Momentum builds to erase Cesar Chavez’s name from schools, streets and parks after allegations of sexual abuse

The explosive sex abuse allegations against farm labor leader Cesar Chavez could deliver not just a reputational blow to the union he founded, but a financial one as well.

Several lawyers said United Farm Workers could potentially be liable for significant payouts due to landmark laws recently passed in California that give victims of older sex abuse cases a new window to come forward.

The country’s oldest and most influential farmworkers union, already embroiled in a legal dispute with the Trump administration, is now grappling with how to respond to the uproar over sex abuse allegations against famed labor leader Cesar Chavez.

Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, said the union wants to be supportive of the women who said they were sexually abused by Chavez decades ago.

A day after explosive accusations about Cesar Chavez sexually abusing minors came to light in a report by the New York Times, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and members of the City Council announced Thursday they would abandon the holiday honoring Chavez’s birthday and instead rename it Farm Workers Day to honor the people who toil in the fields every day.

The mood was somber as Bass and four council members, all women of color who had once cited Chavez as an inspirational figure who played a role in their own political trajectories, spoke about what they described were devastating accusations.

“Usually, when we do these signings, it’s for something that we’re celebrating. This is not a celebration,” Bass said. “This a change that is fundamental, that all of us feel is important for us to do, because moving forward, this is about honoring the men and women and children who toil every day in our fields, and we will honor that.”

Bass, who once had a bust of Chavez near her office, had met Chavez years ago. Growing up, she said, she admired him and the farmworkers and the movement, joining the boycott against grapes in Delano with her parents.

But on Wednesday, after the allegations became public, Bass quickly reached out to Councilmember Monica Rodriguez about getting the proclamation into motion.

“When I heard the painful news from the sister that I admire so much, Dolores Huerta, my heart broke from what she went through,” Bass said.

The next steps for the city will include a process to conduct a citywide assessment to rename signs, parks, and city property with community input. Bass said she reached out to the Chavez family, which supported her effort to rename the holiday, which falls on the last Monday of March.

At 95, labor icon Dolores Huerta made a shocking and heartbreaking revelation Wednesday, in the wake of a New York Times investigation into sexual abuse allegations against her fellow icon, Cesar Chavez.

She was raped by Chavez, she said. Twice — both times resulting in pregnancies.

In the nation’s second-largest school system, the holiday is observed on Friday, March 27 and has the effect of lengthening spring break, which extends across the following week. Chavez’s March 31 birthday falls during the school district’s spring break.

Acting L.A. schools Supt. Andres Chait addressed the issue in a Thursday news conference that mostly covered matters related to labor negotiations.

“We’re all deeply, deeply troubled by the allegations that have come forward over the last couple of days, particularly yesterday, of course,” Chait said.

“We are assessing the impact that it’s going to have on our educational program, specific to the holiday, as it were. I do want to clarify: It is an unassigned day that happens two Fridays from now. At this point, we certainly wouldn’t make any shifts to the calendar, because that would, I think, create issues for our parents in terms of daycare. But again, it’s part of the larger picture as to what we’re assessing.”

For many Mexican Americans and Californians of a certain age and political stripe, Cesar Chavez had long since secured his standing as a kind of secular saint.

Gaining national prominence in the mid-1960s in the San Joaquin Valley, Chavez galvanized public support on behalf of farmworkers after organizing community groups across Central and Southern California. For decades, agricultural laborers had lived in substandard housing and were paid terrible wages. Efforts to organize migrant laborers were usually crushed violently by farmers and local law enforcement.

Chavez’s greatest achievement was the 1968 boycott of California grapes. Beginning in the spring, more than 200 union supporters, many of them earning $5 a week for their help, fanned out across the United States and Canada to urge consumers not to buy grapes.

At its peak in the 1970s, the UFW said that about 70,000 workers in California’s fields were covered by its collective bargaining agreements.

But Chavez’s legacy became increasingly tarnished as the years went on. Labor victories became fewer and fewer. His fierce criticism of illegal immigration — Chavez argued that they undercut his unionization efforts — put him at odds with immigration activists. A 2006 L.A. Times investigation detailed how dozens of former associates and workers left the Chavez-led United Farm Workers because of what they described as his increasingly autocratic ways.

According to The Times obituary:

Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, on a small farm near Yuma, Arizona. The Depression shattered his father’s finances when young Chavez was 10, and the family took to the roads as migrant laborers.

He never graduated from high school, and once said he went to as many as 65 elementary schools because of the family’s constant search for work in the fields. He said his mother taught him to be humane while living in often inhumane conditions.

During World War II, in 1944 and 1945, Chavez served in the Navy. After the war, he returned to organizing efforts and met his wife, Helen, while working in the field in Delano, in the rich, flat plains of Kern County.

In 1952, Chavez lived in San Jose’s Mexican-American barrio of Salsipuedes--which means “‘Get out if you can”--when he met Fred Ross, a community organizer who wanted to set up self-help groups in minority areas.

Ross had heard of Chavez and sought him out. “He looked to me like potentially the best grass-roots leader I’d ever run into,” Ross recalled later.

In 10 years with the group, Chavez led a successful voter registration drive in San Jose. He took up the cases of hundreds of Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants who complained of mistreatment by police, immigration authorities and welfare officials.

In 1962, he left to establish the National Farm Workers Assn., which later would become the UFW, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO.

He died in 1993 in San Luis, Ariz., police said. He was 66.

In the pages of history, they were a team that changed the world.

Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the United Farm Workers and brought new life to the American labor movement, drawing national attention to the brutal working conditions and unlivable wages that agricultural workers experienced.

An eerie silence had settled.

As word evidently reached activists in the last few weeks that disturbing allegations of sexual abuse against Chicano civil rights icon Cesar Chavez were forthcoming, things started to happen without much explanation.

FRESNO — Explosive allegations that Cesar Chavez abused girls and sexually assaulted his fellow labor activist Dolores Huerta decades ago are roiling the farmworker community, leaving many stunned at the revelations.

Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers, condemned the acts that Chavez was accused of committing in the 1960s and 1970s when he led the union.

The United Farm Workers said it would not participate in celebrations of its founder Cesar Chavez amid what the labor union described as “troubling allegations” against the iconic Chicano figure.

The union, in a statement released Tuesday, did not detail the accusations against Chavez but said they were concerning enough for the organization to take action. But several events around the country honoring Chavez including events in Tucson, Houston, Corpus Christi, San Antonio and San Bernardino have been canceled in recent weeks, with little explanation given by organizers.