 65 streets, schools and parks in California alone. The state has recognized his birthday as an official holiday since 2000.
In the wake of the allegations, universities moved quickly to strip his name from buildings and remove statues. Fresno State and Cal State San Marcos both took down Chávez statues within 48 hours of the story’s publication. San Joaquin Delta College replaced a ceramic relief and plaque honoring Chávez with a new mural, painted by students, celebrating farmworkers more broadly. UC Berkeley removed his name from a student center, and UCLA’s Chicano Studies department dropped his name as well. State lawmakers renamed César Chávez Day to Farmworkers Day.
While some have floated replacing Chávez’s name with Huerta’s on monuments and buildings, faculty caution against a reactive approach.
“If Dolores Huerta’s name comes up, I want it to go up based on her own achievements and merits, not based on reaction to allegations against César Chávez,” said Lorena Oropeza, a professor of Chicanx Latinx studies at UC Berkeley.
The reckoning has also reached the classroom. At Bakersfield College, some faculty pushed to immediately scrap the César Chávez Leadership Certificate, a program built around lessons in community organizing drawn from the farmworker movement’s history in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Rosales, who created the certificate, argues any changes should go through the college’s Academic Senate rather than be made unilaterally.
“If you actually look at the curriculum, it’s exactly the curriculum that we need, because it basically broadens the history beyond the UFW,” Rosales said.
Historians note that the 1965 Delano Grape Strike — often remembered primarily through Chávez — was actually launched by Filipino American labor organizers Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz. Itliong’s Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee merged with Chávez’s National Farm Workers Association to form the United Farm Workers, and their combined effort led to a successful national grape boycott.
Ethnic studies scholars say they have long grappled with the contradictions embedded in movement leaders’ legacies. Oropeza has spent years researching Reies López Tijerina, a Chicano land-grant activist from Texas whose 1960s campaign to reclaim ancestral lands in New Mexico made him a major figure in the broader Chicano movement — and who, according to interviews Oropeza conducted with his first wife and eldest daughter, subjected his family to physical and sexual abuse.
Her 2019 book, “The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement,” wrestles directly with that duality.
“How do you hold together this person who was absolutely brilliant when it came to criticizing U.S. expansion and what it meant for Spanish speakers on the ground in the new American Southwest, but was absolutely reprehensible in how he treated his family?” Oropeza said.
She’s drawing on that same framework, along with existing scholarly critiques of Chávez — including Miriam Pawel’s 2014 biography “The Crusades of César Chávez,” which examined his anti-immigrant positions and autocratic leadership style — to help make sense of the current moment.
“I have already spent 12 years thinking about ‘How do you write about people who are complex, people who can act in reprehensible ways who can also do great things?'” she said.
At Fresno State, Alina Mendez, a professor of Chicano and Latin American studies whose own parents worked as farmworkers, brought the allegations directly into her classroom discussion, asking students whether — and how — Chávez should still be part of the curriculum. Her students ultimately agreed that his history should still be taught, but with accountability built into the lesson.
“There’s this collective grief, collective disappointment, a kind of questioning of ‘If César Chávez is no longer our hero, then who do we look up to?'” Mendez said. “That’s why I’ve been insisting that we look at our local communities. Let’s look around us and see other people who very much sacrificed a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of sweat, to make those successes possible.”
Mendez said she is now working with Arte Américas, a Fresno-based Latino arts and cultural center, to gather oral histories from farmworkers across the Central Valley — part of a broader shift toward highlighting the movement’s rank-and-file participants rather than a single leader.
“In many ways, obviously, my teaching is changing,” she said. “As historians, I think we’re understanding more and more the importance of focusing on the collective rather than the individual leader.”
Rosales said he hopes the moment ultimately leads to richer, more inclusive scholarship that recognizes contributions from Arab American, Southeast Asian American and other communities involved in California’s farm labor history.
“I think that the farmworker movement’s legacy is intact,” he said, “but it’s going to take, you know, careful work by teachers, scholars, historians, to ensure that the curriculum is diversified beyond Chávez.”
Original source: CalMatters
