The Left’s Cancellation of Cesar Chavez Looks Bad Either Way

Though the power of the #MeToo movement peaked long ago, the Left’s cancellation machine kicked into gear this past week after a hiatus.

After a New York Times article claimed that Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993 at the age of 66, raped and sexually abused women and girls as young as 12 in the 1960s and 1970s, including his longtime collaborator Dolores Huerta, the Left lost no time in immediately covering up or taking down statues, erasing the Hispanic labor leader’s name from monuments and holidays, and calling for schools and streets honoring him to be renamed.

This display of power to erase a figure from the liberal-left pantheon of civil rights might initially seem like cause for gloating among conservatives, but it shouldn’t be. Whether Chavez was innocent or guilty, this instantaneous cancellation should raise our distrust for those on the Left who claim to represent “social justice.”

Until last week, Chavez was still a civil rights icon in good standing. Upon entering the Oval Office in 2021, Joe Biden immediately took down a bust of Winston Churchill and replaced it with one of Chavez.

Though the removal of Churchill was an offensive and stupid action that was a repeat of Barack Obama’s move, recognizing Chavez was not since the U.S. had already honored Chavez in a variety of ways. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1994, his birthday is celebrated as a state holiday in several states, and even the federal calendar commemorates Cesar Chavez Day (though you likely have to work). Chavez’s burial place in Keene, California, is a national monument.

Born in Arizona in 1927, Chavez was himself a laborer and U.S. Navy veteran before beginning his career as a labor advocate in California, first with the Mexican-American civil rights group called Community Service Organization (CSO). After a few years, Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). The NFWA published a paper, ran a credit union, and provided insurance. Chavez’s organization later merged with another labor organization and became the United Farm Workers (UFW).

The peak of Chavez’s labor influence was in the 1960s and early 1970s when he organized boycotts of grapes and strikes among migrant farm workers. He later organized a commune and became more involved with real estate investments, but he remained a living symbol of organized labor, Mexican-Americans, and Spanish-speaking Americans more broadly long after his death.

Now, no more.

There is no doubt that, if the accusations made against Chavez are true, he was yet another left-wing monster who advocated publicly for (his understanding of) social justice while privately practicing vicious injustice. But this sudden and immediate dumping of a long-dead figure raises many questions.

If Chavez’s accusers are making up these accusations, it seems odd that a single newspaper article should be able to take him down so easily. Why would the entire Left simply agree to take claims about five-decade-old criminal sexual behavior at face value?

The New York Times article includes a great deal of posthumous testimony against him and some for him, but no real contemporaneous hard evidence of Chavez’s misdeeds. Concerning the 96-year-old Ms. Huerta’s claims, the article concedes, “Nothing has emerged publicly to back up the claims made by Ms. Huerta,” adding that even she “said she had told no one, not even her children or closest friends, until just a few weeks ago.”

The one piece of solid evidence is from a woman who claims to have been fondled by Chavez at age 12 and wrote a letter to him the next year. “I’m really glad I got to see you & spend time with you, well not like that, but just to know I was near you was enough,” she wrote in January 1974, adding, “I think of you all of the time. Do you think of me?” What the Times calls here the young woman’s “swooning devotion” in this ambiguous couple of lines isn’t exactly a smoking gun.

Chavez was known for his marital infidelities, but nothing had been heard about his misbehavior with children until about ten years ago when the woman who wrote the letter in question accused him in a private Facebook group.

Is this enough to know that the accusations are true? How are these accusations enough to act so certainly? Is Chavez being sacrificed for some other reason than truth?

The possibility of accepting false accusations is bad enough, but what if Chavez’s accusers are telling the truth? If so, this implies that the UFW and the Left likely knowingly tolerated a rapist and child molester as their leader and symbol, not merely during his life but for more than three decades after, protecting his reputation even during the height of the #MeToo movement nearly a decade ago. And why?

The skeptical observer might suspect that, whatever the truth, the shock campaign against his reputation is really about something else. Why now?

One possibility is because, as the Los Angeles Times reports, “United Farm Workers could potentially be liable for significant payouts due to landmark laws recently passed in California that give victims of older sex abuse cases a new window to come forward.” From this admittedly cynical perspective, the Left has an opportunity to claim moral high ground and pillage an older institution for personal gain.

Add to that Chavez’s politically incorrect legacy by today’s standards. Whatever the reputation on the Left Chavez had in his time, the contemporary Left wants to get rid of a labor hero who was hostile to illegal aliens who were used as strikebreakers during UFW-led strikes. Today’s Left doesn’t tolerate any anti-illegal-alien thought or sentiment. Chavez was known for his “Illegals Campaign” (run with Dolores Huerta) in the 1970s. His UFW members turned in illegal aliens to authorities and, according to some accounts, attacked them physically. 

A 2014 review of a movie about the man complained that the film didn’t really reveal the truth about him, a truth displayed in Miriam Pawel’s biography that depicted him “sounding at times like a typical nativist bigot and acting like a right-wing militia member.”

If Chavez wasn’t guilty of the crimes alleged against him, the likelihood that his cancellation is because of money and/or politics appears high. It signals that the Left remains willing to slander the dead who stand in the way of their personal lust for power and wealth.

If Chavez was the monster his accusers claim him to be, the fact that Americans are just now finding out about it confirms again that the Left was willing to ignore or even protect grave injustices for one of their soldiers as long as he was politically useful – again for the end goal of acquiring more power and money.

Either way, this episode reminds Americans that the Left, who constantly claim the moral high ground, are not to be trusted as judges.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative.