The photos currently flooding my social media stream are like a highlight reel of the life of Chicana civil rights icon Dolores Huerta.<\/p>\n
The famous 1960s-era black-and-white shot of her looking like a bohemian in sweatshirt and black pants while she holds up a sign proclaiming \u201cHUELGA\u201d in the grape fields of California\u2019s Central Valley.<\/p>\n
Chanting at the front of picket lines, strands of gray in her hair, in the 1980s.<\/p>\n
Beaming as President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 for a lifetime of good work that expanded beyond the United Farm Workers union she co-founded.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s especially popular is admirers posting pictures of themselves with her \u2014 at protests, during art gallery openings, in classrooms, even dancing. It\u2019s the type of public outpouring one usually sees when a celebrity dies. Sadly, there is grief involved in people sharing their encounters with her right now. <\/p>\n
Someone didn\u2019t die. But something did. <\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Huerta disclosed to the New York Times that fellow Chicano civil rights icon Cesar Chavez raped her during the 1960s. It was part of a story that also interviewed two women who claimed the United Farm Workers co-founder sexually abused them when they were young teens in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
One of the posts I saw soon after the story\u2019s publication was an Instagram portrait Maricela Cueva took when the two met a few years ago during a conference in Burbank.<\/p>\n
\u201cStanding with Dolores Huerta,\u201d said Cueva, president of the public relations firm VPE Communications, \u201cmeans honoring her legacy in the farmworker movement as well as the victims who had the courage to come forward and acknowledging the personal sacrifices behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former West Covina Mayor Brian Calder\u00f3n Tabatabei shared on the platform formerly known as Twitter a photo of him shaking hands with Huerta in Berkeley at a Working Families Party gathering for elected leaders in 2024, where she joined breakout sessions and listened to the next generation of leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cI look at the folks who posted pictures and we are all children of the movement,\u201d said Tabatabei, who\u2019s also an El Monte High ethnic studies teacher. He kicks off each school year with a shout-out to Huerta. \u201cShe lived with that pain so we could be in these spaces. So we don\u2019t have to be quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Together, the photos stand as a communal family album. It\u2019s a show of love and solidarity to Huerta \u2014 but also a challenge to ourselves. Many of us immediately believed the longtime activist not just because of her stature, but because we\u2019re sadly too familiar with the script playing out in real time.<\/p>\n
A Latina abused by a trusted, powerful man. A terrible secret kept to not make him look bad and ruin his life. A need for the victim to consistently praise the abuser to others no matter what. A life of service in the form of sacrifice. Eternal grace masking an unimaginable pain. <\/p>\n
Her story is the story of too many women I know and you know \u2014 and maybe the story of you. <\/p>\n
Steely resolve in the face of suffering is not new in the Huerta story. For decades, reporters, activists, historians and others who formed the narrative of Chicano civil rights treated her as a modern-day Mary Magdalene \u2014 a woman who found purpose by following a man. Chavez was positioned as the Christlike figure who toiled for all of us at great personal cost and thus was anointed the face of the farmworkers movement. Meanwhile, he and others relegated Huerta to sidekick status, both in the trenches and in the public \u2014 and the image-makers followed his lead. <\/p>\n
She found more prominence after his death in 1993, but Chavez\u2019s shadow loomed over her for too long. Huerta became one of Chavez\u2019s fiercest defenders even after revelations about his autocratic ways became public \u2014 but what else was she supposed to do when people tied so much of her identity to him?<\/p>\n
Through it all, Huerta showed up not just for la causa but for those of others. People in Bakersfield, where Huerta lives, know she\u2019s a supporter of arts and live music \u2014 she was seen dancing with family members at a Mardi Gras party just last month, gladly taking photos with well-wishers. I have run into her at my wife\u2019s restaurant in Santa Ana, at movie theaters in Los Angeles, during online fundraisers for museums. My favorite memory is the time we both spoke to students at a high school summer conference. Afterward, the organizers told me her speaking fee was a pittance compared to that of a famous Latina author who demanded $25,000 for an hour-long chat. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Huerta\u2019s recent revelations hit particularly hard \u2014 unlike the long-sainted Chavez, she always seemed more like one of us. Huerta has cycled through the stages of life in the public eye in a way that has seen Latinos relate to her over the decades as our daughter, our sister, our aunt. Our mother, grandmother and now great-grandmother in the winter of her years. <\/p>\n
We all know women in one of those roles who suffered the same violations Huerta did. The same dismissals and insults. Who never spoke about their ignominies because they were afraid we wouldn\u2019t be there for them.<\/p>\n
Huerta was once one of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believed that exposing the truth,\u201d Huerta wrote in a short essay, \u201cwould hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.\u201d <\/p>\n
By coming forward now, she\u2019s speaking up for every woman who has kept their abuse private, every woman overlooked in favor of a man, every relative told to keep secrets lest they embarrass the family, every woman attacked for finally speaking up. By posting all those photos of Huerta \u2014 by herself, in a crowd, with others \u2014 people are publicly and unconsciously saying:<\/p>\n
We can do better for the girls and women in our lives. We must do better.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have kept this secret long enough,\u201d she concluded in her essay. \u201cMy silence ends here.\u201d<\/p>\n
May we all hear the Dolores Huertas in our lives. May we finally stand by them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The photos currently flooding my social media stream are like a highlight reel of the life of Chicana…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[38513,9747,102817,18104,9976,48,52,51,1637,104805,47,50,49,63,1594,592,2824,51149,3044,104804,1557],"class_list":["post-231084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-chavez","tag-decade","tag-farmworker-movement","tag-grief","tag-huerta","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-longtime-activist","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-other","tag-people","tag-photo","tag-powerful-man","tag-story","tag-terrible-secret","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}