Dolores Huerta Breaks Silence on Cesar Chavez — ‘I Can No Longer Stay Silent’
Renowned labor leader and activist Dolores Huerta has come forward as a survivor after a NY Times investigation into Cesar Chavez.
Trigger warning: This story contains sensitive content regarding sexual assault.
At 95, Dolores Huerta is choosing to break her silence. Huerta, the renowned American labor leader and feminist activist, has made her first comments after a New York Times investigation into decades of sexual abuse by labor leader Cesar Chavez.
“I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences,” Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Chavez, said on March 18th, while revealing that in the 1960s, Chavez “manipulated and pressured” her to have sex with him. She also went on to recount that, on a separate occasion, he forced her to have sex with him “against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.” The two encounters led to pregnancies, which Huerta hid, while arranging for the children to be raised by other families.
Huerta recently revealed the truth to both her children and has now built a strong connection with both.
“I had experienced abuse and sexual violence before, and I convinced myself these were incidents that I had to endure alone and in secret,” Huerta also said, referencing her desire to protect the movement she and Chavez had built from the ground up. “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta explained.
“The knowledge that he hurt young girls sickens me,” she also said in her statement. “My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years.” She added that Chavez’s actions do not reflect the values of the farmworker movement, and that the achievements of the movement are not about just one person, but the effort of thousands.
“I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me and other women, as property, or things to control,” Huerta said. She also pledged to continue fighting for farmworkers and for women’s rights.
You can read her entire statement in English and Spanish on her Medium page here. Huerta also shared resources for survivors or if you’ve been impacted by any type of sexual violence on the official website for the Dolores Huerta Foundation here.
If you need someone to talk to about an experience with sexual assault or abuse, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), where trained staff can provide you with support, information, advice, or a referral. You can also access 24/7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.