My experience in the farmworker movement helps me understand Dolores’ silence

The labor movement and other movement spaces have shaped who I am today. It is in these spaces where I have learned that collectively we are unstoppable. Even when I was afraid I did scary things in the movement. I organized farm workers in the orange fields of the Central Valley, was sprayed with pesticides while pregnant and still woke up the next day and went back out to organize. It is where I shut down the Los Angeles airport in support of hotel worker rights; it’s where I got arrested for the first time; it’s where I locked myself to other human beings with PVC pipes to hinder police from removing us from an intersection and reopening an immigrant detention center. That day, when I locked myself to other human beings, that was Mother’s Day 2010, I spent that night in jail, away from my kids. That was a sacrifice I chose to make; I made that sacrifice for immigrant mamas. It was beautiful.

The movement is beautiful, it is made up of brothers and sisters in the struggle that are willing to sacrifice time away from their families, their freedom, sometimes even their lives for the liberation of others, for our collective liberation.

Those are sacrifices we make, willingly. Choices we make because we believe in what we are fighting for.

It is what movements, what revolutions are made of.

But what happens when sacrifice becomes exploitation, when it becomes rooted in the very power dynamics we are seeking to change?

As I read of the sexual violence that Dolores Huerta, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas experienced at the hands of Cesar Chavez and the secret they kept for decades, my heart breaks open. I didn’t have to read more to understand why they kept the secret, I knew it in my heart. They were afraid that speaking of it would harm the movement and the fight for farmworker rights. These three women, my sisters in the farm worker struggle, made a sacrifice, but it was the kind of sacrifice they should have never had to make.

I joined the United Farm Workers, or UFW, as a young 19-year-old organizer in 1993, just a couple of months after Cesar Chavez died. Sacrifice was quickly ingrained in me as a young organizer in the farm worker struggle. As soon as I walked in the door I was taught that nothing was more important than “La Causa.” In some ways it was beautiful. I lived a life of voluntary poverty, earning close to nothing while dedicating my life to a cause I deeply believed in while having my basic needs met, and working close to some of the best organizers in the movement, including Dolores Huerta herself.

I quickly learned that there was also a culture of acquiescence and these two things together, sacrifice and acquiescence, lead to a culture in which sexual harassment and abuse were not taken seriously.

Individual harms were seen as less important than the movement itself.

Remember that pesticide spraying incident I mentioned earlier? A dozen or so farm workers and I were sprayed with pesticides that day. Two of us were pregnant. We would sign away our rights to sue for harm in exchange for a union contract. I had no real way of knowing if the pesticides would harm my unborn child, or me over the long term. But we were taught, the movement came above all else.

If sexual abuse got in the way, or threatened campaigns or leadership, as was the case for Dolores, Ana and Debra, silence became the only option. No matter the harm to the three women.

The UFW, like much of the labor movement even into the 90s, was dominated by men, and organizing meetings were run by men. I was recently sent a photo of an organizing meeting I was a part of in Delano — in the photo everyone in the room was male except me.

Most women were relegated to administrative positions, rarely in roles with real power over organizing. I was organizing adjacent — an assistant to one of the members of UFW’s executive leadership.

Even so, being organizing adjacent was enough for me. The UFW was the first place I learned to build collective power. I won my first organizing campaign there, at Bear Creek Roses, in a landmark campaign to organize over 1,500 farm workers. I helped to organize the 1994 Pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento. I won my first contract campaign at Airdrome Orchards. I wouldn’t trade these experiences there for the world.

But in the early 1990s, the UFW was still a difficult place for women. It was even more so for women who experienced sexual abuse within its ranks. Speaking up — naming what had been done to you — was often treated as inconsequential and dismissed. If the abuse felt unsurvivable, speaking up and being ignored made it even more so.

I learned I could survive both rape and speaking up when I survived rape in college, and I pursued filing charges. I had gone to the police and the district attorney looking for justice. I endured a sexual assault forensic exam at the hospital, and two grueling interviews by the DA as part of their “investigation” only to be told they wouldn’t be bringing charges against the “nice [white] boy” who had raped me. It broke me, but I survived. 

In my time in the UFW, I was sexually abused twice. Each time I spoke up and did not stay silent. Acquiescence did not come easy to me, and in my case speaking up did not challenge the union leadership. So although it was still hard, it did not feel impossible.

First, a fellow organizer, after weeks of rejecting his sexual advances at the UFW boycott house in LA, pulled me onto his lap and refused to let me go while he enjoyed himself. I don’t need to say more. Once again, I worked up the courage to tell someone. This time I told the wife of a senior UFW leader hoping she would help me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to do, but I wanted her to do something because I felt violated and unsafe. But she merely dismissed his actions as “just having fun.” Memories of the DA came flooding back and silence engulfed me. Eventually, he had a “talking to” and I didn’t pursue it further. I kept my disappointment to myself, and even if I was uncomfortable and afraid around my assailant, I continued to work as if nothing had happened. That was the sacrifice I was willing to make.

I was later transferred to La Paz, the historic headquarters of the UFW, and then Delano. I lived in Agbayani Village on 40 Acres, a retirement village for farm worker men owned by the UFW, where organizers were sometimes also housed as we organized in the fields of the Central Valley. I made friends with some of the retired farmworkers who lived there. One night as I talked to one of the men he pushed me against a wall and violently stuck his tongue in my mouth, refusing to let me break free. I finally did break free and ran back to my room. I told my then husband, and with his encouragement I found it within me to tell a leader of the union. The leader of the union had a talk with the man and once again left me to deal with the aftermath of my disappointment and fear until we moved again.

I do not want to diminish what it took to survive these assaults and to speak up. As many survivors have before me and many will after me, I portrayed myself as strong and capable to make it through the days, months and years that followed each act of abuse, and each time my call for help went unheard. I am not ready to speak publicly about the toll this took on me, suffice it to say that at times it did feel unsurvivable. But here I am. I have done the work and still do it every day. For me, speaking the truth is part of that work.

I’ve never spoken of these things until now. Until Dolores, Ana and Debra broke their silence and gave us all the power to speak.

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I’ve only spoken of La Union, La Causa, the farmworkers, the UFW, as the place where I learned to organize, lived amongst the hills of La Paz, the place of the beginning of my greatest love story — where I met my now husband 30 years ago. I’ve spoken of El Movimiento, where my daughter got her name, where her birth was announced on Radio Campesina in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.

I speak of it now in all its truths, good and bad, because unions and movements have asked us to give everything to the fight, and also asked some of us to hold what was done to us deep within — to stay quiet, to protect the movement, even when the harm was coming from inside it.

I speak of it now for the women who aren’t yet ready to speak, who were told that their sacrifice was the price of liberation.

Movements may require sacrifice, but the sacrifices liberation asks us to make should be made in the sunlight, not in the darkness of silence.

It is these sacrifices that revolutions are made of.

If movements are to demand sacrifice, they must also demand self-reflection and accountability. That is what this moment requires of us. We cannot simply pin our defects on one man — as deserving as he may be — but must shine a light into every corner of our movements and choose a path forward that does better. No one who experiences sexual violence should ever be silenced again. And we must never again allow any man — powerful or not — to escape accountability for sexual abuse.