I used to think that every movement needed a hero — Martin Luther King Jr., marching for civil rights, Gandhi trampling British colonialism, Mandela fighting apartheid. My Los Angeles public school curriculum granted Cesar Chavez a similar role in the canon of great men. He was the humble saint of the Farmworkers’ Movement, a mighty mobilizer who achieved fair wages for California grape growers and whose 25-day fast for nonviolence made history.
When the New York Times published an investigation that found that Chavez sexually abused young girls and his United Farm Workers (UFW) co-founder, Dolores Huerta, I felt betrayed. I had grown up believing wholeheartedly in Chavez’s superhuman influence. On my way to high school each morning, I would pass by a massive mural of his smiling face.
These allegations have prompted me to question society’s pattern of placing male icons at the forefront of history, so I turned to Claremont community members with connections to the Farmworkers’ Movement for guidance. What I learned led me to realize that movements should be commemorated for their collective contributions, not their individual leaders.
The first person I talked to was my 88-year-old friend Rev. Gene Boutilier, a Pilgrim Place resident and minister who worked for UFW in the 1960s. Boutilier babysat for both Chavez and Huerta.
When we discussed Huerta’s March 18 statement, in which she revealed that Chavez had raped her twice and that both assaults resulted in pregnancy, Boutilier told me he was horrified.
“I certainly knew about Dolores’ extra kids,” he said. “[But] I thought it was, quote, ‘just’ adultery. Isn’t that an odd thing for a preacher to say? I didn’t know it was rape.”
In her statement, Huerta said she had kept both the rape and the resulting children a secret because she “didn’t want to hurt the farm worker movement [she] had spent [her] life fighting for.” Huerta knew that in many ways, Chavez represented the movement as a whole. Compromising his reputation could mean compromising the UFW’s credibility. When I emailed Boutilier after the interview to ask if other organizers knew of Chavez and Huerta’s children, Boutilier answered, “It’s hard to say because people would be hesitant to talk about this, but my guess is that adult members of the leadership families were certainly aware.”
While Boutilier was deeply disturbed by the allegations of sexual abuse, he was not surprised.
“When you create the myth of the great man, you are setting up a dynamic that is liable to be dangerous.”
“When you create the myth of the great man, you are setting up a dynamic that is liable to be dangerous.”
According to Boutilier, the union’s commitment to maintaining Chavez’s reputation was “cultic”, a perception echoed by the New York Times article, which found that union members discouraged the women and girls whom Chavez abused from speaking out in order to preserve Chavez’s public persona. Boutilier also characterized Chavez’s leadership as egotistical; Chavez often purged people from the union in order to mitigate his own paranoia and minimize the contributions of the movement’s other key players. Boutilier’s friend and fellow minister Chris Hartmire, Chavez’s long-time Chief-of-Staff, was “purged … after loyally staffing the union and bringing much of the religious support that it had.”
Thus, even before the allegations came out, Boutilier did not celebrate Cesar Chavez Day. He “hated the performance [by leaders] to lionize him” because it underplayed the contributions of others in the movement. This performance extended beyond the actual holiday. “An example is in the United Church hymnal, there’s a famous prayer attributed to Cesar … actually, Chris [Hartmine] wrote it.”
Similarly, Professor Tomás F. Summers Sandoval, professor of history and Chicana/o Latina/o studies at Pomona College, has long been opposed to Cesar Chavez Day.
“When they were making this a holiday in the state of California, I wrote a letter to my state representatives telling them not to and explaining why I was against it.” He said.
In Summers Sandoval’s class, Community Organizing in the United States, which centers on the UFW movement, I learned about how Chavez and the UFW were often violent and hostile toward undocumented immigrants.
Summers Sandoval noted that, as a historian, he is constantly skeptical of “movements making the great figure” when they are always the result of many people’s dedication. His instructional goal is to minimize Chavez’s prominence in the Farmworkers’ Movement, “except as this front-facing [figure] that draws people to it.”
When I asked Summers Sandoval how he would adapt his teaching to account for the allegations, he said, “There’s nothing I’m going to do differently in terms of my teaching, with the exception of adding [the sexual abuse allegations], because I’m very about dismantling that idea of leadership to begin with.”
Daniel Penaloza CM ’26, president of the Claremont Colleges Students for Farmworkers, which was once affiliated with the UFW, stated that prior to the sexual abuse allegations, “there already wasn’t this very high praise of Cesar Chavez within [the] club,” as many club members were aware of how Chavez formed a private Border Patrol to deter undocumented immigrants.
Penaloza was surprised at how quickly the UFW denounced Chavez once the allegations came to light, especially because of his previous experiences with UFW leadership. In 2023, UFW president Teresa Romero gave a presentation on unionizing at Pitzer. During the talk, Penaloza said that when a student asked Romero how the UFW was attempting to move away from the legacy of Cesar Chavez, she was hesitant to respond.
He believes that the rate at which organizations have made statements or rejected Cesar Chavez Day breaks a cycle of unwavering admiration.
“Predominantly, the view has been that, even though Cesar Chavez has done these problematic things, he’s still a leader, we should still respect him.”
In my Community Organizing in the U.S. class, Summers Sandoval opened the floor to discussion on the issue. One of my classmates talked about the human attraction to cults of personality, how we love to elevate heroes, and are quick to tear them down when we realize we were wrong. Summers Sandoval calls this phenomenon “reflex action.” Since the allegations were released, Los Angeles has made a concerted effort to paint over Chavez-related artwork, take down statues, and rename Cesar Chavez Boulevard.
“My discussions with members of the Claremont community have shaped my belief that movements don’t need a single face. It’s time to stop making heroes and start celebrating the collaboration necessary to make lasting progress.”
While these acts are well-intentioned, they fail to effectively examine why we elevate male leaders to superhuman status and how we can reframe movements to prevent this kind of lionization from happening again. “At the end of the day,” Summers Sandoval remarked, “are we all that more skilled about talking about power and sex inside workplaces or society? And does ripping down a statue move us anywhere?”
Penaloza expressed similar concerns. “I also saw a lot online about people suggesting we replace Cesar Chavez’s name with Dolores Huerta on signs and murals and things like that. But I feel like that didn’t really capture the issue with holding one figure up on the pedestal. The point of movements is that they’re created by the people, for the people.”
The Farmworkers’ Movement was an undeniable beacon of hope for laborers everywhere. At the same time, its glorification of an alleged rapist and pedophile, Chavez, raises the wider issue of the impacts of elevating a single figurehead to supremacy.
On Pomona College’s academic calendar, March 31 is now Farmworkers Day. Instead of simply acknowledging the necessity of this change, it is our job to reckon with the repercussions of lionizing individual men and disregarding collectivity. My discussions with members of the Claremont community have shaped my belief that movements don’t need a single face. It’s time to stop making heroes and start celebrating the collaboration necessary to make lasting progress.
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