HYPOCRISY HEIGHTS — For years, César Chávez got packaged like a holy trading card: farmworker saint, union martyr, secular icon, all polish and no stink. Now Dolores Huerta, the labor organizer who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Chávez, has publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her. Suddenly the monument nobody was supposed to look behind has gotten a lot less photogenic. The statue is sweating.
This does not just smudge the halo.
It takes a tire iron to it.
What makes this a SHIT LIST story is not the sex. Sex is easy. America sells sex with one hand and points at it with the other. The real dirt is power in church clothes. Huerta has said she stayed quiet for decades because she feared the truth would damage the farmworker movement, which is exactly how these public fairy tales keep going: a great cause, a famous face, a lot of locked mouths, and a room full of people telling themselves silence is noble. The United Farm Workers has stepped back from Chávez Day activities, and Chávez’s family has publicly said they were devastated by the allegations and support survivors.
That is the real filth here: not pornography, but the pornography of sainthood, where a man becomes so useful as a symbol that everybody helps steam the wrinkles out of his sins. SCREW’s SHIT LIST was built for exactly this kind of story, the kind where public virtue turns out to have bad plumbing and a locked back room. Chávez was sold as sacrifice, dignity, and justice. Now the country gets to find out what else may have been in the package.
FUCK YOU in Hell, César Chávez
—P.
