At the age of 95, American labour and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta has revealed that she had been sexually assaulted by her iconic comrade, the late Cesar Chavez. Both her children were born out of these assaults. Huerta also alleged that Cesar Chavez had done the same to other women, as well as girls.
Through disappointment, disillusionment, and the sobering knowledge that such an unmasking may further fuel those who profit from polarisation, many activists from American left and progressive movements have responded swiftly and unequivocally. On a civic level, parades and celebrations for Cesar Chavez’s upcoming 99th birth memorial have been scrapped, including by the farmworker union that he co-founded with Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, and there are calls to rechristen streets named after him.
This is rare to behold. Such evident, heartbroken integrity isn’t yet a reflexive response when it comes to distancing from predatorial people, powerful and ordinary alike. Closing of ranks and other hypocrisies are, unfortunately, common first responses. There is a cynical argument to be made that disavowing Cesar Chavez decades ago, since his demise in 1993, at no cost to opportunity or other risks or compromises, is neither a challenge nor difficult moral ground to maintain.
But we can learn from this moment, and subsequently apply a nuanced, ethical framework in other situations — ones in which there are consequences for being honourable, or rewards for denying or enabling. There are towering monsters, and there are small ones — the depth of the harm caused is the same, even if the impact is not widespread. There are those who live from their principles, and those who live from their principles when it is convenient. The truth is that behaving with integrity should be like the koan about a tree falling in the woods. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether anyone notices, applauds, or is angered by that integrity. One’s conscience should not be so suggestible.
The escalation of right-wing power and public sentiment globally has forced progressives to confront what we’ve been doing wrong. Going beyond the unpleasant reality that progressives too often behave like proverbial crabs-in-a-bucket, the complexities of interpersonal dynamics within movements are also being analysed productively. Whether one identifies as part of a movement or doesn’t but understands that they are beneficiaries, the acknowledgement that stated values and lived practices are not always integrated is imperative in the shaping and utilisation of our principles. It is embittering. It is also empowering.
People who share our values, or who claim to share them, often become part of our own circles — what in the language of care and advocacy may be known as community, although community and connection are not and need not be the same thing. Harm within intimate spaces, community, and movements is all linked in how they occur, through gaining trust and power, and how they continue, through requiring acquiescence. Dolores Huerta attested that she did not speak up earlier because she feared doing so would harm the movement to which she had dedicated her life. There are so many reasons for the silence of survivors. Some of the loudest, even revered, voices are complicit in these silences too.