Soumya Karlamangla, a reporter who covers California for The Times, writes about our investigation of sexual abuse allegations against the labor movement icon Cesar Chavez.
Cesar Chavez Sex Abuse Allegations Rattle CaliforniaThere are few places in California where a school, street or plaza hasn’t been named for Cesar Chavez, the man who for decades has been the face of the Latino civil rights movement. He was born in Arizona but moved to California as a child after his family lost their farm in the Great Depression. It was in California’s Central Valley that Chavez helped ignite the farmworker rights movement. So it was an absolute shock to many across the state when my colleagues Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes published an investigation on Wednesday revealing that he had sexually abused underage girls. In the same report, Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of his United Farm Workers union, told The Times that he raped her in the 1960s.
Manny and Sarah spent nearly five years reporting the story, and they said they had wanted to respect the pace of the survivors who initially did not want to speak on the record. Over time, the journalists gained the trust of the women to tell their stories. The fallout from the investigation was swift. Within hours of its publication, organizations and public entities that had long honored Mr. Chavez, who died in 1993, moved to distance themselves. Many felt they had to move quickly, given that Cesar Chavez Day was approaching, on March 31, and that celebrations had been planned long ago. San Jose, where Chavez once lived, canceled all of its events associated with the holiday, and the city’s leaders were looking into renaming spaces that bear his name, including the historic Plaza de Cesar Chavez downtown. “We recognize that Chavez’s ties to San Jose come with a responsibility to ensure we are not further traumatizing survivors,” Mayor Matt Mahan said in a statement. Myrna Melgar, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said she had been flooded with texts calling for the city to rename Cesar Chavez Street and for the school district to rename Cesar Chavez Elementary. She said she cried after reading about his alleged crimes. In California, nearly 50 schools have been named after him, more than for Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Chavez’s name also graces the student center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. On Wednesday, the University of California, Davis, removed his name from a youth leadership conference. It could take the system far longer to officially strip his name from institutions and the holiday, if they choose to go that route.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would discuss with state legislators whether to rename Cesar Chavez Day on March 31. “None of us knew,” he said of the sex abuse accounts, shaking his head. Read the full investigation here. More from our Chavez investigation
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