Revelations about Cesar Chavez are part of an all-too-common pattern.

Dolores Huerta changed the world for the better, and she continues to leverage her power and authority – earned through hard work and persistence – to continue to try to change the world for the better. As a cofounder of the United Farm Workers in 1966 and creator of the rallying cry “Sí, se puede,” her inspiration is still part of chants among millions of people today.

Huerta has never rested on her laurels, though. When she left the UFW, she received $100,000 from the Puffin Foundation, which she used to launch the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which champions a range of progressive causes.

She has stayed involved in various political projects including in Monterey County, where she became a significant face promoting Measure Z, a voter-approved ban in 2016 on new oil wells and fracking. She spoke at CSU Monterey Bay in 2012 for International Women’s Day, where she spoke directly about women’s bodily autonomy. “I’m a Catholic. I have 11 children,” she said. “But I believe in a woman’s right to choose. Women will never be free unless they have a right to own their own bodies.”

Huerta is right. And that is part of why it is so devastating to learn, thanks to dogged reporting by the New York Times, that Huerta is a survivor of sexual assault and her autonomy over her own body was denied. The perpetrator was her colleague in leading the UFW, Cesar Chavez. As the Times revealed , Chavez groomed and sexually abused girls working in the movement, in addition to raping his co-leader.

Huerta declined to be interviewed for this story, and my heart aches for her. That she endured this, and that she protected Chavez because she saw what was at stake: an entire movement empowering people who needed leaders to help them find their power.

Since the Times published its reporting on March 18, a chorus of leaders has risen up to remind us the movement is much bigger than one man. On March 23, the California State Assembly voted 70-0 to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day, and this Tuesday, March 31, that is who we were intended to celebrate anyway: The workers who found their voice so generations after them would have a voice and institutional protections.

“The farmworker movement was never about one man.”

“The farmworker movement was never about one man,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, told the Assembly in support of the bill. “It was built by thousands – tens of thousands – of workers. People like my grandfather. People who labored in the fields. People who organized, who sacrificed, who stood up when it was hard.

“Their legacy is not defined by one individual.”

It is a problem of lionizing leaders that we tend to prefer sanitized versions of their stories, pure heroes rather than flawed people. Salinas officials have already started talking about renaming many civic spaces that were named in honor of Chavez.

I have become so accustomed to stories about men in power preying upon women and girls that when I read the revelations about Chavez, I was disturbed and heartbroken, but I was not surprised. It is a pattern that has repeated again and again, most recently with the notorious unraveling of the story about financial mogul Jeffrey Epstein’s many victims.

Chavez was a social justice movement leader, involved in a virtuous cause, but that turns out not to exempt him from exploiting his power to abuse people close to him. It is abhorrent, but as Rivas said – it does not diminish the extraordinary achievements of the Chicano movement, the farmworker rights movement, the interconnectedness of so many causes that Huerta continues to define. That she (and other survivors) were unfairly thrust into the role of crime victims – and are now being asked to shoulder the responsibility of speaking for people who suffered quietly for years – is yet another injustice.

We must continue to expect better from all humans and all men and all leaders. And we should not be surprised when we put them on pedestals and then they fall from those pedestals – and when they do, we must remember every movement depends on more than its leaders.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com or follow her at bsky.app/profile/sarahayleyrubin.bsky.social.