In the days after revelations about Cesar Chavez and his abuse of two young girls more than fifty years ago, I rewatched Dolores, the 2017 PBS documentary about Dolores Huerta and her founding role in the United Farm Workers (UFW)—a role equally as important as Chavez’s. In 1968, she had moved to New York to work on strategy for the famous farmworkers’ grape boycott. There she met with Gloria Steinem, who helped her begin to think about women’s rights within the larger labor movement. “I was in New York when the feminist movement was being born,” Huerta recalls in the documentary, “but my mind was focused on getting all of those women at those conventions to support the farm workers.” There were few women of color identifying as feminist at the time, as Angela Davis explains, making Huerta’s involvement all the more important, given she was also the only woman on the executive board of the UFW.
Yet despite her role, her vision, her political connections, and her skills in coleadership with Chavez, Huerta was the target of sexism and misogyny—not only from men who were opposed to the movement, but also from those within it. The film depicts the tragic and infuriating moment when Huerta is passed over as Chavez’s successor to lead the UFW after his death. Her struggle against the male leadership’s treatment of her eventually led her to step down from the executive board and leave the UFW altogether. Those within the Latino community who have criticized Huerta for waiting until now—after the revelations about Chavez and at the age of ninety-six—to reveal that he had raped her can’t appreciate that the culture within the movement would have made it impossible for her to do so any earlier. Indeed, if anything, these criticisms suggest that the misogyny of the 1960s and ’70s still persists today.
Huerta was in fact raped twice by Chavez—both times becoming pregnant and giving birth to children she placed with other families. “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” she said in her statement. “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. I channeled everything I had into advocating on behalf of millions of farmworkers and others who were suffering and deserved equal rights.”