Wow, so stunned to read the reports of Cesar Chavez abus­ing young girls and rap­ing Unit­ed Farm Work­er VP Dolores Huer­ta.

In the mid-80s I was one of the many ide­al­is­tic col­lege kids who interned with the UFW for a sum­mer. I got to hang out with him a num­ber of times. His son-in-law ran the NYC-based media cam­paign and Cesar would come for plan­ning meet­ings but also to vis­it his daugh­ter and grand­kids. She made great cheese enchi­ladas and all of us would talk late into the night as he told stories.

I do remem­ber think­ing — and ask­ing — why the saint­ed VP Dolores Huer­ta nev­er actu­al­ly seemed all that involved, at least not to the point of ever com­ing East that sum­mer to par­tic­i­pate in NYC-based media strat­e­gy meet­ings. It was explained she was need­ed back in Cal­i­for­nia.¹ I nev­er met her. I remem­ber not being sur­prised at all that she did­n’t ascend to the UFW pres­i­den­cy when Cesar died. It went instead to the son-in-law who had led our office.

My direct super­vi­sor was a schlub and sex­ist pig. He was always mak­ing inap­pro­pri­ate­ly sug­ges­tive com­ments to the young female interns, which they uni­ver­sal­ly laughed off. They were all smart, con­fi­dent women with futures who weren’t going to be put off by him. I was the only male intern that sum­mer and he put me in shit­ty assign­ments, pres­sur­ing me to drop out. I assume I was seen as com­pe­ti­tion and indeed I did start dat­ing a fel­low intern (the only rea­son I put up with his behav­ior and made it through the sum­mer). I see he’s still with the UFW, now list­ed as first vice pres­i­dent, which is not at all inspiring.

It was per­haps the most dys­func­tion­al office cul­ture I’ve ever seen. The union’s influ­ence had obvi­ous­ly declined since the heady days of RFK march­ing with Cesar in huge ral­lies. They seemed to jump from fad to fad hop­ing to recap­ture atten­tion. That year direct mar­ket­ing was all the rage in busi­ness cir­cles and the UFW was jump­ing in with both feet. We would spend hours in meet­ings set­ting unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions, then break our own guide­lines to “meet” them. I’d be called out for try­ing to do things the way we had agreed. I remem­ber won­der­ing if any of the office work I did that sum­mer actu­al­ly made a jot of dif­fer­ence. Help­ing to orga­nize East Coast appear­ances of Cesar was def­i­nite­ly the high­light of the sum­mer — well, that and the girl­friend and get­ting to hang out in New York City all the time.

I do have to won­der now if some of the dys­func­tion and sex­ism in the office was ulti­mate­ly relat­ed to Cesar’s repeat­ed molesta­tion of chil­dren.² Did he fos­ter a cul­ture in which we laughed off bad behav­ior and did­n’t ques­tion poor management?

1. In ret­ro­spect the sto­ry she tells in the linked sto­ry above of being sent on a wild goose chase to Flori­da so she would miss an impor­tant press con­fer­ence seems related.
2. Just to be clear, I nev­er saw any­thing. It seems from these reports that he we went after young Chi­cana girls back in the iso­lat­ed farm towns in California