Icons Aren’t Immune: My Truth About César Chávez and Dolores Huerta

25Mar
by Chavez

I need to talk about something that’s been sitting heavy on me, and I’m going to do it the only way I know how — honestly, from my own experience, and with full acknowledgment that your truth might look different from mine. That’s okay. This is just mine.

A few years ago, I hosted an annual event honoring the life and legacy of Cesar Chavez.

I was proud of it. I put energy into it. I showed up for it. And then afterward, a friend reached out to me and basically said — how could you?

He knew me. He knew how fiercely I stand for immigrants, for undocumented people, for the ones this country tries hardest to make invisible. And he told me that in his view, Cesar Chavez didn’t deserve my energy. He told me about Chavez’s well-documented history of actively working against undocumented immigrants — calling them wetbacks and other names, reporting them and trying to push them out because he felt they were undermining his movement.

I didn’t believe it at first so I went and looked it up myself.

And it was true.

I’m not going to perform outrage I didn’t feel in the moment, but I will tell you — I felt foolish. Not because I had honored someone who turned out to be flawed — we’re all flawed. But because I had celebrated a legacy I hadn’t fully examined. After that, I quietly stepped back. No more Chávez breakfasts. No more events in his name. Not with anger, just with clarity. 

Dolores Huerta…

I know she is beloved. I know people light up at her name, want photos with her, quote her, claim her. And listen — she has done real work. I’m not taking that from her.

But I’ll be honest with you: I was never a fan girl.

Every time I’ve been in a room with her, something in me just… didn’t connect. I know that sounds vague, but if you’re someone who moves through the world reading energy — and I am — then you know exactly what I mean. Some people you walk toward. Some people you just quietly don’t. I never took the picture. Never felt the pull. I filed it away and didn’t make much of it.

Then this past week, the news broke that she came forward saying she was raped by Cesar Chavez, and that two young girls were as well.

I want to believe her. I feel for all of those survivors. What happened to them matters, and their courage in speaking it out loud matters.

But here’s where my reaction got complicated — and where I know I might lose some of you.

What hit me hardest wasn’t what I expected.

It was the part about the children she gave birth to out of that experience.

The detail that a mother could give away her children — regardless of the circumstances that led there — that’s what broke something open in me. Because I know that place. I lived close to it.

I became a mom at 15. And there was a window of time, in those months before I gave birth, where adoption felt like the only door I could see. I was scared. I was young. I didn’t know how I was going to do any of it.

But somewhere in those final months, something shifted in me. I looked at what was coming and I thought — there is no version of this where I put my child into the world and don’t know him. There is no version where I’m not part of his life.So at 15, I made the decision to figure it out. No roadmap, no safety net. Just the choice. And that was a personal decision with no judgement at the time for those who chose adoption. 

I went on to raise my son, and additional three sons and three children who were not biologically mine — children whose mothers walked away from them. And I watched what that absence does to a person. The questions they carry. The worthiness they have to rebuild. The way they flinch sometimes when they feel love getting close, like they’re waiting for it to leave again.

So when I hear about children who were given away — for whatever reason, in whatever circumstance — my heart doesn’t go first to the adults in the story. It goes to those kids. Who are now adults. Who probably spent years untangling what it means to have been left —abandoned. 

I also think about the Chávez family.

The grandchildren. The great-grandchildren. The people who grew up with his name as a source of pride, who are now sitting with information that rewrites something fundamental about who he was and who they are. A legacy now shattered.  I can’t imagine that weight. The grief of it. The confusion. I have so much compassion for them.

I know this is an unpopular read.

Not fully mourning the Chávez legacy. Not being moved by Dolores Huerta the way so many people are. I get it. These are sacred figures in a lot of communities I love and belong to.

But I’ve never been able to fake reverence I don’t feel. And I’ve learned that icons — especially our icons, the ones we need to be heroes — are still human. Capable of harm. Capable of contradiction. Capable of fighting for one group while actively hurting another.

We’re allowed to hold that complexity. We’re allowed to say this part mattered and this part caused damage in the same breath.

And we’re allowed to save our deepest heartbreak for the ones who had the least power in the story — the survivors, yes, and the children who grew up wondering why they weren’t enough to stay for.

That’s where I land. Make of it what you will.

*This is my personal blog and reflects my own lived experience and perspective…

 

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Chavez

Leticia Chavez-Garcia is a Mother, Grandmother, former Middle School Teacher, former Member of a School Board of Education and an Education Advocate for hundreds of parents and students in the Inland Empire. Having become a mother at 15, Leticia knows what it’s like to be a single mother trying to navigate the education system. Leticia received her Bachelor of Science Degree in Political Science and Public Administration from California Baptist University and a Masters’ Degree in Education Technology from Cal State Fullerton in her 30’s. Leticia has used her knowledge and experience to help hundreds of families as an Education Advocate in the Inland Empire and currently works as an Education Specialist.

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