I like names with historical signifigance.
Santa Barbara is full of them but I’ll stop the hijack here. It might make a good thread.
Psychologically, I strongly disagree with either of these as a likely “mind-set.” I think blaming the victim is much more likely (“she lured me on, she shouldn’t dress like that” sort of thing), handy helplessness (“I couldn’t help it”) or else just burying the event out of conscious memory. Much later, they might get to the point where they can reflect and wish they hadn’t done it, but without any thought for any kind of reparative behavior. “It’s done now, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Most predators don’t have enough self-insight to feel guilty about what they are doing. They are extremely deluded and believe the victim wanted it.
Kinda wish I hadn’t read that NYT article. That’s a tough read. If I understand correctly, this is the culmination of a five-year investigation. Not exactly a knee-jerk response.
I’m Hispanic and this has my vote. For many reasons:
Yeah, same here. More like if you have an individual that may have such impulses within, and he finds himself “in command” or held up as an important public face of a Worthy Cause, he may find the usual restraints on that impulse are no longer restraining him as much. Which includes people just not asking questions they would of anyone else, or as apparently happened here, victims feeling that the Cause is too much more important than themselves to risk denouncing the Leader.
Power or fame doesn’t always really change you , some times it just gives you license to act out what you had been holding back.
And one very real thing we have to deal with is that even if we know that “in that culture, in that time” looking the other way about a certain conduct was common, we can still call it out if it crossed those lines, especially in cases when victims are still around so some belated redress may be offered, even if symbolic.
WA will not observe Cesar Chavez Day this year, and the governor is proclaiming Dolores Huerta Day for April 10th instead.
Knowing what is now known I understand the need to change names.
And I still have a likely very unpopular position, not that the NYT should have buried the story, but that if I was his victim maybe I’d not bring it up now?
Chavez is now less a real person than a myth, and myths have important functions:
Torn, because, well truth matters. And the role model of being a victim who comes forward is a strong message to get there. The concept that no one is above being held to account, given a pass, matters. But we do need out myths that tell us who we want to be, even if the figures we mythologize weren’t that.
I think a lot of people are attracted to those roles because they want to be powerful and exercise that power. It’s not necessarily that power corrupted them, but that they were corrupt to begin with. From the article it sounds like Chavez was your basic machismo misogynist asshole, at least based on how Huerta describes him. He went out of his way to deny her credit for her work, physically and verbally abused her at times, and was just an all-around jerk to women. The article suggests this was well-known behavior, in many cases it was on the record, recorded in emails and correspondence and corroborated by multiple witnesses. It’s really just a case of this man, who was not a very good man, had a lot of power. He abused that power because he was not a very good man.
I don’t know what fully motivated him in his work. I don’t deny him real feelings and emotion about the plight of migrant farmworkers. I don’t discount his accomplishments in this arena. But I suspect there was more to him taking on this role than a feeling of duty to his people. I suspect he was leveraging a lot of this attention in order to exercise his power over others.
What’s most disappointing to me about this is how many people knew and kept silent or encouraged the silence of his victims. These women suffered terribly. There are things that can be done to a human being that stay with them for the rest of their lives, and this is one of them.
California is going with Farmworkers Day.
Maybe certain men will see this and care about their legacy going forward and behave better.
For one thing, this investigation started five years ago. I think Huerta told her story because they asked her for comment.
From the NYT article:
Ms. Huerta struggles to reconcile the Cesar Chavez she knew, who inspired so many and achieved so much, and the man who assaulted her and publicly humiliated her. She said she was unaware of any sexual abuse of teenage girls. Moments after some of that abuse was described to her, Ms. Huerta broke down, sobbing and wailing.
What do you suppose she’s thinking there? About all the girls who were hurt because of the conspiracy of silence against his victims?
I wonder how many times people told these girls and women not to bring it up, because it wasn’t a good time for the movement. The whole point of this is that it’s not fair to put that on women.
You have to balance the legacy of a mythic hero with the empowering effect of Latina women speaking out about the abuse they suffered and making it clear that it’s not acceptable behavior and it won’t be tolerated. This was not just a movement for and about men. This was about women too, and their voices and their experiences deserve as much consideration.
Perhaps (and hopefully). But I think people are either willing to behave badly or not for more internal reasons than legacy concerns. I have no concern about my legacy, but I’ve never been inclined to rape anyone or even take advantage of power dynamics (in employment, for example).
Yeah.
My WAG is that those of us unconcerned with having a legacy are also not people to get off on that abuse of power stuff, and that more of those driven by a need to be “a great person”, a person of history, are also more at risk to abuse power dynamics.
Rules don’t apply to The Great Ones.
Brief hijack to say how strongly I agree with this. During the scandal I thought she was a young person who flirted with trouble but was punished with consequences vastly disproportionate to her actions. As years passed my pity for her has been replaced by admiration. FWIW I’m a 75 year old male.
Dolores Huerta coined that slogan. No shame in it.
Yep. At the very least it tells us that people who knew him aren’t all that surprised.
I made that post before reading the NYT article and it’s clear a lot of people were really aware of it, to the extent it made it into official UWF correspondence, there were meetings in which it was discussed and tons of people said they were aware of the allegations.
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.
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.
That’s like Catholic Church levels of corruption.
This is why a lot of organizations bury these things. Fear that it’ll be weaponized by the opposition, be bad for the organization, or hurt the movement.
I think it’s an important distinction if this information was being discussed when Chavez was still alive. Internal emails “dating back over a decade” is still well after his death.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s terrible that it was being hushed up after his death, because it leaves the victims without support or justice. But it’s a different ballgame if it was happening when he was still alive and in the position to inflict further harm. That is where the Catholic Church fully broke bad.