An Undemocratic Union Was Key to César Chávez’s Sexual Abuse
The horrifying revelations of César Chávez’s widespread sexual abuse of young women and girls were in part rooted in the culture of unquestioning loyalty and top-down dictation that Chávez established in the United Farm Workers.
There were two reasons that no one in the United Farm Workers sought the truth about the long-standing rumors of César Chávez’s sexual abuse: he was an authentic hero in the union, and everybody in his organization owed their job to him. (Janet Fries / Getty Images)
In 2011 Frank Bardacke published an eight-hundred-page history of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union: Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. It opened many eyes to the reasons the UFW became a shadow of its former self.
Bardacke starts the book with an epigraph, a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “O what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down . . . ”
Bardacke was a farmworker in the fields of the Salinas Valley for six seasons in the 1970s. When he decided to write his book years later, he went back to his carpool coworkers, finding them still at work in the fields. In 1994, the union had been thoroughly defeated for nearly ten years — but his old friends were afraid even to mention its name where the foreman might hear.
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