"Cesar's actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people," Dolores Huerta wrote in her statement. "We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever."
Noted labor rights and environmental advocate Dolores Huerta has been speaking out this week about her own experiences in the wake of allegations that fellow activist Cesar Chavez sexually abused multiple women and girls decades ago. Her account could be seen to highlight the potential for gender-based violence inside the desperate and commingled struggles for agricultural worker protections, environmental justice, and community survival.
Huerta, who in California in the 1960s co-founded what would become the United Farm Workers labor union along with Chavez and Gilbert Padilla, said in a multiyear investigation conducted by the New York Times and published on March 18 that Chavez assaulted her more than once, which resulted in the births of two children who were raised by other families. The Times reported allegations from others, including that Chavez abused Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, who said they were 13 and 12, respectively, at the time the abuse began.
Chavez died in 1993 at the age of 66. Huerta, who will turn 96 next month, said in a statement published on Medium the same day that the Times released its article that she kept this secret for 60 years "because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for." She reiterated the sentiment in an interview with ABC News, noting that the other women now speaking out motivated her to do the same.
The work of Huerta, Chavez, Padilla, and others to draw attention to the experiences of farm laborers, and Latino immigrants in particular, helped increase wages, improve working conditions, and build political power. Huerta's recent accounts, meanwhile, may help to highlight still-lacking protections against gender-based violence in farmworker and environmental advocacy spaces.
When agricultural workers face crop production struggles exacerbated by rising temperatures and extreme weather, the resulting economic stresses and food insecurity can disproportionately impact already marginalized women and girls. And those facing threats from immigration enforcement may feel even more hesitant to speak out about unsafe conditions due to fear of retribution.
Monica Ramirez, founder of Justice for Migrant Women, told The 19th that communities will be carefully observing how farmworker rights leaders respond to the recent allegations. "Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts?" the outlet posed. "The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people."
The risks of gender-based violence can increase in these contexts and in contexts where women are fighting institutional power to defeat environmental degradation. The move in the Belém Gender Action Plan, ratified in late 2025 at COP30, to commit to establishing protections for women environmental defenders may be a step in the right direction.
With respect to addressing gender-based violence, international organizations like Cord have already identified a need to address the "significant gap in legal assistance for women working in [natural resources management]." This month, Michelle Higelin, the Executive Director of ActionAid Australia, wrote in a piece for Women's Agenda that in Indonesia she recently saw women "taking steps to adapt to climate change" that included "building a network of paralegals who are intervening in cases of violence against women and children."
By having designated 2026 as the International Year of the Woman Farmer, the Food and Agriculture Organization — a U.N. agency — is also "[calling] for collective action and increased investments to close gender gaps, strengthen women’s livelihoods, and promote their leadership across agrifood value chains" this year.
Following the New York Times report, the UFW condemned the alleged abuse and canceled all the events the organization had planned to celebrate Cesar Chavez Day at the end of March. According to the Associated Press, some statues of Chavez have been covered over and a number of "institutions and local governments overseeing sites bearing Chavez's name have already started the process of erasing it."
Meanwhile, when ABC told Huerta in their interview that some have called for such streets and schools to be renamed for her, she reportedly told the outlet that instead these locations should be renamed for the "other real heroes" of the civil rights and farmworkers rights movements
"Cesar's actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people," Huerta wrote in her statement. "We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever."
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