Latinas Are Cultured To Keep Quiet About Abuse. César Chávez's Fall Is Changing That.

The labor icon abused girls as young as 12. The unsilencing of survivors has Latinas and organizers asking who else we've been protecting — and why.

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When I was a child, I learned that I shared a birthday, March 31, with César Chávez, the most famous Latino leader in U.S. history. My mother had bought me a certificate citing major historical events on my birth date. “A great day to be born! Astrologists say you are an Aries; a leader, sociable, likely to excel,” the certificate began, listing celebrities with the same birthday, including Chávez, the only Latino on the list.

I was proud to have been born on the same calendar day as the labor icon, who secured landmark contracts for farmworkers and improved working conditions for them. I woke up every morning to the certificate, which my mother had framed and hung near my bed. It was a daily reminder that I was part of a legacy of struggle for the marginalized. As a little girl, I liked to imagine that Chávez’s ghost lived on in me.

A recent New York Times investigation into alleged rape and sexual abuse by Chávez, including of girls as young as 12 and 15, has destroyed the pride I and countless other Latinos felt in the Chicano leader. The allegations are heartbreaking and infuriating. They come from Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas, Esmeralda Lopez and Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers and is also a labor icon. Huerta revealed that Chávez had raped her, impregnating her twice.

“I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for,” she wrote in a statement.

Many people are confused about how to process the revelations at a time when President Trump is terrorizing vulnerable communities here and across the world, and distracting from his ever-multiplying, monstrous crimes by demonizing Latinos. It is painful to lose another Chicano leader, even though many of us already knew he was flawed. (By embracing anti-immigrant rhetoric, he failed to unite the American labor and immigrant rights movements, a necessary step for collective liberation.)

But the unsilencing of Latina survivors has created space for a retelling of history, one that grapples with the movement’s failures and the unseen Chicanas who were central to its victories. It has opened the door to collective healing. Already, the story is inspiring a reckoning with patriarchal violence in communities of color and among organizers — a digital movement that grapples with how Latinas, particularly those raised Catholic, too often endure violence in silence to protect loved ones, offering compassion to hurt men who hurt us while withholding it from ourselves.

As Huerta told Maria Hinojosa of LatinoUSA, she felt her decades-long secrecy was “worth it” to protect the movement. “It was my cross to bear,” she said.

By speaking up, she and the other survivors are unlocking an opportunity for Latinas and organizers across the country to desahogarnos. The Spanish word refers to a life-giving confession of sorts, an unburdening. Literally, it means to undrown ourselves.

Trump’s firehose of chaos and cruelty is mean to drown us, to choke us on terror, to kill hope. By pursuing justice and accountability amid a breakdown in law and order, Huerta and the other survivors are cracking something open. As I read their stories, I wept; I hadn’t wept in a long time. Weeping requires breathing; it requires life. The survivors and sensitivity of the reporting had let oxygen back into the news cycle. They’d created space to breathe again, to grieve, to imagine repair. They had freed us from the tyranny of the present, and given us back the past and the future.

“It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” Lopez told the Times. “The movement — that’s the hero.”

This reimagining of U.S. history — turning a myth of male saviors into a truthful account of people sacrificing and struggling for each other, such as by renaming César Chávez as Farm Worker Day — invites a reimagining of our own family histories.

While reflecting on the revelations, I thought of all the times I excused or minimized misconduct by men in my family, including my father, the subject of my first book Crux. I omitted the worst of his abuses from those pages; I feared they would render him unsympathetic to readers in a society that demonizes flawed men from Latin America while sending white felons to the White House. I wanted to challenge the imbalance by writing from a place of compassion. My father is a survivor; he deserves love. But there is a difference between love and the silence that protects men at the expense of women and children. For most of my life, I was in denial about the harm my father’s mostly verbal abuse caused and was still causing me until I set boundaries a couple of years ago — which prompted him to stop contacting me.

For years, I maintained relationships with troubled, abusive men, such as the Latino teenager who raped me when I was 15, who told me he had been sexually abused. I stayed with him, my first boyfriend, for about a year after the rape, and remained friendly with him through much of my 20s. I felt for him and wanted to understand him. One evening after the 2016 elections, I expressed my grief about Trump’s victory to him. He told me he admired Trump, but not as much as Hitler — for the power, the command, the dominion over others. I wasn’t surprised. Unacknowledged trauma doesn’t heal; it transforms into a need to dominate, to possess, to destroy. It was in me, too, in my impulse to grasp such men — a form of self-destruction.

The day the Chávez story broke, Yari Mendez-Zamora, a contributor to Latina Rebels and an organizer, found herself thinking about the harms we forgive in our families. “I think about the men who are still allowed at our dinner tables, even when the stories have been circulating for decades about what they’ve done,” she wrote on Instagram.

She told me she hopes the Chávez story inspires long-overdue conversations among Latinos within our families. “What we see at home, we eventually replicate in other spaces, we allow in other spaces,” she said, adding that abuse in organizing spaces stems from failures to address abuse at home.

“Conversations need to happen with moms, with tías, and then figure out how do you confront the abusers in your own family,” she said.

Other Latinas took to social media and other parts of the Internet to express solidarity with the survivors and share experiences of abuse — a community desahogo. “As a survivor I know the great weight of keeping a secret for what you believe to be the greater good,” wrote Aida Rodriguez, the Latina activist behind the HBO Max comedy special “Aida Rodriguez: Fighting Words” and author of “Legitimate Kid.”

Another user: “I went to college with boys that were hella involved in ‘community advocacy’ and treated women like shit + were shady af. It’s a pattern with men in these spaces. And we think they’re special because their public voice feels revolutionary and we care so deeply about the movement moving forward. Se aprovechan.”

Latino men also went online to share observations. In a viral video on Instagram, the content creator @cailegueyyy called on Latino men to speak up when other Latino men say and do inappropriate things. “Sometimes young Latinas are told to watch what they wear because va venir tu tío, y ya sabes como te mira,” he said, referring to a hypothetical uncle’s lustful stares. His reference sent chills of recognition through me. “That young girl is being blamed and policed rather than the person that is exhibiting creeper and weirdo behavior … that behavior should be called out and addressed.”

It’s unclear whether the collective grief, catharsis and calls to action will lead to healing. The #metoo movement during the first Trump administration failed to stop MAGA; some men argue that it pushed them farther into the manosphere, where their resentment curdled into something worse. But a reckoning that stays close to home — that moves from TikTok to the kitchen table, from public condemnation to private conversation — might achieve something more durable than a news cycle.

What would such a reckoning look like? Huerta told Hinojosa in her interview on LatinoUSA that we need to stop the problem of sexual abuse and violence toward girls and boys alike, saying it’s “more prevalent and widespread than we think.” Stopping it will likely require an interrogation of the way we see and interact with children.

Leslie Priscilla, the author of the forthcoming book Chancla: Healing Our Families, Ourselves and Our Culture Through Nonviolent Parenting, has spent years arguing that cycles of abuse begin in the home, in corporal punishment and other types of abuse that are still too common across racial and ethnic populations in the U.S.; as recently as the 1990s, about 90% of American parents reported spanking their children. That figure has since plummeted to about a third. But we still have a long way to go toward healing; many of us are still dealing with inherited trauma from parents who faced discrimination due to gender, race, nationality or simply their status as children. Priscilla believes that nonviolent parenting will be key to interrupting those cycles.

She points to bell hooks, who wrote in her 2004 book The Will To Change:

“We hear the most about sexist violence in public discourses about rape and abuse by domestic partners. But the most common forms of patriarchal violence are those that take place in the home between patriarchal parents and children. The point of such violence is usually to reinforce the dominator model.”

The dominator model, according to hooks, sees power as power over others. It is the root cause of misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia and other bigotries, including childism, which sees children as inferior and as the property of adults.

In a way, I was right as a child when I imagined that a ghost lived in me. But it wasn’t Chávez’s. It was the ghost of my father’s traumas, of the many ancestral traumas I inherited from the dominator model. Those wounds became my compass, pulling me toward people I felt compelled to understand, to fix, to redeem, regardless of the cost to my body and spirit. It took years to learn that compassion without boundaries is not love; it is self-erasure. Some mornings, I still feel that ghost reaching for me.

The question Chávez’s survivors are asking us — the question Huerta answered after 60 years of silence — is whether we will keep feeding that cycle of self-abandonment or finally break it. The movement is the hero, Lopez said. But the movement is only as healthy as the people inside it. That means us. All of us. Starting now.