Female Farm Workers Navigate Abuse Fight After Chavez Allegations Surface

Nearly 20 years after launching campaigns against sexual violence in agriculture, women's rights advocates are processing recent allegations that labor icon César Chavez sexually abused activist Dolores Huerta. Despite the shocking claims, advocates say the women-led movement against farmworker sexual abuse has grown stronger and more independent since Chavez's death in 1993.

Nearly twenty years have passed since labor rights pioneer Dolores Huerta stood alongside Mónica Ramírez at a Chicago gathering to support the Bandana Project, Ramírez’s initiative designed to spotlight sexual violence targeting female agricultural workers.

During that event, Huerta emphasized the importance of teaching women farmworkers about their legal protections and encouraging them to report sexual exploitation – a problem that remains both rampant and underreported in agricultural communities. Attendees had no idea that Huerta herself had experienced sexual abuse from César Chavez, the legendary figure who established what is now called the United Farm Workers alongside Huerta in 1962.

The accusations against Chavez from Huerta and additional women and girls demonstrate that the atmosphere of fear and control that allows sexual abuse to flourish in farm fields had also permeated the highest levels of the male-dominated labor organization that championed farmworker protections.

However, advocates such as Ramírez believe that Huerta’s decision to come forward – along with other women who first shared their stories with the New York Times – demonstrates significant progress since Chavez’s era. During the thirty years following Chavez’s death in 1993, grassroots organizations headed by female farmworkers have expanded, demanding federal and state probes into agricultural sexual abuse and legislation requiring sexual harassment education, while also securing promises from growers and food purchasers to implement women-focused policies.

For Ramírez, the alleged abuse by Chavez represents a betrayal since she and fellow advocates respected him and viewed him as the inspiration behind the movement that energized their own advocacy work. However, his damaged reputation cannot diminish the progress that women farmworkers and their supporters have achieved independently.

“It feels a little bit bewildering because so many of us have grown up looking up to César Chavez,” said Ramírez, founder and president of the advocacy group Justice for Migrant Women whose own parents were migrant farmworkers in Ohio. “But we have to remind each other that this is a long-standing movement that is made of many, many people, including women leaders.”

Approximately 25% of the nation’s more than one million hired agricultural workers are women, based on government data, though population estimates for farm workers differ. Determining the extent of sexual harassment and abuse proves challenging since incidents frequently go unreported, but field research by Human Rights Watch, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the University of California-Santa Cruz found that roughly 80% or more of female crop workers experienced some type of sexual harassment.

A turning point in raising awareness occurred in 1999 when the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal body responsible for enforcing workplace anti-discrimination laws, secured a $1.85 million settlement against a major U.S. lettuce producer on behalf of a California worker who faced sexual advances from supervisors and termination after filing complaints.

This case resulted from years of outreach by EEOC investigator Bill Tamayo to farmworker labor organizations, including Líderes Campesinas, a women-directed group that had been organizing for years. Women described sexual abuse so common that they frequently referenced “fields of panties” due to what they endured to obtain and maintain employment.

Tamayo, who shared his experiences in the 2013 PBS documentary “Rape in the Fields” that helped spotlight the problem, explained that Líderes Campesinas and other community groups became the EEOC’s “eyes and ears” in efforts to inform workers about their rights and submit complaints. Subsequently, the EEOC has obtained millions more in compensation for farmworkers who reported sexual harassment or abuse.

Líderes Campesinas, which emerged from a Coachella Valley organization that previously advocated for naming a local elementary school after Chavez, stated its members are “heartbroken” for abuse survivors but emphasized that “the pursuit of social justice never was, nor ever will be attributed to one individual.”

Determining how much sexual violence against female farmworkers has decreased due to government enforcement and expanding outreach and educational initiatives remains difficult. Fear, field isolation, language obstacles, and immigration status continue making farmworkers especially susceptible to exploitation. More than 40% of agricultural workers lacked work authorization between 2020 and 2022, according to government estimates, and many hold H2-A visas connected to their jobs, heightening their fear of dismissal and deportation if they speak up.

Darlene Tenes, executive director of Farmworker Caravan, a California advocacy organization, reported that during meetings, most women still describe being sexual abuse victims, and that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement forced them to cancel education conferences and attempt direct community visits to quietly provide resources.

Nevertheless, in areas where the strongest legal protections and support programs exist, female farmworkers report improvements have begun.

Nelly Rodriguez described sexual abuse as “bread and butter” during her field work decades ago, but she didn’t fully comprehend her rights until joining the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which operates the Fair Food Program, a partnership with major produce purchasers including Walmart and McDonald’s that commit to sourcing food from growers who enter legally binding agreements to follow a conduct code.

This conduct code includes sexual harassment training and systems for investigating complaints and holding perpetrators responsible. It also mandates installing portable restrooms near fields – a significant change for women who were often forced to accept rides from managers to distant bathrooms and assaulted during transit, Rodriguez explained.

For many female advocates, the most significant change has been breaking the silence in farmworker communities about discussing sexual abuse.

Maria Ines Catalan, who worked packing broccoli, cauliflower and lettuce in Monterey, California from 1988 to 1994, described it as a period of substantial improvements for farmworkers who gained regulatory guarantees including water and bathroom breaks. However, nothing addressed the sexual abuse Catalan said was routine and that she personally experienced, recalling how foremen in packing facilities would pass by women in confined spaces, touch them and claim it was accidental.

“You had to stay quiet,” she said.

That has changed.

“That is precisely what nonprofit organizations are currently doing: providing information, making farmworkers aware of their rights, and offering referrals — letting them know that they can now speak out,” Catalan said.

In her statement revealing that Chavez raped her in the 1960s, Huerta, now 96 years old, explained she maintained her secret for so long because she feared that “exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement” but today, she recognizes that she is a “survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University, said the accusations against Chavez remind us that the labor movement “is not immune” to power abuses and for her, it was particularly painful that Huerta “had to keep that secret for that long so that she could keep her respectability within the movement.”

“You cannot expect the victim to be the one that holds the person accountable, because it takes a lot of personal courage,” Campos-Medina said. “I can imagine when she was trying to co-create this union with him, how much it would have cost her to speak up.”

When Ramírez began her legal advocacy work in Florida in 2003, she said both men and women in the movement dismissed sexual abuse allegations as “gossip” or argued that with limited resources, they needed to focus on larger issues affecting most workers.

However, by the time the #MeToo movement emerged globally in 2017, farmworker women had been speaking out for years, though with much less attention. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national organization that Ramírez co-led then, wrote an open solidarity letter with Hollywood women that became viral and further brought farmworker women’s struggles into national focus.

The “Dear Sisters” letter, as it’s called, and the ongoing efforts by women-led farmworker groups, were key factors behind the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal assistance to low-income women who are sexual harassment and abuse victims, said Jennifer Mondino, the fund’s director, operated by the National Women’s Law Center.

Mily Treviño-Sauceda, a former farmworker and executive director of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, expressed anger upon hearing the allegations against Chavez. It reminded her of her own sexual harassment experiences and the numerous stories she’s heard from other women during three decades working on this issue and the backlash she and other advocates have faced.

“We’ve been accused of so many different things and that has not stopped us,” she said.

Ramírez believes the #MeToo movement helped provide victims, including Huerta, with the vocabulary to discuss abuse.

“Do I think it’s still a widespread problem? Yes. Do I think that there are many survivors who do not feel like they can come forward? Yes,” she said. “But farmworker women have exerted their power and shown their leadership on this issue, and I don’t want that to get lost.”