As a young journalist, I covered the funeral of Cesar Chavez in 1993 and have interviewed Dolores Huerta several times over the past 30 years.
They were heroes to me and my family, icons of the Chicano civil rights movement.
Reading this week in The New York Times the allegations that Chavez raped Huerta and groomed and assaulted minor girls was devastating. My heart felt like it split open knowing one of our greatest civil rights leaders was capable of such evil.
As a child my mother’s family in the 1950s migrated from picking cotton in Texas to Midwestern states, where they picked beets and tomatoes.
They eventually made it to rural Illinois and transitioned from farm work to factory work in Chicago. But my mother never forgot her farm worker roots.
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s, as a family we picketed local grocery stores asking people to boycott lettuce and grapes. My parents taught us about the history of the farm worker movement and its leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
For more than 60 years, Huerta held on to the secret of her coercion and assault that resulted in her secretly having two of Chavez’s children.
Huerta issued a public statement Wednesday, “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”
In the 1998 interview I did with Huerta she acknowledged that she and Chavez would argue. It was her idea for a grape boycott. He wanted it to be a potato boycott.
“It took a fight to get that. In fact, probably the only reason I won that fight was because he was on the seventh day of a fast and he was weak,” she told me. “We never argued about philosophy because we shared the same philosophy. We argued about strategy. Should it be grapes or potatoes? Sometimes he would win, and sometimes I would win.”
She did not reveal to me or anyone until now the deeper reality of their encounters.
For too long we haven’t believed women, or offered them protection from predators. This has created a culture of silence.
In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, an estimated 1,000 girls and young women were trafficked. Besides Epstein, who died in prison, and Ghislaine Maxwell, sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring to sexually abuse minors, nobody else has been charged.
We know the names of other men in the files from former President Bill Clinton to current President Donald Trump, the latter mentioned at least 38,000 times. They should and other men in the files should be investigated.
At least in the United Kingdom Prince Andrew was arrested but not for sexual abuse but for alleged misconduct in office.
It is unconscionable the U.S. is not investigating the men in the Epstein files.The accountability for the victims is nonexistent. Now who will be held accountable since Chavez died in 1993?
It’s important to investigate who knew about Chavez’s grooming of girls at his compound and if there are other victims who may yet come forward.
The message must be swift and clear. Cesar Chavez day, celebrated in California and other states as an official holiday on March 31, should be cancelled as a holiday.
Already the United Farm Workers Foundation has cancelled Chavez Day activities. There are reports of cancellations of events in Arizona, California and Texas. A Chavez memorial statue at Fresno State was immediately covered up after news broke. Chavez’s name should be taken off streets, schools and other landmarks. His murals should be painted over.
Instead on March 31 the world should honor all people who have been victims of sexual abuse and violence.
It’s important to remember the values of the movement of economic equality for the farm workers who feed our country and still toil in the fields.
Today, the movement matters as farm workers, immigrants and Latinos are targets of the ICE raids. The fight for economic justice, civil rights and worker protections continues. Huerta, 95, who has fought for this justice, fairness and equity, continues her pursuit.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual,” Huerta said in her statement. “Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people. We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
I’m reminded of how Huerta leads a chant at the end of most of her speeches. I last heard her speak in Albuquerque in the summer of 2023.
“Who’s got the power?
We’ve got the power!
What kind of power?
People power!
She ended with the phrase she coined, “Yes, we can.”
¡Sí, se puede!”
Yes, we can keep fighting for justice for women and workers.
Cancel Cesar Chavez: Continue The Fight For Justice was first published on CA Latino News and was republished with permission. CALN is an affiliate of the Latino News Network.
Teresa Puente is an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach. She teaches courses in News Reporting and Ethics, Social Media Communication, and Bilingual Magazine Reporting and Production.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.