César Chávez falls off the pedestal. Dolores Huerta reveals a devastating secret. And we Latinos are reeling

When I was young I had a notebook full of quotes from public figures who had said something so deeply resonant that I wanted to remember it forever. One of them was from Bertolt Brecht’s play, Life of Galileo: “Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.”

Those words have been echoing through my head since Wednesday, when the New York Times published a stunning investigation (in English and Spanish) into accusations about rape and the sexual abuse of minors by Mexican American labor rights icon César Chávez, one of the founders of the United Farm Workers union, who died in 1993.

Despite deep opposition to undocumented immigrants — whom he saw as strikebreakers who weakened workers’ rights — Chávez was a hero to many Latinos in a United States that officially honors precious few of us. Streets and schools were named after him, his face was on postage stamps and murals, and his birthday had become a U.S. federal commemorative holiday observed in seven states.

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While some of the reader comments that accompanied the Times article berate the reporters for diminishing someone of Chávez’s stature, most of the responses have centered on the courage of the survivors of the abuse Chávez inflicted who were mentioned in the piece: Ana Murgia, Debra Rojas, Esmeralda Lopez — and, astonishingly, Dolores Huerta.

In the article, Huerta, the cofounder of the United Farm Workers, disclosed two previously unreported sexual assaults by Chávez.

The reporters describe the 96-year-old labor and civil rights leader “sobbing and wailing” when she found out about the sexual abuse Murgia, Rojas, and Lopez had recounted in their interviews.

It pains me to picture this. I’ve only met Huerta in person four times, and each time I’ve been struck by the fact that such a tiny person (she is 5-foot tall, if that) can emanate the towering strength and resolve she does.

Huerta was severely beaten by police at a grape boycott protest when she was 58 years old, but after her recovery, she remained unbowed, and has continued to participate in demonstrations and actions into her 90s.

But for the past 60 years, Huerta thought she was the only one who had been assaulted by Chávez, and that if she came out and talked about it, as she told Latino USA’s Maria Hinojosa, it would hurt the farmworkers movement she had shed literal sweat, blood, and tears to build.

“After reading my heart felt so heavy, I’m glad that she released this pain she carried for years,” the Rev. Jessie Alejandro, of South Philadelphia’s Church of the Crucifixion, told me in a social media message after the story broke. “God knows how many of us go throughout life carrying this burden and thinking that we are to blame. I pray for her, and for all of us women that have endured so much pain in our life.”

While both Chávez’s and Huerta’s work as labor organizers had national impact, and their status as icons is pan-Latino, it is indisputable that their roots are in the Mexican American communities and geographies of the West Coast. I imagine the impact of the scandal is being felt there in a deeper way than it’s being felt in Philadelphia. Still, there is no getting around the devastating feelings the news has elicited among those who respected Chávez.

One local friend messaged me this morning to tell me that he was planning to burn the posters and autographed ephemera his mother had collected during the many grape boycott actions she had participated in with the UFW.

We have learned that idols fall, but people rise up.

And Edgar Ramírez, the Mexican immigrant founder of Philatinos Radio, gave voice to what many of us here are feeling. “Today, we are pierced by a mixture of sadness, horror, and bitterness,” he wrote yesterday, in Spanish, on his personal Facebook page. “Discovering the shadows of someone who was once an icon is painful, but disappointment must not paralyze us.”

He went on to write: “Mrs. Dolores Huerta’s determination in breaking her silence reminds us of a fundamental truth: this Latino movement was never the work of a single man, but rather the heartbeat of an entire community. This legacy can’t be claimed by one surname; it belongs to every generation that has strived, to every father who migrated in search of freedom, and to every woman who kept up the fight.”

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“For years, many of us felt the unease of a leadership that didn’t always embrace the newly arrived immigrant,” Ramírez wrote. “Today, Dolores Huerta’s courage restores the movement to us. She teaches us that the true sí se puede — yes, we can —was not born on a pedestal, but from the collective effort of generations of people who refuse to give up”

In the last few lines of his post, Ramírez finds the perfect counterweight to the Brecht quote that has been troubling me since yesterday.

“We have learned that idols fall, but people rise up,” he said. “This work is ours — it belongs to all of us, and to no one else. We have grown and learned. Let’s continue it.”