After watching a documentary at school about farmworkers getting beaten on picket lines, Anita Romero Torres had one dream: to join Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. In 1977, at age 17, she arrived at the union’s La Paz headquarters in the California mountains. But within weeks, she began to grow fearful — not of agitators on the picket lines, but of the men she worked with.
In the department where she was assigned, her supervisor began calling her several times a day, reminding her that they would be spending a lot of time alone together in the fields. “Sometimes it’ll be really late at night in very isolated places,” she said he told her. “Nobody’s going to know where we are.”
The calls “seemed very strange and uncomfortable,” she said. “He was basically telling me that he was going to take me out in a field somewhere and rape me.”
When she reported the calls to Mr. Chavez, the response was, for her, a devastating lesson in institutional priorities. Mr. Chavez told her that the man was too important to the cause to be removed from his job. His solution was to transfer the man’s wife into her department to keep an eye on him.
The harassment, she said, didn’t stop there. A different male co-worker groped her in the office. Another cornered her in a locked room and tried to push himself on her before she narrowly escaped. Three years after she started, Ms. Romero Torres quit.
“It became impossible to do what I came to do, what I love,” she said. “What broke my heart about the U.F.W. is I felt that I left because of the way that men behaved there.”
A New York Times investigation this year uncovered substantial evidence that Mr. Chavez, a key figure in America’s civil rights history, had sexually abused young teenage girls and engaged in other sexual misconduct over a period of decades. The revelations led to a nationwide reckoning, with communities across the country canceling events, removing statues and re-examining artwork celebrating Mr. Chavez.
But the abuse did not begin or end with Mr. Chavez, new interviews and documents show. Many other women faced devastating sexual assault and harassment from men they worked with — including senior managers — even as they helped organize the marches, boycotts and membership campaigns that laid the groundwork for the Latino civil rights drive in the United States.
Former co-workers, family members and friends helped corroborate the accounts of several of these women, as did documents in the union’s archives. Some of the women asked that the men they accused of abuse not be publicly identified for fear of lawsuits or physical retaliation.
The U.F.W. over the years elevated women in ways that were uncommon in a less progressive era. Mr. Chavez promoted several to leadership roles, including Dolores Huerta, who founded the U.F.W. with him. Women often served as organizers, picket captains and boycott leaders.
But privately, interviews and union records show, women suffered under a culture of misogyny. More than a dozen women said in interviews that they were harassed, groped, pressured into sex or assaulted by men involved with the labor union, from farmworkers to senior staff members, from the 1970s to the mid-1990s.
Their accusations were often ignored, or dismissed as secondary to the union’s mission and as the inevitable behavior of men. Some who spoke up were cast as seductive spies or provocateurs.
One woman recounted a struggle in a bedroom where a fellow organizer tried to rape her. Another said she was 18 when she agreed to have sex with her supervisor in a hotel room; the next week, he transferred her to an office far away.
Ms. Huerta, 96, revealed in an interview with The Times in March that she had been sexually assaulted by Mr. Chavez on one occasion and coerced into sex with him on another. But The Times’s new reporting, which included interviews with former union associates and an examination of archived union records, suggests that a number of women complained that Ms. Huerta often failed to support them and rebuffed their complaints of sexism.
The U.F.W. of the 1970s is not the U.F.W. of today. Much of the abuse unfolded in an era when there was almost no social or organizational space for women to speak out about sexual assault.
In 2018, Teresa Romero became the union’s first female president. After The Times published its investigation of Mr. Chavez in March, Ms. Romero helped the U.F.W. establish a system for women to tell their stories of abuse by Mr. Chavez and to start a process of reconciliation.
These women are now offered counseling and a 24-hour crisis line. Union leaders have sexual harassment prevention policies in place that are reviewed and updated regularly, they said.
“I would have never expected some of the reports we have heard based on my personal experiences as a woman in the U.F.W., and I can only imagine the courage it takes to come forward and share stories like these,” Ms. Romero said in a statement.
Interviews with women from the earlier era make it clear that the problems did not end with Mr. Chavez’s death in 1993.
That same year, Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, the daughter of a garment worker, joined the union at age 18.
One day at the Los Angeles office, she said, a fellow organizer pulled her onto an office chair and began rubbing himself against her while laughing. She went to the wife of a union board member for help.
“She was very dismissive,” Ms. Gonzalez-Brito said. “She said, ‘Oh, he’s just kidding,’ or ‘I’m sure he was just playing around.’”
The next year, while working for the union in Delano, Calif., Ms. Gonzalez-Brito said she was forcibly kissed by a farmworker who pushed her against a wall. She reported the assault to a veteran U.F.W. leader, who promised a response, but no action was taken, she said.
“You expect them to live their values,” Ms. Gonzalez-Brito said. “You expect them to protect you because that’s what a union does.”
In a federal lawsuit filed in 1997 in California, two farmworkers, Leticia Maravilla and Gloria Perales, sued the union for sexual harassment. They alleged that Efren Barajas, who headed the organizing campaign in Watsonville, had instructed them to provide sexual favors to strawberry farmworkers as an incentive to join the union.
“If the farmworkers don’t want to sign the union card, go to bed with them — who cares if you get a little dusty?” Mr. Barajas reportedly told Ms. Maravilla, who reiterated the allegations in an interview. Mr. Barajas did not respond to requests for comment.
The U.F.W. denied the allegations when the suit was filed, with Ms. Huerta saying at the time that it was an attempt by the strawberry industry to derail union organizing. Union lawyers argued that the women had not exhausted their administrative recourses before resorting to a lawsuit, and the plaintiffs later dropped the case.
Driven by a desire to help the union achieve justice for farmworkers, many of the women The Times spoke to kept their stories secret for decades, even within their own families. Many said they continued to suffer from post-traumatic stress and recurring nightmares, describing their time in the movement as one of the most devastating periods of their lives.
“It’s like having a secret that is so shameful, and you feel responsible for it,” said one former union volunteer, Amanda Chavez, who is unrelated to Mr. Chavez. She described an episode that she said occurred in 1991, shortly after she joined the union, when a U.F.W. organizer forced her onto the floor of a condo in Chula Vista, Calif., undressed her and attempted to rape her, as she desperately fought him off.
She still dreams about the attack. “It’s always in the dark, I’m on the ground, there’s mud, and weeds holding me down, and someone on top of me, and I know it’s him,” she said.
A Rape in a Field
Liz Sullivan, a native of the peach orchards and rice fields of Marysville, Calif., was 19 when she joined the union. By 1975, she had helped establish a U.F.W. service center in her hometown.
She was transferred to the Coachella Valley in the winter of 1976. At the time, Coachella was a crucible of the movement: a vast, arid stretch of the Colorado Desert known for its date palms and table grapes, but notorious among organizers as hostile territory. Growers were pushing back strongly on the union’s bid to secure labor contracts.
After one organizing meeting in 1977, she gave a ride home to the son of a foreman at a nearby ranch and the son of a former union member. They were driving down a remote vineyard road, she said, when her tires became stuck in the sandy soil.
The two men, who had been drinking beer, demanded to have sex with her. Ms. Sullivan started running, but the men dragged her by her legs back to the car, where she said they forced her into the back seat and took turns raping her.
Ms. Sullivan struggled to walk back to a union house and reported the assault to her supervisor, David Martinez, and one of the directors, Ruth Shy. At the union clinic, she was offered Valium to calm her nerves, but was then asked to return to the vineyard to retrieve the union vehicle she had been driving.
The interior of the car, Ms. Sullivan recalled, was a stomach-turning scene that smelled of beer and semen. It forced her to relive the horrific ordeal.
Ms. Sullivan said she decided not to report the rape to the police, seeing them as hostile to the union, and fearing that growers would use the episode to discredit the movement if it became public. But several former union members, including members of the board, said they had been made aware of the assault.
While the union eventually assigned a bodyguard to accompany Ms. Sullivan in the field, other female organizers were sent to the ranch where the attack had occurred without protection, she said.
Weeks after the assault, another female organizer at the same ranch faced sexual insults and had her car rammed by the growers, the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board found in an unfair labor practices investigation.
During this same period, a flyer was being circulated among farmworkers in the area, featuring a drawing of a female union organizer offering worker “benefits.” The illustration, which the labor relations board later determined had been created and distributed by the company that owned the ranch where the rape happened, suggested that female organizers were selling sex for union votes, an apparent attempt to discredit the union’s organizing efforts.
Ms. Sullivan began pulling women aside to offer safety tips about avoiding labor camps alone. Another organizer, Phyllis Hasbrouck, suggested they form a women’s safety group.
A fledgling group of about eight women — field organizers, secretaries and clinic workers, including Linda Rodriguez, the daughter of Mr. Chavez — met to discuss safety and what they termed the “second-class status” of women in the union. But shortly after the group’s formation, a mandatory all-staff meeting was announced.
Ms. Hasbrouck and Ms. Sullivan said they sat with the rest of the staff in a sweltering room as three of Mr. Chavez’s top lieutenants — Eliseo Medina, Marshall Ganz and Jim Drake — proceeded to question and verbally attack the women involved in the safety group, whom they accused of trying to ruin the movement.
Ms. Hasbrouck was later forced to resign, accused of counter-organizing. One union executive complained to other board members that she had disrupted his marriage with “women’s lib and all that other bullshit.”
“I was shattered,” she said.
Ms. Sullivan said she quit the union in disgust.
“Instead of addressing the important safety concerns which resulted from my rape,” she said, the U.F.W. “branded talk about safety ‘counter-organizing.’”
In recent interviews, both Mr. Medina and Mr. Ganz said they did not remember the all-staff meeting, though they recalled hearing about Ms. Sullivan’s rape, and board meeting recordings show that senior leaders discussed both the women’s group and Ms. Hasbrouck’s firing. Mr. Drake died in 2001.
Mr. Ganz said he did not recall pressuring Ms. Hasbrouck to resign. He said, however, that he had come to believe that union leadership had gone too far in carrying out Mr. Chavez’s purges of those he deemed disloyal or ineffective.
“Eliseo and I and others, there was a time that we should have stood up and taken him on,” Mr. Ganz said. “We rationalized to ourselves that somehow this would pass because the work we were doing had such a value.”
A Culture of Abuse
Mr. Chavez was at the center of the union’s culture of sexism and abuse. After The Times published its account of women who said they were repeatedly molested by the labor leader as underage girls, several more came forward and said they, too, had been pressured into sex with Mr. Chavez when they were young women in the movement. Many still do not want to share their stories publicly, with some fearing condemnation from their own families.
Ms. Romero Torres, who had complained about her boss, said she had also faced harassment by Mr. Chavez.
Within weeks of her arrival at the union’s headquarters, she said, Mr. Chavez began summoning her for late-night tasks in his office, where he tried to kiss her, told her he wanted her to have his babies and repeatedly proposed retreating to a secret, union-funded apartment where they could be alone.
She realized he would do nothing about the men in the union who were making unwanted advances when he himself was behaving similarly.
“I had to give up the thing I loved more than anything else,” she said, “because of all these men who didn’t care how much they hurt me.”
Ms. Romero Torres’s husband, Henry Torres, a union staff member at the time, said that they had only recently met at the time but that she had shared some of her complaints with him. Two former union workers recalled Ms. Romero Torres’s being frequently summoned to Mr. Chavez’s office, but The Times was unable to independently verify her account of the taunting by her former supervisor, which she said “scared me to death.”
The supervisor denied making any such remarks, calling her account “slanderous” and “balderdash,” and declined to comment further.
Other women have reported similar harassment. Clara Solis, who also worked for the union in the 1970s, said that she and another female worker were offered lodging in a trailer for a month by a union board member during a vegetable strike in Calexico, Calif., in 1979. She said they awoke one night to find he had climbed into bed with them. On another occasion, she said, another union staff member tried to force sex on her, and though she escaped, he warned her to remain silent about it. “He told me: ‘You tell anyone and I’ll kill your parents. I know where you live,’” she said.
There is no evidence that Mr. Chavez explicitly gave a green light to any of the men working for him to mistreat women. But he often dismissed or downplayed accusations that women made against those men. And archival recordings of meetings with U.F.W. executives from the 1970s show Mr. Chavez engaging in freewheeling discussions that often demeaned women with misogynist jokes and insults.
In the recordings, Mr. Chavez repeatedly used slurs against women, including Ms. Huerta, whom he ordered to “shut up” and called “stupid” or a “fucking bitch” when she challenged him. Even as he was engaging in multiple extramarital affairs, he told the board that his wife, Helen, was receiving anonymous calls from women he claimed were lying about having a romantic relationship with him to sabotage the union.
“My marriage is on the rocks right now,” he said. “This is what they do.”
Both he and Ms. Huerta accused some of the women in the union of acting as manipulators, informants or sexual agents intent on disrupting loyalty within the movement.
“They’re lighting them up, they go into bed with them, they’re getting a whole second relationship,” Ms. Huerta said.
Mr. Chavez accused one union nurse, Caitlin McCarthy, of being a dangerous operative and of inventing a rape claim against her former supervisor, Marcos Muñoz. Recordings of a board meeting show Ms. Huerta and others appearing to dismiss the purported rape claim. “She raped Marcos is what happened,” one male board member joked. “It was the other way around.” Laughter can be heard from those in the room, including a brief chuckle from Ms. Huerta, who made it clear she thought that Ms. McCarthy was an infiltrator, not a victim.
Ms. McCarthy said in an interview that she had never made a rape claim against Mr. Muñoz, who died in 2021, though she had faced abusive and sexist treatment while working for him. When Mr. Chavez fired her, accusing her of hiding her true identity, she struggled to understand. Once a year, she wrote a letter to Mr. Chavez, asking the same question: “What did I do wrong?”
Ms. Huerta herself was a constant target of verbal abuse from many of the union’s male leaders, particularly Mr. Chavez. Male union leaders often downplayed, dismissed or took credit for her work, interviews and the board meeting recordings show. Some of them criticized her for being too adamant about “women’s lib.”
In an interview, Ms. Huerta spoke of the difficulty of working within what she described as the U.F.W.’s past “culture of misogyny” and noted numerous instances in which she had acted on sexual harassment complaints and elevated women to leadership positions.
“I have to say that in my own good conscience, from Day 1 when I was in the organization, I always advocated for women,” Ms. Huerta said, adding, “because that’s the way that I was raised. I was raised by a single parent, my mother, who always advocated for women.”
The Legacy of Abuse
Several of the women who said they were abused by men kept their memories to themselves for years. But some refused to stay silent.
“I want to be heard,” Ms. Chavez, who described the attempted rape in 1991, said in an interview. “I still have this rage inside of me, this hurt, and it consumes me.”
In 1994, Ms. Sullivan began writing her memories about the rape in the vineyard in journals. The nightmares and flashbacks of thinking the men were about to kill her remained vivid, two decades later.
She decided to write to her former supervisor, Mr. Martinez, demanding a reckoning.
“I would like to invite you to reflect on the culture of organizing that exists in the U.F.W.,” she wrote in January 1996. “When individuals merge their identities with the single leader’s identity, when we become ‘Chavista,’ when we subordinate individual relationships to the cause of justice, we betray our own human dignity.”
Ms. Sullivan said Mr. Martinez responded immediately, apologizing for how union leaders treated her. (Mr. Martinez declined to comment, as did Ms. Shy.) Ms. Sullivan, in any case, wanted accountability at a higher level. She then wrote to Arturo Rodriguez, who had succeeded Mr. Chavez as the union’s leader, threatening to go public if she did not receive an official response. After the letter, Ms. Sullivan said, Mr. Rodriguez dispatched Ms. Huerta to meet with her at her home. But the meeting was not the healing moment Ms. Sullivan had hoped for.
Ms. Sullivan said the conversation was respectful and Ms. Huerta later wrote to her, in a letter reviewed by The Times, saying that there was concern and sympathy for her among the union leadership. But Ms. Sullivan said she felt that Ms. Huerta had refused to hold the union responsible, telling her that the rape was “just something men do to women.”
After the meeting, Ms. Sullivan sent a follow-up letter to Ms. Huerta.
“I believe that the rape was a form of intimidation used by the grower’s agents to silence me,” she wrote. “The U.F.W. was engaged in a battle with the growers of the Coachella Valley. Rape in the context of battle is a war crime, not ‘just something men do to women.’”
Ms. Huerta said she did not recall meeting with Ms. Sullivan or saying anything dismissive about rape.
But Ms. Huerta said the organization’s male leaders were often uninterested in investigating sexual misconduct or reprimanding men accused of harassment. In the 1980s, Ms. Huerta said, she worked with another woman to gather complaints from women who had faced sexism. She said a report on the findings was given to union executives. “It never saw the light of day,” Ms. Huerta said.
Earlier, in the 1970s, Ms. Huerta heard that a union executive had told a farmworker that the only way she could receive her weekly stipend was by sleeping with him. “I brought it up to the board, to let all the board members know that this guy is refusing to give a woman her stipend because she wouldn’t have sex with him,” Ms. Huerta said. Mr. Chavez stopped the board meeting, pulling the union leader aside to go for a walk with him. But ultimately, she added, the complaint was not taken seriously.
“That was about it — a walk in the park,” she said.
The sexism, she said, was a constant. At some of the male-dominated board meetings, she counted the demeaning and insulting remarks. “Every time they made a sexist comment, I put a little dash on my paper,” she said. “At the end of the meeting, I said: ‘I have an announcement to make. During the course of this meeting, you guys have made 58 sexist comments.’”
Mr. Rodriguez, who became the union chief in 1993, said in a statement that the movement relied heavily on its female organizers and activists and that he had tried to create an “atmosphere of respect.”
“Our movement, like others in the civil rights and labor movements of the time and more broadly in this country, has had painful shortcomings,” he added. “The culture of the organization evolved over time. Today the U.F.W. and many of its movement allies are led by a diverse group of women, many of whom I had the privilege to work with.”
Ms. Romero Torres, now 66 and retired, said she was a lifetime away from being the 17-year-old union worker who was threatened and harassed.
She’d spent decades trying to behave in a way that would avoid unwanted attention and groping. Now, she said, she wants women to have the ability to be friendly and joyous without having men view those traits as an invitation. She envisions a simple gathering where the women from the movement can just hug and heal.
“It would be so lovely if we could all get together somewhere,” she said. “We don’t even need to talk about it.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.
The post In Cesar Chavez’s Labor Union, Women Often Worked in Fear appeared first on New York Times.
