Dolores Huerta’s civil rights legacy was inextricably linked with Cesar Chavez. Then she accused him of abuse

By Chelsea Bailey, Stephanie Elam, Norma Galeana, CNN

(CNN) — Days before The New York Times published bombshell allegations of sexual abuse that would upend the legacy of famed labor rights leader Cesar Chavez, Delia Garcia answered a phone call from her longtime friend, Dolores Huerta.

“She said, ‘Let’s have a conversation, and I need you to be sitting down,’” Garcia told CNN.

Then Huerta – who cofounded the famed United Farm Workers union with Chavez and served as his right hand for decades in their fight to secure labor rights for farmworkers – revealed a secret that she’d been holding onto for about 60 years.

Garcia said the 95-year-old recounted two times when, she said, Chavez sexually assaulted her.

“Where she began to cry was when she was talking about the victims, and not herself,” Garcia said, referencing the two other women who alleged in the Times investigation that Chavez groomed and assaulted them when they were minors.

“In this moment, where she’s sharing something so raw, she’s in that moment caring about others.” That, she added, shows the character of Dolores Huerta.

The allegations against Chavez have cast a pall over his legacy, and the fallout has been swift. But the revelations have also brought renewed focus on Huerta, a woman who helped Chavez lead a national movement that upended the status quo for labor rights and whose contributions were at times overshadowed by a man who she alleges was her abuser.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told CNN he grew up idolizing both Chavez and Huerta for their tireless work on behalf of the Latino community.

Villaraigosa – who is campaigning to be the next governor of California – said over the years he’s developed a personal relationship with both civil rights leaders, which made Huerta’s allegations against Chavez even more painful.

“I’ve always known that (Huerta) has the heart of a lion. From the earliest days, you just saw the fire in this woman and the courage. So, I’m not surprised that she’s come forward this way,” he said.

In a statement published after the release of the Times investigation, Huerta said for decades she convinced herself the sexual assaults were incidents she had to “endure alone and in secret.”

“I have kept this secret long enough,” she added, “My silence ends here.”

Huerta channels her passion into a union

Dolores Clara Fernandez was born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico. After her parents divorced, Huerta and her siblings were raised by their mother, Alicia, who was a businesswoman and an active member of their diverse, agricultural community.

After high school, Huerta attended college and graduated with a teaching certification.

But, as she explains in the eponymous 2018 documentary, “Dolores,” she always felt called to fight for something greater than herself.

Despite marrying young and starting her family, Huerta began working with the Community Service Organization, a grassroots group that fought to better the lives of Latinos across California. She quickly climbed the ranks to become the organization’s political director.

And that’s where she met Cesar Chavez.

Both Chavez and Huerta were working with the CSO on separate projects to organize the state’s farmworkers. But when they approached the group’s founder, Fred Ross, about supporting their efforts to start a union, he declined.

The decision would prove to be pivotal.

Huerta would later recall how Chavez proposed they join forces to start their own union.

“He put it this way, he said, ‘Unless you and I do it, it’s never going to happen,’” she recalls in the documentary.

But, she added, Chavez also acknowledged they faced an uphill battle because “the growers are too rich, they’re too powerful, and they’re too racist.”

Undeterred, in 1962 Chavez and Huerta launched the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers union.

A grape boycott marks a milestone

The 1960s were marked by social and cultural upheaval in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement ignited the South; a feminist movement bloomed in New York, and in California, the UFW led a movement to secure higher wages, and safer working conditions for farmworkers.

At the time, agriculture workers were specifically excluded from federal protections that guaranteed the right to organize; and yet they toiled under some of the harshest working conditions in the country. Farmworkers were often exposed to deadly pesticides in the fields – which led to illness and death – and they were among the lowest-paid workers in the United States. In 1962, the year the UFW was founded, the average farmworker earned $0.93 per hour.

“After I had seen the miserable conditions of farmworkers and knowing how to organize people … I just felt that that’s what I needed to do,” Huerta recalled in the documentary. “It was just a calling.”

In 1966, the union launched an international consumer boycott of grapes in protest of the workers’ conditions. The boycott often pitted farmworkers against agricultural business leaders and the US government. It would last four years, with union members and supporters picketing outside grocery stores and urging restaurants not to carry products that were not union grown.

In March of that year, Chavez began a 300-mile march from Delano, California, to the state capital of Sacramento. As he marched, Huerta helped negotiate with the industry leaders.

“She was given more power in a male-dominated union than any other women probably ever had in history,” said Randy Shaw, author of “Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.”

“When (UFW) really wanted to irritate the growers, they’d send Dolores into negotiations,” he said. “She was a very aggressive negotiator. … It’s one thing if the male lawyers for the farmworkers took a hard line – that was expected – but a woman wasn’t supposed to be in that position.”

Days before they reached the capital, Shaw said the union secured its first major victory when Schenley Industries recognized the union and agreed to provide its farmworkers with better conditions and wages.

The landmark agreement was the first union contract between farmworkers and growers, Shaw said.

And yet, tragically, as Huerta revealed to The New York Times, in 1966 – at the height of the UFW’s boycott – she alleged Chavez drove her to a secluded grape field in Delano, California, and raped her.

Huerta told the Times she didn’t report the attack – or a previous incident in 1960 where she said Chavez pressured her into having sex with him during a work trip – because of police attitudes toward their movement, and because she feared no one in their union would believe her.

Shaw called the revelation an appalling and cruel irony.

“Cesar Chavez is doing these terrible things to women and yet he empowered women organizers when they really didn’t have much opportunity,” he said.

Farmworkers unite behind Bobby Kennedy

On June 5, 1968, Huerta stood beside Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he thanked California voters and farmworkers for their support of his presidential campaign.

“I want to thank … Dolores Huerta who is an old friend of mine and has worked with the union,” Kennedy said, “we thank her and tell her how much I appreciate her coming tonight.”

Kennedy had been among the most prominent supporters of the UFW and the farmworker’s movement. In 1966, he traveled to California during the grape boycott and held a Senate hearing where he sparred with local law enforcement who were arresting picketers for demonstrating.

In February 1968, Chavez began fasting in protest of the farmworkers’ conditions – a move that garnered national media attention. After nearly 25 days of fasting, Kennedy sat beside Chavez as he symbolically broke his fast with bread.

Shaw said Kennedy’s support of the farmworker’s movement helped propel his presidential campaign to victory in the California primary later that year.

“The farmworker voter outreach strategy – of knocking on doors, engaging in communication with people – that was unprecedented when it happened in ‘68,” he said, adding the UFW’s strategy became a model of voter outreach that is still used today.

As he thanked his supporters that night at the Ambassador Hotel, Kennedy promised to continue to fight for their rights as Huerta smiled beside him.

“We have certain obligations and responsibilities to our fellow citizens, which we talked about during the course of this campaign, and I want to make it clear if I am elected president of the United States with your help, I intend to keep them.”

Kennedy left the podium and moments later, as he made his way through the hotel’s crowded kitchen, he was assassinated.

Sí se puede

In the years that followed, Huerta and the UFW continued to negotiate contracts on behalf of farmworkers to secure better wages and benefits. The union also took up the battle against pesticides, often negotiating limiting their use into union contracts.

In 1972, after years of pressure from the UFW and environmental groups, Congress enacted a federal ban on the pesticide DDT.

But Shaw said the union achieved its most significant victory in 1975 when it successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act. The law, Shaw said, was the first of its kind in the country and it upended decades of precedent that prevented farmworkers from formally organizing by enabling them to elect their own union representatives.

Huerta continued to organize and protest for equal rights, and she also began to expand her advocacy to other issues, like women’s liberation. At demonstrations, Huerta would often lead animated chants of what would become her signature rallying cry, “Sí se puede!”

In her documentary, Huerta explained she originally began using the phrase when anyone would cast doubt on what the UFW could achieve.

The chant would later become the rallying cry for another changemaker – Barack Obama. In 2012, then-President Obama presented Huerta with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and thanked her for allowing him to use her slogan.

“Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, ‘Sí se puede,’ Yes, we can,” Obama said, “Knowing her, I’m pleased that she let me off easy.”

A lifetime of fighting for equality

Over the decades, Shaw said, Huerta has never lost sight of her passion for advocating for the workers who form the backbone of our country.

“I just saw Dolores a few weeks ago at an event at city hall,” Shaw said. “It was for laborers trying to get higher pay for street cleaners. … She’s 95 years old … and she’s still speaking out for street cleaners.”

Villaraigosa acknowledged the allegations against Chavez complicate and denigrate his legacy as both a civil rights leader and a man. And, he said, he agrees with efforts across the country to remove or rename monuments in Chavez’s honor.

“When you look at the lives of great men and women, we oftentimes put them on a pedestal and make them saintlike,” he said. “All of us are flawed human beings. But this flaw … is beyond the pale.”

And unlike those who have criticized Huerta for staying silent for so long, Villaraigosa said he can understand her decision.

“I had a mom like that who suffered a bad marriage to keep her family together,” he said. “I understand what Dolores did in her eyes to protect the movement.”

And, he said, he is in awe of the fact that she didn’t let the actions of one man dim her spirit.

“Hers was this fiery ‘Sí se puede!’ Whenever you were on a picket line with her, she was as loud as anyone,” Villaraigosa said. “I’m just proud of her courage, but I’m not surprised.”

Chavez’s family told The New York Times they are “not in a position to judge” the newly revealed allegations against him.

“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,” the family said in a statement.

When asked about the impact the recent revelations would have on Chavez’s legacy, Huerta told ABC News it was not for her – or the other victims – to say.

“I think we leave that up to … in God’s hands,” she said. “He was a great leader but unfortunately he had an evil side to him – it is evil.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.