Raised by the Chicano Movement, Reckoning With Its Limits

I owe much of my life to the Chicano movement.

There would be no Serena Maria Daniels without little Serena getting dropped off at the campus daycare center while her mother studied at Evergreen State College.

My mother left my father when I was 4 and built something else for us. She went to college and learned Chicano history for the first time, after growing up discouraged from speaking Spanish or fully embracing her Mexican American identity. She raised two daughters during that shift and was the president of her campus chapter for the  Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlan (MEChA), working alongside the farmworkers’ cause in Washington State.

I grew up inside the outcome of those decisions, within walls covered in Sí Se Puede posters and Chicano rock bands, and before I could even decide whether I was right- or left-handed, I marched alongside my mother to support her student activism. 

I was raised knowing, without a question, that I was going to college. In ninth grade, I organized a walkout to protest the dismantling of affirmative action. The first semester I worked for the campus paper, the Valley Star, I was named editor-in-chief. I joined student protesters on bus trips to Sacramento to demonstrate against tuition increases in the community colleges. These were early signs of a lifelong career covering movements, in pursuit of stories that bring us closer to the truth.

Which is why it has been devastating this week to reckon with new reporting about César Chávez, the labor leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers and became a symbol of dignity and resistance for Mexican American communities.

An investigation published this week by the New York Times has raised allegations that Chávez sexually abused multiple girls and women over a period of years. The reporting also includes accounts from Dolores Huerta, his longtime collaborator, who said he coerced and raped her in the 1960s, resulting in two pregnancies. She gave birth to two children, who were raised in secret by others. Huerta said she remained silent for decades because she believed speaking out would damage the movement she had spent her life building.

I understand what that means. What it takes to carry something like that and keep going. To let life continue around it.

I was in sixth grade when I first experienced it.

It was still hot enough to spend afternoons at the pool. Earlier that day, my mother’s boyfriend had been playful, tossing me into the water.

We went back later that afternoon, but something had changed. He had been drinking. His demeanor was different.

At first, I didn’t understand what was happening. Then I did.

I got out of the pool and ran home. I never left the water like that. I loved the pool. I was convinced I would one day become an Olympian and compete in the freestyle competition. My mother noticed and followed me. She asked what was wrong.

I told her.

She called the police. They said there was nothing they could do.

He was sent away for a few days. Then he came back.

Life continued, at least on the surface.

I withdrew and then started to come apart in ways that were harder to ignore. I stayed out late, skipped school, smoked cigarettes, tried drugs. I ran away. I was in situations where I wasn’t safe. During that time, I was repeatedly victimized by adults who convinced me into believing I was more adult than I really was, that I was special.

The allegations against César Chávez describe a pattern I recognize.

One of his accusers, Debra Rojas, described writing him a letter in January 1974, in careful cursive on floral paper, like a note a girl might write to her crush in class. It read like she believed she had something special with him, something no one else could understand or take away.

I remember that feeling. I came to know it when I was on my own.

It took years to understand what it actually was.

Grooming is the process by which an adult builds trust and an emotional connection with a child to exploit that relationship. It can feel like attention, like care, like being chosen.

Sexual abuse most often happens within families or among people we trust. That trust is what allows it to continue. The same person causing harm is often the one offering attention, protection, or approval. The line between care and control blurs, making it harder to name what’s happening, and easier to keep it secret.

What happens next is shaped by what each person feels they can afford to lose.

My mother called the police. She did what she thought she was supposed to do. Nothing came of it. He left for a few days, then came back, with the understanding that he would stop drinking. Life resumed. That became the solution.

Dolores Huerta made a different calculation. She has said she remained silent because she did not want to derail the movement she helped build. She carried it privately, even as she continued the work.

I didn’t contain it. I refused to. I rebelled, and it shaped how I moved through the world and the voice I would later build for myself. It turned me into someone who would not stay quiet. Someone who would push back. Someone who would fight.

Years later, I would find language for what had been done to me and for the ways women were expected to absorb harm without disrupting the systems around them.

In Chicano studies classes at Cal State Northridge, I read authors like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. Their writing centered the feminist voice and was critical of the ways women in the movement were often pushed to the margins. They were expected to support, to organize, to endure. Gendered harm was often left unaddressed.

Their work named something I had already lived.

But even in the Chicano studies classrooms of Santa Susana Hall, the contradictions were there.

An editor I interned for, an older Chicana who had attended CSUN in the 1970s, told me that relationships between professors and students were common. It was normalized. It was the same era in which César Chávez is now alleged to have abused girls, according to the NYT investigation.

The same institutions that made it possible for people like my mother, and later me, to access education and learn about who we are as Chicanas also allowed men to hold power in ways that could be abused. They also made possible the work of Dolores Huerta, who helped reshape labor rights and expand political power for Mexican Americans in this country.

But they did not prepare us for what happens when men inside those spaces cause harm — or for what it takes to confront it.

And I think about what it means to build a life under those conditions.

What becomes possible. What is lost.

Imagine a world where Dolores Huerta did not have to carry that trauma. Consider what she accomplished while holding it.

I ask myself the same questions.

Would I have unraveled the way I did? Would I have searched for validation in places that put me at risk? Would I have made different choices if that afternoon at the pool had never happened? Would I have made it to the Olympic Games? Would I have even become a journalist?

What happened in my home did not lead to resolution. What Dolores Huerta carried was kept quiet. What is now being reported about César Chávez was allowed to continue.

The pattern is not incidental.

The same forces that made our lives possible also made room for harm, and at times depended on silence to sustain it.

Reckoning with that does not undo what the movement gave us. It requires telling the truth about what it could not hold.

Serena Maria Daniels is a Chicana journalist based in Detroit and the founder of Midwest Mexican. Her bylines have appeared in Reuters, NPR, HuffPost, the Chicago Tribune, and The Detroit News, and she is the former editor of Eater Detroit and the founder of Tostada Magazine.

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Farmworkers Day: Calls to strip Chávez’s name from public spaces are accelerating after new sexual abuse allegations, with leaders proposing to rename César Chávez Day as “Farmworkers Day,” the New York Times reports. The shift reflects a broader effort to honor the labor movement beyond one figure as institutions nationwide reconsider Chávez’s legacy.

‘It Was Time’: Huerta breaks decades of silence in her first interview following abuse allegations against César Chávez, sharing her experience and urging accountability and healing. Listen to the full conversation on Latino USA for her powerful firsthand account and what it means for the farmworker movement’s legacy.

Julio Ricardo Varela edited and published this edition of The Latino Newsletter.

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