This week, specifically March 31st, carries weight.
The United Farm Workers has paused its celebration today. Dolores Huerta, a woman who continues to give her life to this movement, has come forward at 95 years old to say she was raped by César Chávez. A secret she kept for over sixty years because she didn’t want to hurt what they were building.
We invite you to sit with this for a moment.
We want to name, first, that we know many reading this are carrying this personally. Sexual violence is not a simple news story. Over half of women in this country have experienced some form of violent sexual contact (and we know there are countless more bound by silence). Nearly 90% of transgender people report experiencing harassment or assault in their lifetime. These are not purely statistics. These are our stories, our secrets, our siblings in the movement. This is what we are holding when we show up for our neighbors, when we organize, fill rooms, write policies, and choose to keep going while carrying wounds no one can see. The power was always ours.
Dolores Huerta’s courage in speaking, after sixty years of silence — is not separate from the work. It is the work. Her story is in concert with the decades-long fight of Epstein survivors, who are clawing for accountability against systems designed to protect powerful men and bury the truth. To every survivor, we see you. We believe you.
At Women’s Foundation California, we have always understood the thing power wants us to forget: Movements are not built by heroes. They are built by people. By women who will never have a day named after them. By gender expansive people who show up without recognition or protection. By people of color, immigrants, mothers, and organizers who sacrifice everything—not for fame or statues, but for the possibility of a future where all people are treated with dignity.
Please join us in supporting organizations who have been carrying this work for decades.
The hero myth costs us. Pedestals overshadow movements. When we make a man into a symbol, we make it nearly impossible to see what he does in the dark — and we ask the people he hurts to disappear to preserve his legend. Dolores Huerta is refusing that. She is asking us not to rename this day after her — but after martyrs, organizers, farmworkers, families. The people. She has given us a blueprint not just for grieving, but for rebuilding.
We are standing in the rubble. And we know what we must carry forward.
The work survives the worker. The movement is more than a man. Justice is not tied to a single biography — it is a practice, a daily return, a refusal to let harm have the last word.
We believe Dolores. We believe survivors. We grieve with farmworker communities navigating this loss. And we recommit to a feminism that sees the full picture and does not flinch when the picture is complicated.
The movement was never his alone. It never will be.
Sí se puede belongs to the farmworkers, to survivors, to feminists, to all of us.