Capitol Weekly’s Top 100: Dolores Huerta

No. 64

It is not every day that political icons get taken down in the way that labor leader César Chávez was in March. The stories that New York Times reporters Sarah Hurtes and Manny Fernandez produced on the yearslong sexual abuse and assaults inflicted by Chávez on numerous women and young girls hit the Capitol like an earthquake. It did so in great part because Huerta, herself an icon of the civil rights movement, stepped forward to validate the stories. It is hard to know how the NYT stories would have been received without her coming forth, but we know for sure what happened when she did. Within days statues were coming down and parks, schools, streets, bridges and anything else honoring him were being renamed and César Chávez Day quickly became Farmworkers Day. Moreover, it reinvigorated necessary conversations about hero worship, sexual violence, trauma and the silencing of victims. And we think it’s fair to say it likely had a big impact on the reaction to another series of allegations to come the very next month against then-Congressman and gubernatorial aspirant Eric Swalwell.