What Happens When a Movement Hero Causes Harm?

What happens when a community leader, elevated to near-mythic status, harms the very people he claimed to serve?

Three months after a New York Times investigation detailed allegations of sexual violence against United Farm Workers movement cofounder Cesar E. Chavez, many Latinos are still grappling with that question. The revelations have sparked difficult conversations about accountability, memory, and what it means when someone whose legacy is woven into a community’s identity is accused of causing profound harm.

To understand why the allegations have resonated so deeply, it helps to understand Chavez’s place in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s, farmworkers across California endured grueling conditions, including low wages, job insecurity, exposure to pesticides, and few legal protections.

Alongside labor organizer Dolores Huerta, Chavez helped build the United Farm Workers into one of the country’s most influential labor movements, organizing strikes, leading nationwide boycotts, and advocating for better pay and working conditions. Their efforts helped bring national attention to the exploitation of agricultural workers and secured contracts that improved conditions for thousands of laborers.

Over time, Chavez became more than a labor movement leader. For many Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, he came to symbolize perseverance, dignity, and the fight for civil rights. Schools, parks, streets, and public buildings bear his name.

His story has long been taught as an example of nonviolent activism and collective action. His image has become inseparable from the broader history of Latino political empowerment in the United States.

That is why the New York Times investigation landed with such force. Drawing on interviews and historical records, the investigation reported allegations from multiple women who said Chavez sexually assaulted or abused them over several decades. It also examined claims that people within his circle were aware of the alleged misconduct but failed to intervene.

Although Chavez died in 1993 and was never criminally charged or able to respond to the allegations, the reporting challenged a public legacy that had largely portrayed him as a moral leader and champion of justice. For many who grew up revering Chavez, the investigation has forced an agonizing question: How should communities remember a figure whose contributions to social justice are now being weighed against allegations of profound personal harm?

Psychologists suggest that revelations involving admired leaders can trigger a unique form of emotional conflict. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s research on institutional betrayal suggests that when harm is committed by someone closely tied to a person’s identity, community, or sense of belonging, people may experience grief, confusion, anger, and disbelief simultaneously. The challenge is not only processing the wrongdoing itself, but reconciling it with long-held beliefs about a person or institution once trusted. In these moments, the person being questioned is not merely a public figure but someone connected to collective memory, cultural pride, and a community’s understanding of its own history.

That tension raises yet another difficult question: How can communities acknowledge painful truths without abandoning the movements and values that shaped them?

Holding two truths at once

For Pablo Gonzalez, a first-generation Chicano scholar-activist and anthropologist who studies social movements, the allegations against Chavez forced a conversation that could no longer be avoided.

“There’s no way you can’t have this conversation in a Chicano studies class,” Gonzalez said.

When he addressed the topic with students, he found himself overcome with emotion. As someone whose generation benefited from educational opportunities created through the broader farmworker and Chicano movements, he understood both the movement’s significance and the pain of confronting its contradictions.

“I got emotional because it’s something that for us, we have not yet been able to have deep conversations about,” Gonzalez said. “What the broader movement, that includes the Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers struggle, [meant]—of how deeply important it was but also how deeply painful it was in regards to its internal contradictions and conflicts.”

His response reflects a challenge many communities face when confronting harm committed by influential figures. The conversation is often framed as a choice between honoring a movement’s achievements and acknowledging abuse.

Alexandra Barahona de Brito, a scholar of collective memory and reconciliation, explains that societies are often better served by simplified narratives. Furthermore, research on transitional justice suggests communities build a more honest understanding of the past when they acknowledge both the accomplishments and failures of historical figures, rather than reducing them to heroes or villains.

Acknowledging one reality does not require denying the other. Instead, confronting both can create a fuller and more honest understanding of the past.

The cost of hero worship

According to Gonzalez, part of the difficulty lies in how social movements often become centered on individual figures.

Over time, Chavez’s role within the farmworker movement became inseparable from the movement itself. Through public fasts, religious symbolism, and widespread media attention, he became more than an organizer. He became a symbol.

“Over time, you create this persona,” Gonzalez said. “History starts to write about Cesar, and he becomes central to the story.” As Chavez’s image became increasingly intertwined with the farmworker movement, criticism of the leader could feel like criticism of the movement itself.

Psychologists use the term “halo effect” to describe the tendency for positive impressions in one area to shape perceptions of a person’s overall character. In Chavez’s case, admiration for his leadership and the movement’s achievements may have made it more difficult for supporters to reconcile evidence that conflicted with his public image.

That psychological tendency was reinforced by Chavez’s symbolic role within the movement.

He had become its most recognizable public face; questioning Chavez could also feel, for many, like questioning the legitimacy of the farmworker struggle itself. While charismatic leadership can inspire collective action, it can also make criticism of a leader feel like an attack on the cause they represent.

Gonzalez said that dynamic often led difficult conversations about Chavez to be sidelined.

“You don’t talk about, for instance, his anti-undocumented labor stance,” Gonzalez said. “You don’t talk about how he ostracized Filipino labor leaders or other farmworkers that didn’t agree with him.”

Instead, protecting the image of the movement’s most recognizable leader frequently took priority.

The recent allegations challenge communities to reconsider what happens when social movements become attached to a single individual rather than the thousands of people who collectively made change possible.

What survivors make possible

At the center of the current conversation are the women who came forward to share their experiences.

For Gonzalez, their decision to speak publicly represents more than a need to reassess Chavez’s legacy. It offers an opportunity to address forms of harm that have long remained unspoken within Latino communities.

“It takes time for those voices that were silenced and suppressed to come out,” Gonzalez said. “But they’re there. They’re always there.”

Psychiatrist Judith Herman’s research on trauma and recovery suggests that healing often begins when survivors are able to speak about their experiences and have those experiences acknowledged. Naming harm does not weaken communities. Instead, creating conditions where survivors feel safe enough to come forward and be taken seriously can become an important first step toward accountability and repair.

Gonzalez pointed to Dolores Huerta’s willingness to publicly address the allegations as an example of breaking longstanding silence.

“When young girls— . . . girls of color—are looking for heroes and heroines and they look at Dolores Huerta, they’re not only going to see a labor leader and civil rights leader, but also a person who broke the silence,” he said.

“They’re going to see other women, whose names probably won’t be written in history books, break the silence.”

Creating space for difficult conversations

The revelations surrounding Chavez arrive at a moment when conversations about sexual violence are unfolding across many institutions, from universities and workplaces to religious organizations and immigrant detention centers.

For Gonzalez, the importance of this moment extends far beyond one individual.

“Breaking the silence around that is important,” he said. “It could be the place where we see mobilization. Sexual violence in detention centers. Sexual violence against young girls. Everything that, again, our community has not had a meaningful dialogue about.”

That dialogue, he argues, must begin by centering survivors rather than protecting legacies.

“There has to be a dialogue in our community around sexual violence,” Gonzalez said. “There has to be a dialogue around centering victims.”

Restorative justice scholars argue that accountability begins not with protecting reputations but with understanding harm. Rather than asking how a leader’s legacy should be preserved, restorative approaches encourage communities to ask who was harmed, what support survivors need, and what changes are necessary to prevent similar abuses in the future.

Beyond heroes

As communities continue to wrestle with Chavez’s legacy, Gonzalez believes the broader lesson is not simply about one leader but about how we define leadership itself.

“The solution here is not to create more pedestals,” he said.

While some have proposed replacing Chavez’s name with other figures, Gonzalez argues that doing so risks repeating the same pattern. Instead, he believes communities should shift their attention away from singular heroes and toward the countless individuals whose labor, courage, and sacrifices sustain social movements.

“We have to embrace the nameless—not the voiceless, but the nameless—people who make up everyday struggles, because that’s who we are.”

The challenge facing Latino communities today is not deciding whether Chavez was entirely good or entirely bad. It is learning how to tell a fuller story—one that honors collective achievements, acknowledges harm, centers survivors, and resists the temptation to place any individual beyond accountability.

Perhaps that is what collective healing ultimately requires: not the erasure of history, but the courage to face it honestly.