Last week, The New York Times published an investigation into legendary labor organizer Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) and his decades of alleged criminal conduct. Women, including Dolores Huerta, a key ally, have revealed what was rumored, and well-known in the movement’s inner circle: that he was a serial sexual abuser. Chavez, along with Huerta and other allies, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association. The NFWA later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chavez has had celebrations and spaces named for him, and President William Jefferson Clinton awarded him the Medal of Freedom on 1994.
Chavez’s accomplishments were historic, and like many organizers of the period, he was a charismatic leader. However, that gave him an extraordinary amount of power in the movement, which we now know he used to selfish and cruel ends. While Chavez’s mercurial temperament and marital infidelities were well-known, his sexual abuse of women and young girls was not, in part because those in the movement who knew helped to conceal it by not calling him to account. A second painful revelation is that one of his victims was Dolores Huerta. In support of the other victims, she revealed that Chavez, a friend and comrade, raped her twice.
I asked the University of Pittsburgh’s Eladio Bobadilla, to visit with Political Junkie on a Substack Live. A prize-winning historian, Bobadilla has a terrific new book coming out, Dangerous Migration: Mexican Labor and the Fight for Immigrant Rights (University of Illinois, 2025.)
Eladio and I applaud all of these women for making their stories available to us, and wanted to put it in the context of Chavez and Huerta’s achievements.
Cesar Chavez, guarded by two Chicano Brown Berets, speaks at Los Angeles peace rally, May 3, 1971. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons
Catch me if you can:
Image credit: Juice Flair/Shutterstock
If you are in the vicinity of Boulder, Colorado on 4:00 tomorrow (Wednesday, March 25), stroll on over to Macky Auditorium at the Center for Humanities and Arts. I will be doing a star turn as the Cox Family Process Speaker—and reflecting on the inspiration for this newsletter, my 2020 book Political Junkies. If you come, bring your copy—I’ll sign it.
What I’m watching:
Vladímír, a limited series on Netflix, based on a 2020 fictional sendup of academic life of the same name written by Julia May Jonas (which my friend Laura Kipnis says is better.) It’s a dark comedy starring Rachel Weisz and John Slattery as an aging power couple in the English Department of a liberal arts college that could be Bard. Or not.
It’s based on the novel of the same name by Julia May Jonas This pair has an “arrangement”—one that has, in the further past, landed Slattery (who also played a serial sexual harasser in Mad Men) in the beds of students. Empowered and inspired by #MeToo, those students have filed a mass grievance against him.
The show’s “so what?” attitude towards sex and power imbalances catapults us back in time (or sadly, maybe not), and is amplified by the arrival of a flirty, married tenure-track assistant professor. Vladímír (played by Leo Woodall, who you last saw in the movie Nuremberg) becomes the stuff of Weisz’s fantasies, propelling her towards an affair with a subordinate even as she navigates fallout from the sexual harassment suit. English actor Ellen Robertson (Mickey 17, Black Mirror) has a superb supporting role as an adult queer daughter trying to understand what all this chaos has to do with her own relationship issues.
Short takes:
Expect Donald Trump’s 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence to portray a bunch Enlightenment atheists as devout Christian nationalists, Ja’han Jones warns at MS NOW. One member of the planning committee is “Eric Metaxas, the far-right media figure and promoter of election conspiracy theories who has touted his belief that Christians should ‘infiltrate’ government,” Jones writes. Celebratory events are expected to include “universal” favorites like a cage match on the White House Lawn, a drag race in the Streets of Washington D.C., and a religious revival on the National Mall. “One of the people apparently helping plan the programming is a self-described Christian nationalist named Sean Feucht, who has portrayed himself as an informal adviser of sorts to Trump officials. He has been a fixture alongside Scott Turner, secretary of Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development.” Last year, Feucht was enlisted, and presumably paid, by the Trump administration to provide a “divine perspective” on California wildfire recovery. (March 20, 2026)
Does public pressure on federal immigration detention work? HSA says no, appearances say yes. “This week there were only around 100 people in family detention at Dilley, compared with an average daily population in January of over 900, the data shows,” ProPublica’s Mica Rosenberg and McKenzie Funk write about the Texas facility that became notorious for its poor treatment of children. “One 13-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edison was released from Dilley with his mom this week. During his 92-day detention, Edison had cried in video calls to his father back in Chicago, saying he felt like he was being treated like a criminal,” Rosenberg and Funk write. “Then in the early hours of Wednesday morning,” (ICE Barbie lost her job the previous Friday) “a guard came to their bunk room and told him and his mom to start packing their belongings. By that night, they were on a plane to Chicago to be reunited with Edison’s dad.” (March 20, 2026)
Katha Pollitt read Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir of having been drugged and serially shopped out for rape by her husband, and she wants to know why we care less about sexual assault when it is perpetrated by ordinary people. “In every social class, men tend to have power over the women in that social class and the ones below,” Pollitt writes in The Nation. “It’s not universal—some men are more interested in sexual coercion than others, some women are more vulnerable than others. But men who commit sex crimes mostly get away with it, and society mostly shames the woman.” And had Pelicot not had the courage to not just prosecute, but put her face on the crime, Pollitt points out, the 51 men who subscribed to a web site that facilitates spousal rape, would be free today to continue their crimes. (March 18, 2026)
Thank you Alison Moore, Mary Cuellar, Order is never Peace, Alison Holt-Kalish, and many others for tuning into the live video with Eladio Bobadilla! Join me for my next live video in the app.
