‘We’re Just Seen as Sex Objects’: Dolores Huerta’s Years in the U.F.W.

The co-founder of the United Farm Workers talked about her relationship with Cesar Chavez, and the night he raped her.

In the days after Thanksgiving in 1986, Dolores Huerta was ready to celebrate. As one of the co-leaders of the United Farm Workers union, she had spent four months in Washington lobbying lawmakers to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act, landmark legislation that granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants.

A news conference was scheduled to celebrate the victory, but Ms. Huerta said she was not made aware of the event. Instead, she said, her fellow U.F.W. leader, Cesar Chavez, told her there was a crisis in Florida that required her immediate attention. Ms. Huerta flew to Florida, only to realize that the emergency was nonexistent and no one was expecting her. She spent the next few days speaking at senior centers.

“I realized afterward they just wanted to get me out of the way so they could take credit for the work,” she said of her male co-workers in an interview last week. “Straight male-chauvinist trick, and I was really upset about that.”

In the interview, Ms. Huerta talked about the challenges she had faced as a woman in the machismo culture of the movement, which Mr. Chavez had come to dominate with the sheer force of his personality.

And in a stunning disclosure, she said that Mr. Chavez had sexually assaulted her on one occasion and manipulated her into sex on another, encounters that produced two children. A New York Times investigation detailed strong evidence that Mr. Chavez had sexually assaulted several women in the farmworkers’ movement, including two young teenagers.

Ms. Huerta and Mr. Chavez, standing together with raised fists at rallies and marches, were the public face of the Latino-led union organizing movement that swept through American farm fields in the 1960s.

Now 95, Ms. Huerta is often referred to as Grandmother of the Resistance. Her portrait hangs in some American embassies. She fought for years for better wages, maternity protections and basic safety measures for women doing the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting crops.

But in the interview, Ms. Huerta described a culture in U.F.W. under Mr. Chavez that forced her to struggle to be heard and to suppress any negative feelings she felt about him and his leadership — including the trauma of rape.

Ms. Huerta said the assault occurred in the winter of 1966, when she was at the People’s Bar and Cafe in Delano, Calif. — a well-known hangout for farmworker organizers. She was having a beer when Mr. Chavez stormed in, tapped her shoulder and asked for a word.

Assuming that the matter concerned an upcoming strike, she said, she followed him outside. It was common for them to have meetings in the car — Mr. Chavez worried that his office was bugged. He drove her to a secluded grape field on the outskirts of town, she said, and assaulted her.

She also described an earlier episode in 1960 — five years after first meeting Mr. Chavez — in which she felt pressured and manipulated into having sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano, in Southern California.

After the assault in 1966, she was left in a numb, shocked state, she said, but told no one. Not her friends, not her family, not even her daughter born from the assault.

She said she believed that the work of advancing rights for farmworkers was more important, and worried that publicly criticizing Mr. Chavez would tarnish the movement’s legacy and be exploited by political opponents.

“I saw him, again, as my boss, as my hero, as, you know, somebody that would do the impossible,” she said. “I never talked about it to anybody and the reason I didn’t is because I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”

Ms. Huerta said she viewed Mr. Chavez as a contradictory figure when it came to women. He believed in promoting them, she said, but only so far.

Women ran the credit union, the clinic, the field offices. They were trusted with the operational machinery of the movement. But making the decisions that shaped the union’s direction, she said, remained out of reach. “Cesar believed in promoting women as leadership, not at the policy level, but at the work level,” she said.

It was, she suggested, a reflection of something deeper. “Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects. I think it’s an illness.”

While several people interviewed by The Times described the relationship between Mr. Chavez and Ms. Huerta in those years as a high-stakes sibling rivalry, others described the dynamic as painful to watch and rooted in a culture that favored men.

“He was very disrespectful toward Dolores,” said Cynthia Bell, a longtime union staff member, observing that Mr. Chavez and other male U.F.W. leaders would frequently pick on Ms. Huerta in front of the entire staff.

“Don’t say nothing, dilapidated bitch,” one male union board member could be heard telling her during a meeting in April 1978, a recording of which was reviewed by The Times. He then told her to “shut up” as Mr. Chavez berated her with even worse invective.

Ms. Huerta said that she often suppressed these memories as a survival mechanism. “I kind of block those things out of my mind, but I know at the time that it was very painful,” she said.

She recalled an instance involving Father David Duran, a priest and bookkeeper who worked with the union. After witnessing a meeting in which Mr. Chavez relentlessly berated Ms. Huerta, Father Duran pulled her aside. “He came up to me and said, ‘You don’t have to take that, you know? You don’t have to take that from him,’” she remembered.

But Ms. Huerta was not afraid to push back. After one especially brutal meeting where she was insulted, she said, she left the U.F.W. headquarters and returned to her home in Stockton, Calif., for several weeks.

When she eventually returned, she did so with a renewed sense of purpose. At the next meeting, when she took a spot at the back of the room, she said, Mr. Chavez approached her and told her she didn’t belong there.

“I want to see you sitting up in front. You need to be up in the front,” she said he told her.

Years later, in the spring of 1993, Ms. Huerta recalled sitting with Mr. Chavez in Yuma, Ariz., as the song “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week” played on the radio.

She said Mr. Chavez confessed to her during their conversation that he realized he had treated her and another female board member differently than their male colleagues. She met his admission head-on. “Yes,” she said she told him, “it’s called machismo — it’s called male chauvinism.”

She saw it as his way of offering an apology.

Several days later, Mr. Chavez died at the age of 66 while going over a legal case. Ms. Huerta said he had been found with his glasses still on and a brochure in his hand, appearing as if he had simply fallen into a peaceful sleep.

“That took him out before he would have to face his wrongdoings,” she said.

When asked if she had forgiven him, Ms. Huerta said the judgment was not hers to make. “Well, I’m not God,” she said. “You know, I think it’s up to God.”

Jodi Kantor contributed reporting for this story.

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