Thirty-six schools in California. A national monument in Keene. A bronze bust in Biden’s Oval Office. Streets in Milwaukee, avenues in Los Angeles, murals in Toledo. A state holiday. A federal day of observance. March 31 — César Chavez Day — is nine days away, and almost no one plans to celebrate it.

The infrastructure of reverence built around Chavez over three decades is now the measure of what must be dismantled. A yearslong New York Times investigation, published on March 18, accused the labour leader of sexually abusing two girls — one 13, the other 15 — during the 1970s, when he was president of the United Farm Workers. Both were daughters of organisers within the movement. And Dolores Huerta, the 95-year-old activist who co-founded the UFW alongside Chavez in 1962, told the newspaper he raped her in 1966.

Sixty Years of Silence

Huerta’s statement, released the same day, is devastating in its plainness. “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for,” she wrote.

She described two encounters. The first: “I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement.” The second: “I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.” Both resulted in pregnancies she kept secret, arranging for the children to be raised by other families. Her own children did not learn the full truth until weeks before the story broke, according to her statement.

The Times spoke with more than 60 people and reviewed documents and other materials bolstering the accusers’ stories, according to NPR’s account. NBC News reported that the newspaper also combed union records, confidential emails, photographs and recordings of UFW board meetings. The newspaper reported that one of the two younger accusers said Chavez raped her in a motel room in 1975, when she was 15 and he was 47. The other said the abuse began in his office at La Paz, the union’s headquarters, when she was 13.

Chavez died in 1993. Some former associates, including longtime bodyguards, rejected the allegations, according to the Times.

A Reckoning That Was Structurally Impossible — Until Now

What makes this moment so jarring is not only the severity of the accusations but the sheer weight of institutional investment in Chavez’s image. In 2014, President Barack Obama proclaimed March 31 César Chavez Day. Obama had personally dedicated the César Chavez National Monument in 2012, landing by helicopter at La Paz to tell a sun-drenched crowd, “Where there had once been despair, Cesar gave workers a reason to hope.”

That mythology served real purposes. Chavez was the first figure to bring the exploitation of Latino agricultural workers to broad national attention. The UFW’s grape boycott of the late 1960s led to a landmark contract with 26 California growers in 1970. The union helped outlaw the short-handled hoe, opened health clinics, and campaigned against pesticide use. Robert F. Kennedy sat beside Chavez and credited him by name. The movement mattered.

But as The Atlantic’s coverage noted, historians had already been chipping at the pedestal. Miriam Pawel’s and Matt Garcia’s respective books, published in 2009 and 2014, documented the cultish aspects of Chavez’s leadership — his demand for fealty, his tendency to blame others for the union’s failures, and a relationship with a teenage woman that led to his separation from his wife. Pawel told The Atlantic that the latest revelations are, for her, “the next chapter in our evolving understanding of a complicated man.”

The complications, it turns out, included rape and child sexual abuse. Those are not complexities to be weighed against achievements. They are crimes.

The Movement Without the Man

The institutional response has been swift and, notably, unified. The UFW announced it would not participate in any Chavez Day activities. The César Chavez Foundation pledged support for victims, saying it is “actively engaging in a necessary conversation about our organization’s identity.” California’s legislature announced plans to rename the holiday as Farmworkers Day before month’s end, with Governor Gavin Newsom’s support. Washington state declined to issue its annual proclamation. Denver is renaming its celebration. Events in Texas and Arizona have been cancelled.

In Phoenix, former City Council member Mary Rose Wilcox — who marched alongside Chavez and helped him open a radio station — took down his photos and began making plans to cover a mural in her restaurant. “We love César Chavez,” she told the Associated Press. “But we cannot honor him and we cannot even love him anymore.”

Historian Stephen Pitti, quoted in The Atlantic, offered what may be the most useful framework: “We should listen to those who emphasize that the UFW was never a one-person operation and that the farmworker movement’s commitments today remain powerful and urgent. We should support the victims. And we should support groups that don’t protect abusers.”

Eliseo Medina, who met Chavez in 1965 and served on the UFW board, told NBC News the allegations left him confused and angry. “The man I thought he was, was someone else.”

What Movements Owe Their Icons

The farmworker movement was never actually one man’s work, even if it was marketed that way. Huerta — not Chavez — stood onstage with Kennedy at his victory celebration at the Ambassador Hotel. Thousands of organisers, many unnamed, built the infrastructure that made the boycotts and strikes effective. The mythology of the singular hero served fundraising, media narratives, and political convenience. It also created a shield behind which abuse could go unreported for six decades.

Huerta said it directly: “The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual.”

She is right. And the proof is that the movement’s core cause — justice for the people who harvest the food — remains as urgent as ever. The latest proposal to expand the H-2B visa programme would actually pay immigrant farmworkers less, not more. The streets may need new names. The work does not.

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