I very much doubt there is a woman on the left who has not endured some form of misogyny in her organising work. The Cesar Chavez revelations are both shocking and unsurprising. I have written about the misogyny of the left many times (see links at the end), and in this essay I try to explore the parts that women are often reluctant to describe. A lot of people on the Left, across generations, have normalised misogyny in their ranks.
Stories about Cesar Chavez’s sexual abuse of women have circulated for years, but have never gone beyond mumurings dismissed as gossip. Long considered a hero of the Latino and immigrant rights movement, Chavez has been an untouchable icon for many. This week, the New York Times published the damning results of a five-year investigation and revealed that he had sexually abused two women, now in their sixties, from the time each was barely in her teens. There were additional victims, including Dolores Huerta, perhaps the only woman whose fame in the movement rivals that of Chavez. She disclosed to the Times and in a statement that Chavez had pressured her to have sex during a work trip in 1960. Six years later, he raped her in his truck. Huerta conceived a child each time, and gave both children away to be raised by others.
This is likely to be the start of a series of stories, as more women will undoubtedly emerge from their years of silence with more revelations. While the details are sordid and shocking, the revelations of child sexual abuse are the most damaging and show that Chavez’s reputation on the left allowed him to groom and abuse the children of fellow organisers. One of the women, Debra Rojas, revealed his abuse in a private Facebook group ten years ago, but quickly took the post down. The Times’s investigation uncovers the extent to which Chavez was able to weaponise his influence and stature to exploit children, practically in the open. It also points to a dark and troubling truth about the Left which, despite its vaunted reputation for justice and equality, has long been a pit of misogyny and sexual abuse.
Ana Murguia was 13 at the time the abuse started, sometime around 1972, and she recalls being “summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.” Debra Rojas was 12 when Chavez first groped her breasts in his office. When she was 15, he “arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California,” and raped her there. She recalls that he had a gun on the bedside table, which she could see every time she turned her head. Murguia has said that he molested her but did not have intercourse with her.
Both women were the children of Chavez’s political compatriots and co-organisers, and they have spoken to the Times of his stature as a hero in the movement, and that their families revered him and wanted to remain in his favour. This only partly explains why their parents seemed to turn a blind eye to the possibilities of abuse. Rojas reveals that Chavez would call her house after the first time he groped her, to “talk union business with her father, and then, before they hung up […] ask him to put his daughter on the phone.” Putting aside the complexities of non-sexual inter-generational relationships, we can assert that it is not normal for an adult man to want to talk to an unrelated child without the parents asking more questions (and perhaps finding out more than they wanted to know). Murguia’s relationship with Chavez through her family was a closer one: he had been her father’s best man when he married her stepmother, and had encouraged her to work as an unpaid intern of sorts from the time she was 12. She even signed correspondence in his name and went on tours with him. By the time she was 19, and after years of molestation, she had begun to spiral into drug addiction, which Chavez took as a reason to expel her from the community (he also arranged for her to enter a rehab program).
There were others, but they escaped with much less harm. Esmeralda Lopez was 19 in 1988, when Chavez invited her to his camper, and “pointed to a street sign outside bearing his name and suggested that he could use his influence to get something named for her if she slept with him.” Lopez rejected him, he did not persist, and she eventually told her mother, Cynthia Bell, what had happened. It turned out that Chavez had propositioned Bell in the 1970s, when she was in her early 20s.
It is more than likely that Chavez preyed on the vulnerable: other women the Times spoke to have said that he never behaved inappropriately with them even when they too were taken on tour with him. Sexual predators have an uncanny ability to scope out who among possible victims is the least likely to tell on them: if a child’s parents do not question why an adult man wants to talk to their pre-teen child, they are not going to wonder why he might want her on tour with him. Murguia was repeatedly “summoned” to Chavez’s office for abuse sessions, which prompts questions: Where were the adults — including his ever-present security guards and office staff — when she kept showing up for “meetings?” What kind of official meetings could a 13-year-old have with a prominent leftist union organiser without the presence of adults? In the case of Lopez: given that there is no mention of a father, it seems likely that Chavez thought he could hit upon the child of a single mother with impunity, especially if he had already done that to her mother.
Huerta entered a long-term partnership with Richard Chavez, brother to Cesar, and they had four children together. Did she ever reveal what had happened to her partner? The Times was able to corroborate what happened to Murguia, Rojas, and Lopez but could find no definitive proof of Chavez having raped Huerta (unsurprising, given the circumstances she describes). It was, however, able to find an audio recording confirming that Chavez had called her a “stupid bitch” during a board meeting, which means that others witnessed his abusive behaviour — and it is unlikely that this was the first or last time. How was all this allowed to happen, and why has it taken so long for these revelations to emerge? The answer has to do with the Left’s tolerance of misogyny and sexual abuse, and its habit of sweeping any evidence of such out of sight.
There is probably not a single woman organiser on the Left who has not experienced some level of misogyny and sexism and much worse. As I have written here and elsewhere, leftist men tend to view women in organizing as mere secretaries at best, or as sexual objects there to provide amusement and the occasional blowjob at worst. I could provide a million examples — and I have, in essays linked below — of the ways in which leftist men, even and perhaps especially mainstream gay left men (whose overall misogyny remains untheorised) see women as expendable. Leftist men, even now, will refer to women as “war-whores” or place photos of a bikini-clad Salma Hayek on their timelines to declare their support for immigrants, with much brotherly snorting and high-fives. And, apparently, the only way to express support for AOC is to first assert that, “Yeah, man, I’d fuck her, sure,” a sentiment that does not do much to separate lefty men from their counterparts on the Right. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) perpetually uses sexualised slogans (“Hot Girls for Zohran”) and hosts Valentine’s Day events as if the possibility of sex and romance should make it more exciting to be on the left. To be fair, given that the Left has historically been a joyless and almost sunless place, such tactics are probably seen as necessary correctives and a way to attract newcomers, but the emphasis on sexual activity as a necessity, not just an incidental part of left organising is also why the Left keeps running into problems. If the DSA persists in sexualising its organising, it will more than likely run into issues when some men assume too much about what women (or other men) want. Any woman who dares call out sexist or sexually abusive behaviour is immediately shushed or shouted down. As Alex Press put it:
Whether you yourself were abused or you are speaking up on someone else’s behalf, you open yourself up to criticisms that you are distracting from the real work of the movement. Rather than speaking about your intended focus—be it labor organizing, coalition building, communications strategies or direct action planning—you are forced into the position of feeling hysterical, becoming a caricature: the woman who is decrying sexism or misogyny in the movement. Almost instantly, you feel your comrades change how they see you: Once an organizer first and foremost, you’re now a woman before all else. It’s jarring. Moments prior you were a respected leader, and suddenly you are suspect.
The prevalence of misogyny and sexual abuse has an effect on activism. When a leftist organisation will not confront either, it makes itself vulnerable on at least two fronts: it reduces its organising capability and strength by disempowering and humiliating its own members, and it makes itself vulnerable to the Right by sweeping matters under the rug and silencing victims and their advocates. People often wonder where the women of the Left might be, as if this is some great mystery. The truth is awfully mundane: we really hate working alongside men who keep leering at us and wondering when we might sleep with them, or who treat us as mere minions — only there to create the power point presentations and clear the chairs and dishes once the men-folk are done with their grand speeches. When women who speak up are silenced — and they often are — they are told it is because their revelations will only harm “The Movement.” Murguia, Rojas and Huerta said they “struggled for years about whether to tell their stories publicly,” according to the Times. Given the current political climate and the great harm already done to immigrants, organisers warned them that speaking out against a hero might have adverse effects.
But what hurt the movement was Chavez’s rapacious, abusive behaviour. We could, quite correctly, argue that if people had been more attentive to the abuses of children and women and less inclined to turn a blind eye to all of that, we might actually have a more robust immigrant and labour organising movement today. If a movement cannot tend to the needs of its most vulnerable, what is the point of it?
See also:
Graham Platner and the Left’s Masculinity Crisis
You can also hear me, Briahna Joy Gray, Matthew Hoh, and Branko Marcetic discuss Platner-related matters on the Bad Faith podcast.
Polyamory is Gay Marriage for Straight People (about how the pressure to be in polycules is both sexist and classist)
Fuck Love (about the Left’s toxicity towards women)
Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Man with Backpack, 1888
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