Dolores Huerta. Ana Murguia. Debra Rojas.
  March 19, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Today I offered to salt and eat Nona’s arm in exchange for not having to read about any more awful things in the world. We’re having dinner later this week. In today’s newsletter, a New York Times investigation shows us just how much the women of United Farm Workers sacrificed to keep the movement alive. Plus, the U.S. tries to play bully on the world stage and loses. Gathering the seasonings, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONSigue luchando: Yesterday, The New York Times released a sweeping, years-long investigation into labor rights activist Cesar Chavez, revealing that Chavez had groomed and sexually abused women and girls who were part of the farm workers’ movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Three women are named in the article: Ana Murguia, who was 13 the first time Chavez “summoned” her to his office and molested her. Debra Rojas, who was 12 years old the first time Chavez groped her. And Dolores Huerta—labor rights icon, feminist, and the co-founder of United Farm Workers—whom Chavez pressured into sex in 1960, then raped in a grape field in 1966. Murguia told the Times that Chavez had known her since she was eight years old and by the time she was 15, following two years of repeated molestation by Chavez, she “wanted to die.” Huerta, who turns 96 next month, released a statement yesterday confirming what was in the Times, writing, “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work…I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.” She also shared that both encounters with Chavez resulted in pregnancies; in each case, she hid her condition with baggy clothes and arranged for the babies to be taken by other families. Those children eventually met their mother and their siblings, she writes, but “no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.”  The news that this revered man, an icon of Latine civil rights, could betray his own people, could so deeply harm the young women and girls who trusted him, is shocking and painful (and yet another reminder that a man’s progressive politics have very little to do with how he treats women). The fact that Chavez’s legacy was so fiercely protected despite years of whispers of what he’d done, however, is par for the course. The Times notes Huerta’s silence around her experience was what she viewed as a “strategic necessity.” Women in movements have always needed to remain silent about their suffering, lest the man at the center of it all fall off his pedestal. Women of color, particularly, have long been expected to stay loyal for “the cause,” which most often means shielding abusive men who have centered themselves in community work. In her classic 1979 book Black Macho and the Superwoman, Michele Wallace criticized the way the typical Black male civil rights activist relied on a Black woman’s silence: She “had to understand that manhood was essential to revolution—unquestioned, unchallenged, unfettered manhood,” Wallace wrote. “She was just going to have to get out of the way.” Black women, from Anita Hill to Russell Simmons accuser Drew Dixon, have been labeled traitors for calling out men of their own race. This is also the case in Latine communities and some families, where silence is practically a virtue and machismo is the rule of law—men protect us, so we must protect them. But time and again men, even and especially those with larger-than-life status, have failed to fulfill their end of that bargain. It’s hard to overstate what Chavez means to Latine communities, especially in California and Arizona, which are dotted with statues of him and streets bearing his name. He was a father figure to many, and the reaction of his own son, Paul Chavez, to the allegations may lend us insight into what many might be feeling: “It was unimaginable to me, just hard to process,” he told New York Times reporters. “You’re talking about my dad.” The revelations have left officials struggling with how to disavow Chavez, and devotees wondering how to fill the void at a time when his legacy served as a balm on the terrifying assault on civil rights, labor, and Latines. “Now, Latinos and others who admired Chavez have to grapple with his moral failings of the worst possible magnitude at the worst possible time,” writes journalist Gustavo Arellano in the Los Angeles Times. “When there’s an administration doing everything possible to crush Latinos and we’re looking for people to look up to like never before.” We still have those people to look up to. Ana Murguia. Debra Rojas. Dolores Huerta. These are the women whose names should replace those street signs, those statues. These women—and the ones whose names we don’t yet know—sacrificed pieces of themselves for the greater good; Huerta gave up her own flesh and blood to become a leader, overshadowed for years by her own rapist. They held an entire movement together in spite of everything that movement took from them. Each of us owes them a debt, which we start repaying today. We must protect each other, believe each other, and above all else, sigue luchando. AND:
 TFW THAT NEW CBA CHECK HITS. OUR PRESIDENT, NNEKA OGWUMIKE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 SLICE OF WOMEN’S HISTORY 🍕Shere Hite, sexual revolutionaryBY SCARLETT HARRIS Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  HITE AT HOME, 1976. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Shere Hite has made your sex better, even if you don’t know her name. The feminist sociologist’s most well-known work, a groundbreaking 1976 study known as The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, is one of the bestselling books of all time and forever changed the conversation about women’s pleasure. It explored sex through the prism of how women felt about their bodies and their intimate relationships, rather than through the paternalistic lens of male psychologists. And the changes brought about by the women’s movement were featured prominently in the study’s results. “We owe her a lot,” says Rosa Campbell, author of the forthcoming The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report. “Today we know that politics enters the bedroom” and “that sex—how we do it, how we want to do it, what we like and what we don’t like, our desires and proclivities—is not just a matter of personal choice, but of politics too.” The Hite Report collated the answers of around 3,000 women who responded to the 58-question survey she distributed to more than 100,000 prospective participants. “She found widespread sexual dissatisfaction among American women,” says Campbell. “Seventy percent could not orgasm from penis-in-vagina sex… and required clitoral stimulation to orgasm.” She found that many women knew that, but were too ashamed or embarrassed to ask for it. “For sex to improve, women needed more than knowledge—they needed power.” Hite’s strict yet chaotic upbringing, failure to be taken seriously in the boys club that was Columbia University’s doctoral history department in the 1960s, and background in modeling and porn all inspired her work—and her high-femme fashions and past in sex work landed her a spot on The Phil Donahue Show. Millions of suburban housewives suddenly knew about this book, and helped it fly off the shelves. She later became a victim of the backlash to feminism in the 1980s. Eventually, she retreated to Europe, where she lived until her death in 2020. Ultimately, Campbell says, “her work was really brought into disrepute because it was relentlessly feminist.”  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
