Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years
An investigation by The New York Times found extensive evidence that the United Farm Workers co-founder groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the movement. By Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes
describes abuse allegations
The reporters interviewed several women who told their stories for the first time, as well as more than 60 other people, including Cesar Chavez’s top aides and relatives. The reporters also reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs and other material. March 19, 2026
....Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.
The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.
The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, immediately prompted organizations with ties to him to try to distance themselves. The U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations....
The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.
Many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.
The findings are based on interviews with more than 60 people, including his top aides at the time, his relatives and former members of the U.F.W., which he co-founded with Ms. Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails and photographs, as well as hours of audio recordings from U.F.W. board meetings.
The accounts of abuse from Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas were independently verified through interviews with those they confided in decades ago and in more recent years. Elements of their stories were also corroborated in documents, emails, itineraries and other writings from union organizers, supporters of Mr. Chavez and historians.
The Times spoke at length with Ms. Huerta, the renowned Latina activist who helped run the farmworkers’ union with Mr. Chavez and coined the social-justice rallying cry, “SÃ, se puede,” loosely translated as “Yes, we can.” She said she has held on to a dark secret for nearly 60 years.
One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California....
A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them. Instead, many of the women say they were discouraged from speaking out in order to preserve Mr. Chavez’s public image.
Internal emails dating back over a decade show union members discussing Ms. Murguia’s claims of abuse and the impact it had on her life. One of Ms. Murguia’s relatives confronted Mr. Chavez while he was still alive, in the 1980s. According to the relative, Mr. Chavez offered no defense and responded only by clearing his throat....
Nothing has emerged publicly to back up the claims made by Ms. Huerta. Her description of assault could not be independently verified because she said she had told no one, not even her children or closest friends, until just a few weeks ago.
But the paper trail of some of Mr. Chavez’s misconduct involving young girls can be found in the very archives built to preserve his legacy.
In one handwritten letter on girlish stationery imprinted with roses, Ms. Rojas wrote to Mr. Chavez in January 1974 at the age of 13, shifting between childlike school updates and swooning devotion. She said she wrote the letter more than a year after he first kissed and fondled her in his office in 1972, when she was a 12-year-old seventh-grader. “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, adding, “I think of you all of the time. Do you think of me?”
The letter is among thousands of documents and other materials in the Walter P. Reuther Library archives at Wayne State University in Detroit....
Elements of Mr. Chavez’s extramarital affairs with adult women were chronicled in at least two biographies, Matt Garcia’s “From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement,” published in 2012, and Miriam Pawel’s “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography,” published in 2014.
But neither raised issues of abuse of girls. While Mr. Chavez had eight children with his wife, Helen Chavez, the Times investigation showed that he also fathered at least four children with three other women. Two of these children and other family members were interviewed and confirmed the relationship. Additionally, 23andMe match results were reviewed for the four children, and they confirmed Mr. Chavez’s biological ties in each case....
Ms. Murguia said she was 13 when Mr. Chavez began inviting her into his office. He had an obsession with alternative healing therapies, and would sometimes put her on his desk and demonstrate the “pressure points” that could relieve stress and pain, she said. That eventually led to kissing, and then fondling. And then more.
“When I was on the yoga mat is when he would try to have sex,” Ms. Murguia said. Ms. Murguia said she wasn’t attracted to Mr. Chavez, and was initially surprised by his touches, but said she felt chosen. “Part of it was, why would someone like that like someone like me?” She said Mr. Chavez told her not to tell anyone because other girls and women would be jealous of their special bond.
He took her on tour with him, having her travel in his car and stand with him at events and marches. She appears next to him in several photographs — among them one of the most iconic images from the U.F.W.’s famous 1,000-Mile March in the summer of 1975, and an earlier shot alongside the folk singer Joan Baez.
But it was also during that time, two years after he first touched Ms. Murguia in his office, that things changed. By now age 15, she had accompanied Mr. Chavez on a trip to Los Angeles. At a fund-raiser’s home in Bel Air, she walked into the kitchen and found him kissing a woman. She left quickly. “I was disgusted,” she said. On the way back to La Paz, she rode with the guards and the dogs, refusing to share a car with him....
Several people corroborated her story. One family member said she learned of the abuse in the early 1980s, after Ms. Murguia told her about it. Another person said Ms. Murguia disclosed the abuse to him in 1989. One of the men present in the room when Ms. Murguia was kicked out of La Paz refused to comment. Another said he didn’t remember that time in his life.
For a long time, she felt she would be blamed for what had happened. That was how it worked back then, she said — girls were abused by family members, by people close to the family, and it was always kept quiet. And if anyone found out, she said, the question was never about the man. “It was always: ‘Well, what did you do? See what you did.’” There was one person at La Paz she knew she could share her story with, and that was Ms. Rojas....
One night, Ms. Rojas recalled, Mr. Chavez told her he was sending her home for a week. She was sad and confused, and thought she had done something wrong.
She was waiting at the bus station when Mr. Chavez drove up with one of his bodyguards. He invited her into the car, and they drove to a motel on Highway 99.
In the motel room he shared with her, she said, he had intercourse with her for the first time — rape, under California law. She was a virgin, and remembers that it hurt, and she was bleeding. But she also remembers the gun Mr. Chavez had placed on the night stand next to the bed. She couldn’t help but look at it every time she turned her head, and it scared her, she said. “I said, ‘What’s that for?’” Ms. Rojas said. “Don’t worry about it,” she said he told her. He said because of the death threats he received, he and his security team wanted to make sure they were safe.
Several people and documents corroborated the accusations made by Ms. Rojas, including a relative who said Ms. Rojas first told her in the late 1990s that Mr. Chavez had abused her....
Yet many of those who look back on those years at La Paz also say that Mr. Chavez was a man who could be nurturing one moment, only to use that same emotional intimacy to manipulate and abuse the next. Ms. Huerta said he abused her not only physically but emotionally.
Union records document an argument at La Paz between the two of them over missing financial receipts during a board meeting in 1979. Ms. Huerta demanded respect and pushed back against his suggestions that she had stolen money. Mr. Chavez responded by shouting at her with curses and insults, repeatedly calling her a stupid bitch, according to the audio recordings of board meetings The Times listened to....
