Farmworker Advocates Grapple With Legacy Changes as California Replaces Chávez Holiday

Reading about Cesar Chavez inspired Rosalinda Guillen to organize strawberry pickers in Salinas with the union he co-founded, the United Farm Workers, in the 1990s, after the late labor leader had died.

Now, as California has renamed Cesar Chavez Day — observed annually on March 31 — as Farmworkers Day — and begins reconsidering how it honors the civil rights icon, advocates like Guillen are confronting a deeper question: What happens to the farmworker movement when its most recognizable figure becomes a source of pain and controversy?

Guillen, 74, is worried the shattering of Chavez’s image by rape allegations could demoralize organizers and provide ammunition to agricultural corporations opposing raising wages for some of the nation’s lowest-paid laborers.

“Organizing for the rights of farmworkers anywhere in this country is one of the heaviest lifts that there is,” said Guillen, a former berry picker herself who helped reach Washington state’s first union contract covering agricultural workers at a large winery in 1995.

“Any type of benefit that we fight for or organize for, the pushback from the industry is just huge,” she said. “There’s such a huge power imbalance that everything matters for us as we continue to move forward.”

Newly surfaced sexual abuse allegations against Chavez are reverberating across California and beyond, fueling a reckoning within farmworker communities while raising concerns among organizers that fallout could weaken already fragile efforts to build worker power, influence policy and protect some of the country’s most vulnerable laborers.

The allegations that Chavez sexually abused UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta and underage girls decades ago unleashed grief and soul-searching among advocates. Across California, labor leaders and elected officials have emphasized that the movement must extend beyond any one individual, even as they grapple with the emotional toll of the revelations.

One week after the allegations were made public by the New York Times, California lawmakers voted unanimously to rename a March 31 holiday on Chavez’s birthday as Farmworker Day, a move intended to shift recognition to the broader workforce rather than a single leader. Community leaders planned to remove Chavez’s likeness from school murals, statues and other public spaces.

For many farmworkers, the emotional impact has been disorienting. Some described learning about the allegations through word of mouth, social media or conversations at work, struggling to reconcile admiration for Chavez as an organizer with anger and sadness.

“It’s going to harm us,” UFW member Maria Garcia Hernández said in Spanish, a Tulare County resident.

The 52-year-old weighed whether the union would lose any influence in Sacramento or the rural communities where it operates, an open question. She worried about encountering antagonism or even aggression when volunteering as a union canvasser in Republican areas.

“It could undermine the politicians we support — for whom we go door-to-door for, so they can hold office and represent us,” said Garcia Hernández, a farmworker for more than 30 years. “Now, people won’t want to accept us.”

The reckoning comes as the U.S. Department of Labor issued a rule to make it cheaper for employers to hire seasonal foreign agricultural workers through H-2A visas — a policy the Economic Policy Institute estimates could drive down wages for farmworkers nationwide by more than $4.4 billion annually.

The Trump administration has also signaled plans to ramp up deportations in a workforce where about half are undocumented, leaving many vulnerable to exploitation and reluctant to challenge employers.

“It’s a legitimate concern for a lot of folks to wonder what happens now,” said Eladio Bobadilla, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies U.S. social movements. “How these particular revelations will impact people on the ground, the ordinary farm workers who are trying to find themselves in a better economic and social position.”

The historian, who grew up with farmworker parents in Delano, the former UFW headquarters in the 1960s, said there were problems in how Chavez’s leadership was widely remembered and celebrated, even before the new accusations came to light. Chavez ran the union autocratically, purging critics and surrounding himself with loyalists, which weakened a movement that gave him too much power, Bobadilla said.

One crack in the movement was Chavez’s hostility toward undocumented immigrants, whom he considered strikebreakers. Under his reign, the UFW harassed, beat and reported undocumented people to immigration authorities in the 1970s, Bobadilla said. His forthcoming book explores nativism debates through the eyes of Latinos. Later, the UFW and Huerta emerged as strong advocates for immigrant rights.

“It will be essential to decouple the farm workers’ struggle from this one man,” he said. “How the union and how activists choose to do that, I don’t know, but I think it will be essential to really untangle themselves from this one person, something that should have been done decades ago.”

Since the 1930s, federal law has excluded agricultural workers from many protections afforded to other workers, including overtime pay and collective bargaining rights. Even in California, which expanded farmworkers’ rights, field crop laborers still often face deep poverty, wage theft by employers and dangerous working conditions, including wildfire smoke and extreme heat.

Agricultural workers are far more likely to die from heat-related illness than workers in other industries, and the U.S. still lacks federal regulations requiring employers to protect workers from heat hazards.

Today, most of the nation’s 2.2 million farmworkers are not unionized. The UFW counts about 10,000 members in California, Oregon, Washington and New York, a fraction of the roughly 60,000 in its heyday during the 1970s.

Beyond organizing, the UFW helped build a broader civil rights movement that trained generations of community activists, said Oliver Rosales, a historian at Bakersfield College in Delano. At its peak in the 1960s, the Delano grape boycott drew participation from an estimated 14 to 17 million Americans, reflecting the nationwide impact of the farmworker movement.

“It was like the heart and soul of the Mexican-American civil rights movement,” Rosales said. “The farm worker movement ultimately, despite its long-run failures to organize farm workers within the union, inspired activism all across and well beyond the fields. That, to me, is its ultimate legacy.”

The UFW continues to fight well-resourced grower associations, sometimes successfully, said Daniel Costa, who directs immigration policy at the Economic Policy Institute and co-authored the H-2A wage rule analysis. The UFW helped beat a similar pay-cut policy during the first Trump administration, he added, which helped hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers.

“They are punching above their weight for sure,” Costa said. “They’ve been able to leverage the attention that they’ve gotten over the years to really make a big impact.”

Teresa Romero, the first female UFW President, said she’s still grappling with the ramifications of the exposé about Chavez by New York Times reporters, who signaled more women may come forward with additional accusations. The union is reviewing training and policies for its 55 staffers, she added.

But controversy or not, politicians who support farmworkers understand their plight remains dire, she said, and just as important as it was three decades ago, when Chavez died. Strong opposition to the union is part of its history, she noted, just like the allegations against Chavez now are.

“We never depended on growers appreciating their workforce and treating them with respect and dignity and paying them fairly. That’s why we exist,” Romero said.

The union continues to organize workers and push for labor protections, including collective bargaining rights and safeguards against extreme heat.

With California replacing a holiday bearing Chavez’s name with one honoring farmworkers, Romero said the focus must stay on those still laboring in the fields.

“It saddens me to know what happened with our founder, but it hasn’t changed my commitment or my understanding of who I serve, and that is farmworkers,” Romero said. “I don’t serve our history or Cesar Chavez.”