Who Was Cesar Chavez—and Who Will He Become?https://victorhanson.com/who-was-cesar-chavez-and-who-will-he-become/Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, eventually became the symbolic leader of the entire Mexican American community of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, he was eventually enshrined in the pantheon of modern leftist activists and civil rights leaders alongside Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Betty Friedan. His Chavez Foundation today emphasizes Chavez’s saintlike status as “a genuinely religious and spiritual figure.” His Tehachapi redoubt remains a national monument.
In public, Chavez stressed nonstop his common-man roots, his strong Catholicism, and his devotion to wife and family, and thereby turned the struggle to provide a livable wage and humane working conditions for farm workers into a broader civil rights movement—led by the Christlike martyr Cesar Chavez himself. He carefully constructed an image of the long-suffering moralist, at odds with greedy capitalist “growers,” whom Chavez often publicly said he loathed.
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In 1971, as a bumbling freshman farm kid entering UC Santa Cruz, I can remember being confronted my first day on campus by screaming students outside my dorm door for bringing to my new room a tiny box of grapes I picked on our small 120-acre farm.
Trying to explain to furious (mostly) wealthy white kids from Los Angeles that family raisin farming had little to do with the labor fireworks over table-grape production in Delano was a waste of time. ...
Yet even then, there were always elements of the mythical Chavez that did not quite ring true. The supposedly nonviolent Chavez sent his toughs down to the southern border to form a “wet line” to stop and sometimes assault illegal aliens—in a way that would make ICE today look tame. ...
Rumors in small farming towns swirled—and were tossed off as “grower” lies—that he was a serial adulterer with a string of female liaisons, an image at odds with his carefully cultivated shy and introspective persona.
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His top aide, the now-95-year-old but once fiery Dolores Huerta, has just revealed she was raped in a grape field by her boss over a half-century ago. And she was coerced into sex on another occasion, along with being sexually and emotionally abused by Chavez. Two of her own children were fathered by Chavez—a secret kept for over sixty years.
Yet the most disturbing revelations were that Chavez sexually molested and groomed at least two small girls, both reportedly during their preteen and underage teenage years. Some of his victims are now in their sixties. What was once whispered is now a disturbing confirmation of the dark side of the so-called humanist Chavez and the trauma he inflicted on the most innocent and vulnerable.
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So the embarrassed Left has gone into hyperdrive to separate from its fallen hero, rather than seeking to defend him. Why?
The disclosures did not come from far-right conspiracy theorists. The charges arose from among his closest and most intimate union associates, who were no longer willing to remain silent and perpetuate the decades-long myth. And their stories surfaced initially only from the investigative reporting of the left-wing New York Times.
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So, the Left is on the horns of a dilemma. It was one thing to erase a liberal jurist like Earl Warren or a progressive president like Woodrow Wilson, given that they were white guys whose alleged sins came from their “privilege” as white males.
But what does the Left do in these cases of intersectional conflicts of interest, when a noble male of color is accused of violating noble women of color, and there is not a white male oppressor to be found amid this sordid mess?
IMO, this should not be an, "Oh crap! What do we do now?!" moment. Acknowledging that an influential person turned out to have clay feet, legs, and genitalia is only complicated or difficult if you've made that person some sort of pedestaled idol. Libs and Progs have done that, though they have plenty of experience in circumlocution about idols like JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., and Teddy-the-Snorkel.
