A Civil Rights Icon, A Paedophile, She Was 13 Cesar Chavez in His 40's

Cesar Chavez during a demonstration in New York in 1969.Credit...John Sotomayor/The New York Times

By Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes

The reporters interviewed several women who told their stories for the first time, as well as more than 60 other people, including Cesar Chavez’s top aides and relatives. The reporters also reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs and other material.

New York Times

  Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser. 

Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were the daughters of longtime organizers who had marched in rallies alongside Mr. Chavez. He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Ms. Murguia, she said. He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.  

“I wanted to die,” she said.

ImageCesar Chaves marching alongside Ana Murguia, who is holding a flag, in a black-and-white photograph.

 Cesar Chavez, center, and Ana Murguia, right, in a black shirt, during the United Farm Workers’ 1,000 Mile March in 1975.Credit...Cathy Murphy/Getty Images

Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, fondling her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent (Ms. Murguia said Mr. Chavez molested her but never had intercourse with her.)

The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.

Many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.

The findings are based on interviews with more than 60 people, including his top aides at the time, his relatives and former members of the U.F.W., which he co-founded with Ms. Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails and photographs, as well as hours of audio recordings from U.F.W. board meetings.

Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez smiling in a crowd.

Dolores Huerta, left, and Cesar Chavez in Fresno, Calif., in 1965.Credit...Carl Crawford/Fresno Bee/ZUMA Press, via Reuters

The accounts of abuse from Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas were independently verified through interviews with those they confided in decades ago and in more recent years. Elements of their stories were also corroborated in documents, emails, itineraries and other writings from union organizers, supporters of Mr. Chavez and historians. 

The Times spoke at length with Ms. Huerta, the renowned Latina activist who helped run the farmworkers’ union with Mr. Chavez and coined the social-justice rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” loosely translated as “Yes, we can.”

She said she has held on to a dark secret for nearly 60 years.

One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.

Ms. Huerta later began a long-term domestic partnership with Mr. Chavez’s brother Richard, with whom she had four children. He died in 2011.

Ms. Huerta turns 96 on April 10. Her memories of the details of the assault that night in Delano are at times hazy. But she speaks of the attack in a startlingly matter-of-fact manner.

She described being stunned by Mr. Chavez’s aggression, and then numb to it. She framed her silence at the time not as an absence of pain, but as a kind of strategic necessity, particularly as a woman fighting for respect in the male-dominated world of 1960s union organizing. Now, her accusation shatters what was a widely celebrated — and seemingly egalitarian — bond between two of the most influential Hispanic activists in U.S. history. 

“Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children — it’s really awful,” Ms. Huerta said.

More than 30 years after his death, Mr. Chavez has become only more revered in the Latino community, as President Trump’s efforts to limit immigration and scale back rights threaten to destroy many of the gains secured by decades of his work.

Through a series of grueling fasts, grape boycotts and marches that captured the world’s imagination, Mr. Chavez drew a spotlight to the plight of the American farmworker. He improved not only wages, living conditions and health care for generations of farmworkers and their families, but strengthened the political power of Latinos, giving their voice and concerns an urgency and moral authority on the national stage.

He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1994. When Joseph R. Biden Jr. entered the White House in 2021, he put a bronze bust of Mr. Chavez on display in the Oval Office. 

The allegations of rape and sexual abuse are likely to have far-reaching consequences.

On Tuesday, the United Farm Workers issued a statement saying that the organization would not take part in any activities celebrating Mr. Chavez’s birthday on March 31. The union said the “troubling allegations” that were surfacing were incompatible with the organization’s values, adding that it did not have firsthand knowledge of any misconduct.

“We need some time to get this right, including to ensure robust, trauma-informed services are available to those who may need it,” the union said in its statement.

Mr. Chavez’s family said on Tuesday night that they were “not in a position to judge” the claims. “As a family steeped in the values of equity and justice, we honor the voices of those who feel unheard and who report sexual misconduct,” they said in a statement. “These allegations are deeply painful to our family.”

A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them. Instead, many of the women say they were discouraged from speaking out in order to preserve Mr. Chavez’s public image.

Internal emails dating back over a decade show union members discussing Ms. Murguia’s claims of abuse and the impact it had on her life. One of Ms. Murguia’s relatives confronted Mr. Chavez while he was still alive, in the 1980s. According to the relative, Mr. Chavez offered no defense and responded only by clearing his throat. 

More than 10 years ago, members of a private Facebook group for longtime Chavez organizers and supporters were stunned to read a post from Ms. Rojas that she wrote in a fit of anger as they prepared to celebrate the holiday in his name.

Her post read, in part: “Wake up people. This man u march for every year molested me.”

Ms. Rojas deleted the message days after posting it and was accused by some who saw it or heard about it of jeopardizing all that had been accomplished by not only Mr. Chavez but her parents and those they marched alongside.

Nothing has emerged publicly to back up the claims made by Ms. Huerta. Her description of assault could not be independently verified because she said she had told no one, not even her children or closest friends, until just a few weeks ago.

But the paper trail of some of Mr. Chavez’s misconduct involving young girls can be found in the very archives built to preserve his legacy.

 

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In one handwritten letter on girlish stationery imprinted with roses, Ms. Rojas wrote to Mr. Chavez in January 1974 at the age of 13, shifting between childlike school updates and swooning devotion. She said she wrote the letter more than a year after he first kissed and fondled her in his office in 1972, when she was a 12-year-old seventh-grader. “I’m really glad I got to see you & spend time with you, well not like that, but just to know I was near you was enough,” she wrote, adding, “I think of you all of the time. Do you think of me?” 

The letter is among thousands of documents and other materials in the Walter P. Reuther Library archives at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Debra Rojas wrote to Mr. Chavez in January 1974 at the age of 13.

More than 30 years after his death, Mr. Chavez has become only more revered in the Latino community, as President Trump’s efforts to limit immigration and scale back rights threaten to destroy many of the gains secured by decades of his work.

 

Looking back on it now, Ms. Rojas said she believed then that Mr. Chavez wanted her to be a real part of his life. He would tell her that they would move together someday to Mexico. He told her to stay away from other boys because he’d get jealous. He told her that the Flamingos song, “I Only Have Eyes for You,” was their song, and that every time she heard it she should “just remember that I love you.”

“I had love for him,” Ms. Rojas said. “He did his grooming very well. He should get an Academy Award for all he did.”

An Initial Reckoning

Elements of Mr. Chavez’s extramarital affairs with adult women were chronicled in at least two biographies, Matt Garcia’s “From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement,” published in 2012, and Miriam Pawel’s “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography,” published in 2014.

But neither raised issues of abuse of underage girls.

While Mr. Chavez had eight children with his wife, Helen Chavez, the Times investigation showed that he also fathered at least four children with three other women. Two of these children and other family members were interviewed and confirmed the relationship. Additionally, 23andMe match results were reviewed for the four children, and they confirmed Mr. Chavez’s biological ties in each case.

Two of the children were the result of his two sexual encounters with Ms. Huerta, she told The Times, including the assault she described in 1966. Ms. Huerta said she concealed the pregnancies by wearing baggy clothes and ponchos, had the baby girls and then arranged for them to be raised by others.

 

A black and white picture of Cesar and Helen Chavez standing outside with two women holding babies.

Cesar Chavez and his wife, Helen Chavez, right, in California in the 1970s.Credit...Cathy Murphy/Getty

The accusations involving Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas date back to a period when they themselves were children, with behavior they now describe as grooming beginning when they were as young as 8 or 9. 

Ms. Rojas said she started seeing a therapist at the age of 16, four years after the abuse began, and continues to see one today. “I picked up a drinking habit,” she said. “A panic attack habit. A bad relationship habit.”

Ms. Murguia said she suffers from panic attacks and depression, and has trouble being in public spaces or being part of crowds.

“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Ms. Rojas said. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”

With some exceptions, most of the episodes the women described occurred over the decades in the same tight-knit place — La Paz, the union’s compound in the Tehachapi Mountains more than 100 miles north of Los Angeles where he kept his home and his office.

The Murguias had been the first family to move into La Paz, in 1970, when Ana was 10. Her father was a union official and one of Mr. Chavez’s closest aides. Mr. Chavez had been the best man at his wedding three years earlier when he married Ms. Murguia’s stepmother, a union volunteer. 

A grainy wedding photo with children dressed in white walking down a church aisle in front of women and men.

A wedding photo captures the closeness between the family of Ana Murguia, bottom left, and Mr. Chavez, left. He was the best man at the wedding in 1967, when Ana was 8, in which Ms. Murguia’s father married Ana’s stepmother, a union volunteer.

After Mr. Chavez and his family moved to the compound in 1971, he would sometimes ask Ms. Murguia, who was 12 by then, to help him dictate letters or work the community’s phone switchboard. She was proud of being able to mimic his signature so masterfully that she would sign it on documents.

“Dear Eddie, I’m writing this letter for Cesar,” read one letter she wrote to a union supporter in April 1972. “Cesar liked your picture very much. Sincerely, Ana Murguia.”

Initially, she said, she enjoyed spending time with him in his office. To her, he was the only adult who truly listened, a confidant who sympathized with her as she coped with schoolyard bullies and her father’s temper. He told her he was lonely, burdened by his bodyguards and unable even to use the bathroom alone. They spent hours talking.

Ms. Murguia said she was 13 when Mr. Chavez began inviting her into his office. He had an obsession with alternative healing therapies, and would sometimes put her on his desk and demonstrate the “pressure points” that could relieve stress and pain, she said. That eventually led to kissing, and then fondling. And then more. 

“When I was on the yoga mat is when he would try to have sex,” Ms. Murguia said.

Ms. Murguia said she wasn’t attracted to Mr. Chavez, and was initially surprised by his touches, but said she felt chosen. “Part of it was, why would someone like that like someone like me?”

She said Mr. Chavez told her not to tell anyone because other girls and women would be jealous of their special bond.

He took her on tour with him, having her travel in his car and stand with him at events and marches. She appears next to him in several photographs — among them one of the most iconic images from the U.F.W.’s famous 1,000-Mile March in the summer of 1975, and an earlier shot alongside the folk singer Joan Baez.

But it was also during that time, two years after he first touched Ms. Murguia in his office, that things changed.

By now age 15, she had accompanied Mr. Chavez on a trip to Los Angeles. At a fund-raiser’s home in Bel Air, she walked into the kitchen and found him kissing a woman. She left quickly. “I was disgusted,” she said. On the way back to La Paz, she rode with the guards and the dogs, refusing to share a car with him. 

Their time in the office grew less intimate and eventually ended. She started to ache with a quiet distress.

“I felt very alone,” she said. “I had zero support.”

She finally left La Paz at 19 but soon fell into a spiral of heroin addiction. Desperate, she thought that Mr. Chavez could help her and returned to La Paz. But this time, when she went to his office, she found a room full of men. And Mr. Chavez, she said, turned on her.

“He told me I was bringing drugs into the community and needed to get out.”

She went home in tears and remembers a family member asking what happened. “He doesn’t need me anymore,” she recalls saying. “I’m grown up. He told me to get out.”

The next day, she checked into a rehab program that Mr. Chavez had arranged for her. She never spoke to him again.

Several people corroborated her story. One family member said she learned of the abuse in the early 1980s, after Ms. Murguia told her about it. Another person said Ms. Murguia disclosed the abuse to him in 1989. One of the men present in the room when Ms. Murguia was kicked out of La Paz refused to comment. Another said he didn’t remember that time in his life.