Dem
47
GOP
53
That observation comes from, of all people, the actor Robert Downey Jr. Undoubtedly he's had to give this particular subject more thought than most people, since the signature role of his career was Iron Man, a fellow who does heroic things, but is sometimes not much of a hero (he is, after all, an arms dealer).
This particular conundrum, or paradox, or whatever you wish to call it, looms large in the mind right now, particularly for residents of California, and for members of the Mexican-American community. That is because Cesar Chavez, who most certainly did heroic things, has now been outed—more than 30 years after his death—as someone who was most certainly not a hero.
Actually, Chavez was a... complicated figure even before this week. His iconic status was rooted, of course, in his work with the United Farm Workers, and his success in securing better working conditions for agricultural laborers. However, he was a labor leader first, second, and third, and did not regard himself (until late in life) as a leader of the Mexican community. Consequently, he was famously hostile to undocumented immigrants, often turning them over to the FBI when he discovered their immigration status. His reasoning, which was absolutely correct from the vantage point of a labor leader, was that the undocumented immigrants were bad PR (since the enemies of the UFW slurred the union as "a bunch of illegals") and they were the likeliest people to be hired to cross the UFW's picket lines.
Broadly speaking, fans of Chavez have dealt with that by either not knowing it (and Z has had hundreds of students come up after lecture and say they had no idea about his anti-undocumented-immigrant activism), or by accepting that a labor leader's gotta do what a labor leader's gotta do, or by saying "well, nobody's perfect."
There's not going to be any "dealing" with the latest revelations, though. On Wednesday, a couple of weeks before Chavez' birthday, and thus the various celebrations and commemorations that always accompany that date on the calendar (March 31), The New York Times published the results of an investigation into the labor leader's past. As it turns out, he was something of a Latino Jeffrey Epstein. There are no reports that Chavez trafficked anyone—at least, no reports so far—but he did groom and rape girls, he did use his power as the leader of the UFW to press women into non-consensual sex, and he did use job termination (or the threat of termination) to punish those who did not accommodate his sexual demands and/or to make sure that nobody told what they knew.
The Times' reporting is based on two very credible accounts from two women, now in their 60s, who explained, in detail, how they were either raped (one victim) or molested (the other) by Chavez well before reaching the age of consent, and how the grooming that made that possible began when they were 12. The newspaper writes that it found a great deal of corroborating evidence to back up the two women's accounts, though it doesn't provide a lot of specifics, very likely to protect additional victims.
What seals the deal, and puts the claims beyond any and all doubt, is that the Times also talked to Chavez' most famous associate, Dolores Huerta, who is still among us at the age of 95. She confirmed that she too was victimized, and issued a statement that reads, in part:
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.
I have encouraged people to always use their voice. Following the New York Times' multi-year investigation into sexual misconduct by Cesar Chavez, I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences.
As a young mother in the 1960s, I experienced two separate sexual encounters with Cesar. The first time I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn't feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to. The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.
I had experienced abuse and sexual violence before, and I convinced myself these were incidents that I had to endure alone and in secret. Both sexual encounters with Cesar led to pregnancies. I chose to keep my pregnancies secret and, after the children were born, I arranged for them to be raised by other families that could give them stable lives.
If anyone prefers to read in Spanish, there is a Spanish-language version available at the link.
The reaction to this news, which hit university campuses in California and elsewhere like a thunderclap, has been shockingly swift. Within a few hours of the news breaking on Wednesday, there were e-mails going out to students and faculty offering counseling to anyone who needed help processing the information. Not long thereafter, there were cancellations of dozens if not hundreds of Chavez-centered events that were to be hosted by schools, or labor organizations, or communities.
Yesterday, the actions were even more decisive. Chavez statues and murals have been wrapped in plastic, or crated, or otherwise covered as the cities that host them figure out how to proceed. Some monuments, such as the one in San Fernando, have already been taken down. Street signs are also being taken down, and street names are being changed, or will be. It took the state of California less than 24 hours to rename Cesar Chavez Day, which is an official holiday and a day off for state employees, as Farmworkers Day. Other states are expected to make similar moves, with Minnesota furthest along that path. The UCLA Cesar Chavez Center has similarly already been renamed the UCLA Chicano/a Studies Center—and trust us, by the standards of academia, that is light-speed fast. Other universities with programs or research centers named after Chavez are not going to be far behind.
(Z), as you can imagine, has something akin to a front-row seat for all of this. And so, he can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that these moves are driven by one thing, and one thing only, and that is to do right by Chavez' victims, and to immediately stop lionizing someone for whom that has now become distasteful. There are millions of people who are devastated to have lost a hero, but they would be even more devastated to carry on with a terrible lie.
Put another way, there was absolutely nothing about this that involved "scoring" political points, or trying to make a statement about national politics, or anything along those lines. When Sen. Al Franken (DFL-MN) got cashiered, at least a part of that was Democrats performing "us vs. them" theater, and trying to show that the blue team is way better on these issues than the red team, with particular reference to then-U.S. Senate candidates Doug Jones and Roy Moore.
(Z) can assure you that nobody was thinking in this way, or talking in this way, when it came to Chavez. And yet—and we point it out because this IS a politics-centered site—that IS the message that comes through. The new evidence against Chavez is rock-solid; nobody can seriously doubt its veracity. And the new evidence against Chavez is also eerily similar to the evidence against some of the people who were a part of Epstein's web, most obviously Les Wexner, Leon Black and Donald Trump. We don't expect there to be swift action when it comes to those men, and probably not any action at all. But it's worth pointing out that righting these sorts of wrongs is not partisan, in most cases. It's only partisan in the case of one particular wing of one particular party when it comes to one particular miscreant.
There's another politics angle here, as well. As chance would have it, (Z)'s lecture on Mexicans in California is coming up in a few weeks. As you might imagine, Cesar Chavez is the central figure of the lecture (along with Dolores Huerta). So, he's got a fairly short amount of time to figure out what to do with that. The Trump administration approach to messy history, of course, is to Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive, and to pretend there is nothing else.
That really never works, at least not with college students, and this particular situation is an especially good illustration of why. It is simply not possible to tell the story of Mexicans in California without talking about Chavez. That would be like talking about the Civil War and neglecting to mention Robert E. Lee. At the same time, if you only talk about Chavez' public works, and you don't address what is now the 800-pound gorilla in the room, you are telling a lie of omission. Students would be outraged, as well they should be.
So, (Z) will have to find a way to integrate the new information, and to make it a teachable moment. There are, of course, plenty of historical figures who did good things, but were bad guys or gals. But with Chavez, the gap between public persona and private individual is unusually large, and feelings are particularly raw right now. It's going to be tricky to get it right. (Z)