Many of the women who helped lead the fight for Latino civil rights say they were quietly waging their own battles with harassment, misogyny and sexual assault inside the powerful United Farm Workers union. excerpt - After watching a documentary at school about farmworkers getting beaten on picket lines, Anita Romero Torres had one dream: to join Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. In 1977, at age 17, she arrived at the union’s La Paz headquarters <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/us/cesar-chavez-la-paz.html> in the California mountains. But within weeks, she began to grow fearful — not of agitators on the picket lines, but of the men she worked with.
In the department where she was assigned, her supervisor began calling her several times a day, reminding her that they would be spending a lot of time alone together in the fields. “Sometimes it’ll be really late at night in very isolated places,” she said he told her. “Nobody’s going to know where we are.” The calls “seemed very strange and uncomfortable,” she said. “He was basically telling me that he was going to take me out in a field somewhere and rape me.” When she reported the calls to Mr. Chavez, the response was, for her, a devastating lesson in institutional priorities. Mr. Chavez told her that the man was too important to the cause to be removed from his job. His solution was to transfer the man’s wife into her department to keep an eye on him. *https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/us/cesar-chavez-dolores-huerta-united-farm-workers-sexual-abuse.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/us/cesar-chavez-dolores-huerta-united-farm-workers-sexual-abuse.html>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42113): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42113 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119892477/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
