In the wake of explosive allegations that the famed labor leader Cesar Chavez sexually abused women and girls from the 1960s to the 1980s, rebukes from elected officials have invoked one phrase more than others: that the farm worker movement “was more than one man”.
But Chavez, who organized farm workers and fought for Latino civil rights, has often eclipsed the movement he galvanized. Dozens of public spaces bear his name, and a federal commemorative holiday was created to celebrate his birthday on 31 March. As legislators in California, Texas and Arizona began painting over murals and renaming the streets, schools and a state holiday dedicated to the late union organizer, Latino leaders and historians are grappling with Chavez’s tarnished legacy and the perils of building a cause around a single person.
“We tend to focus on individuals as stand-ins for social trends or social movements,” said Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology, American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. “In part it’s that Latinos were unrecognized in US history that, when one recognizable figure emerged, a lot of hopes got pinned on him.”
‘A historical and political convenience’
The social movements of the 20th century produced leaders whose presence, charisma and sacrifices were a source of inspiration for people from deeply disenfranchised communities. In California, Chavez became the face of the farm worker and Chicano movement as much as Martin Luther King Jr came to embody the civil rights movement.
“It’s a historical and political convenience to hang leadership on one person,” said David Meyer, a professor of sociology at University of California, Irvine and the author of How Social Movements (Sometimes) Matter.
In sociology, Meyer said, charisma is considered less a personality trait than the “relationship between a person and a constituency that’s underrepresented”. Chavez filled that void for Chicano field workers who had no political power, he said.
For a time, Chavez’s vision and direction brought about lasting changes. From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, the United Farm Workers (UFW) union that Chavez co-founded won contracts with growers that secured better wages and working conditions, and pushed for the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, which established collective bargaining rights for farm workers in California.
For many farm workers who risked their lives and livelihood to go on strike in the 1960s and 1970s, Chavez was a unifying force who embodied the ideals they held dear, said Christian Paiz, a historian and author of The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement. It’s because of what he symbolized that the new allegations felt like a “profound betrayal” to the movement, Paiz said. The New York Times investigation on 18 March detailed decades of sexual abuse and grooming by Chavez against Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the UFW, and girls as young as 13. Huerta, 95, told the Times that she kept the abuse a secret for more than 60 years because she was afraid it would hurt the movement that she considered her life’s work.
The veneration of Chavez and the conflation of his image with the fight for farm worker rights, Paiz said, can be partly attributed to the fact that most books on the history of the movement have been written by white people. These historical accounts of the UFW relegated to the sidelines the contributions and stories of the union’s rank and file, including many women and the Filipino farm workers who engineered the 1965 Delano grape strike.
“Almost every book has been on Chavez, whether he’s a saint or an authoritarian leader,” Paiz said. “This is partly a reflection on California society, race and class.”
The scholarship on Chavez from the past two decades, though, have triggered a sweeping reevaluation of his image, at least in academic circles. Books such as Miriam Pawel’s The Crusades of Cesar Chavez delved into his authoritarian management of the union, his purging of potential rivals, as well as the vile rhetoric he deployed against undocumented workers, some of whom he reported to federal immigration authorities.
By the mid-1970s, Chavez’s influence on the farm worker movement had diminished significantly, Pawel said. After the union lost most of its labor contracts, Chavez became more of a political and symbolic force, Pawel said. “He became a brand and lived off that brand for a long time,” Pawel said. “But there was a concerted effort to not get into the complicated elements of his leadership.”
Decentralizing movements
Organized dissent in the 21st century is more self-consciously decentralized and hyper-democratized, intent on learning from the shortcomings of “your grandparents’ civil rights movement”, a refrain coined by rapper Tef Poe to describe the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, that catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement.
Black Lives Matter, the anti-capitalist Occupy movement and the Sunrise Movement for climate justice have all organized mass protests and direct actions without conforming to a conventional top-down power structure. No Kings coalition, the definitive anti-Trump resistance of his second term, has spawned massive demonstrations around a broad range of issues without anointing a recognizable figurehead.
The rise of social media and the #MeToo campaign, which became a rallying cry against sexual abuse, have made it far more difficult for movement leaders today to get away with unethical or abusive behavior. Allegations of antisemitism torpedoed the leadership of Women’s March, which had organized some of the largest anti-Trump protests in US history.
Pastor said it was still possible for charismatic individuals to inspire and mobilize millions, like Zohran Mamdani in his rapturous campaign for New York mayor, or the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. But people have become much more wary about treating leaders like saviors, Pastor said, which is a “sign of health” for the movement. The Latino community’s swift and total repudiation of Chavez following the abuse allegations, he said, is a testament to its “resilience and maturity”.
But leaderless movements come with their own organizational challenges, Meyer said. While Black Lives Matter was co-founded by organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2013, the movement went on to forge many leaders across the country who mobilized millions to protest police violence. But the messaging and goals, beyond “ending racialized police violence”, weren’t always cohesive, Meyer said.
“There needs to be a balance between central leadership that can make deals and grassroots democracy that can train leaders,” Meyer said. “It’s a hard balance to pull off.”
Veronica Terriquez, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, said there was plenty of decentralization in the UFW that got glossed over in historical accounts. “The farm worker movement and subsequent labor organizing it gave birth to were built by a lot of workers in alliance with students and other community activists,” she said.
But the heyday of the union, Terriquez said, was decades removed from the #MeToo reckoning that made it possible for women and girls to hold powerful men accountable. Movements led by women and LGBTQ+ organizers today, she said, have been “more intentional” about rooting out sexual violence and homophobia. Latino, youth-led immigrant rights groups, such as United We Dream and Latinos Unidos Siempre, also emphasize multiracial, decentralized organizing.
“As we study the history of social movements, we have to recognize it’s a collective effort,” Terriquez said. “We have an opportunity to learn from more contemporary movements about how to uplift the voices of the most marginalized.”
Terriquez said it was a myth that any movement could thrive on the charisma of one leading figure, without broad-based support and organizing from the rank-and-file – a sentiment echoed by the revered civil rights activist Ella Baker.
“I think that, to be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement,” Baker said about King in 1968. “That is not a discredit to him.”
