I save the best for first. So, you all should know that Josh Johnson is hosting The Daily Show Tuesday night, along with Wed. and Thurs. nights.Thank you for your attention to this vital matter!
Next, and almost as good: maybe this has been seen, but here it is, for your enjoyment.
Hi Everyone. Sorry for no posts except from my phone and later from my tablet which I have to carry a backup power supply and cord with me now to doctors appointments as my old pad has a battery life of less than 10 minutes. A new Ipad is not a priority for our money right now even the cheapest one. Ron needs heart surgery, Ron needs cataract surgery, I need both new glasses and cataract surgery, and the van still has an oil leak. Plus Kamyk has basicly given up and slipped into depression. He had an apartment open up that he needed first/ last / and security for which came to $900 a month. It was government-subsidized housing. But because he is in long term care now the nursing home took all his SSI, leaving him with no money. Plus he no longer gets physcial therapy so he is slowly losing the ability to walk again. His sister started a go fund me but he forbade her to tell me about it. He felt we had all done too much for him and did not want me or you people to think he was trying to milk us or be greedy.
In a way I am glad he did not tell me until it was too late because I worry that as he can’t walk well, doesn’t drive, and did not know how long it will take to get his SSI back, that he wouldn’t be able to care for himself and so would be homeless in two months. The nursing home he is in is really nice compared to the last one which was abusing him emotionally, physically, and even sexually because the nurses decided he needed Jesus in his life and he rejected that being forced on him. So they were going to abuse him until he relented and came to their Jesus. This one gives him his medications on time, changes his ostomy bag or helps him do it, and they have been nice / kind to him. I understand his frustrations having to share a room with another person and basicly having no privacy but… the US government / wealthy don’t care about people in a land where profit is king.
I got up at 4:20 to feed the cat who when he thinks he needs food howls to get one of us up. I decided to stay up and watch the recorded news that I did not get to watch yesterday. I was not well at all yesterday, highly stressed which has been the situation for a while. My doctors were clear and Ron reminded me that my body breaks down under stress, and I am to be under as little stress as possible. That is not possible and has not been for a while. When I woke yesterday it was already much later than normal for me. Ron said he could tell I was having a bad night, I was highly agitated. I had gotten up at 2 am with a huge contracture, a “cramp” in the large side muscle in the upper part of the leg. I managed to get out of bed but couldn’t straighten out my leg. I spent 30 minutes moving around the bed holding on to the dresser and the end of the bed, leaning over to put weight on the leg, then removing it. Eventally I got it to touch the floor and hold some weight so I limped to my office and got a cane, then went to the bathroom which was a critical need by then. Ron never woke up and was upset I did not wake him. Not much he could do that I did not know to do myself.
When I got up with Ron at 7 I still couldn’t move or use the leg which was being electrified from the knee down, I couldn’t bend the leg due to the muscle still hurting from the cramp. I was swinging the leg forward and walking “peg legged” with a cane. Ron realized something was wrong and had me take my blood pressure and pulse. My blood pressure was extremely high. My pulse was also far too high. So high he asked me to take another dose of my blood pressure and heart rate medications. Ron had me sitting and checking it every ten minutes. It was not coming down and the first news show I started watching made it worse. So as I as them recorded I went back to bed until noon.
The reason for so much stress is Ron. He had his new medication Saturday that opens the arteries so he was better Sunday, but all day friday and Saturday I had to watch him and deal with him. He was exstrememly forgetful, unable to work his computer, he would sit in his recliner and fall asleep even during a conversation. He has bad sleep apnea and so he has to have his CPAP machine anytime he goes to sleep. But even in the bed he was forgetting to put it on until reminded. I offered to move it out to his chair but he would promise not to fall asleep as he just wanted to watch a few things on TV, 2 minutes later he was asleep. I would make him go to bed and I stay there until he had his CPAP on. I don’t dare let him drive like this so I am doing all the driving and shopping now. I am doing the dishes so he doesn’t exsert himself and the last time he washed the dishes he put everything away in the worng drawers not even realizing he was doing it. So yesterday afternoon while he slept I did the dishes. He cooked a porkloin last night so I have a bunch of dishes to do when I get home. I did pick everything up and rinsed everything off / out so it should be easier than it could have been.
I have a doctor’s appointment this morning and I have to go with Ron as you can see to his new heart surgeon on Wednesday morning, which I have to look up and see where he is. I am tired people. I went to bed at 5 yesterday but kept getting up to check on Ron as he was in his recliner and I wanted to make sure he was not sleeping. Care of the cat has totally fallen to me now. I asked him if he could clean the cat litter box before he came to bed. He assured me he would so I went to bed. And he did not do it as he forgot. I did it when I woke up. Randy is sick after just having surgery, his parents are both sick / ill. Ron is teetering with the same thing that killed his brother-in-law. And I am worried and scared.
When I get the dishes done today I will try to get to the wonderful comments and reply to somethings Ali posted which I appreciate. Ali has really stepped up and is posting more to give everyone something on the blog to read and engage in. I can’t say how much I am grateful for that. Got to go. Hugs
“Goodbye, Pamela Paul,” was the headline of Andrea Long Chu’s now-iconic, recently ASME-nominated New York Magazine farewell to the former NY Times Book Review editor, when Paul left the paper two years ago. For a little background, Paul was named editor of the NYTBR in 2013 and took over books coverage for the entire paper in 2016, effectively becoming the most powerful editor in literary criticism. In 2022 she moved to the paper’s opinion pages to publish her own ideas about the world, many of which became political lightning rods in a publishing community that had for years been beholden to her editorial decisions.
Particularly infamous was one explicitly anti-trans essay from July, 2022, which was widelycriticized at the time. It also had many people wondering how Paul’s politics might have come into play in her decisions as the most important books editor in the world.
So at some point I began dreaming up an idea: to commission a whole package of reviews of books by trans and queer authors, folks whose projects weren’t covered by the NYT under Paul’s reign. I asked Maris Kreizman to collaborate and to my delight, she agreed. What followed became an exercise in thinking through what is lost—and perhaps can never be regained—when transphobes and their enablers rise to prominence as our most powerful cultural gatekeepers.
*
So, to the nuts and bolts of this project. First of all, the volume of seemingly great books published by queer and trans authors between 2013 and 2022, and not covered by the NYT, was intimidating. It took Maris and me a while to work through the many great pitches we received and arrive at our final lucky number of 13. (Funnily enough, in actually trying to commission these reviews, I felt surprising sympathy for book review editors like Paul who are no doubt constantly buried in new titles to consider.)
Our effort here offers reviews of a mere sliver of all those titles we might have covered, many of which would be worthy of inclusion if we had limitless time and resources. I’m immensely grateful to all who submitted ideas, especially to all the fellow authors who wrote to tell us about their books (some were even writers I’d call heroes). My to-be-read pile is now, as ever, impossibly tall.
On a personal note, this entire project has made me feel much less alone. I feel more connected to other trans and/or queer writers, who are doing this work despite the shitty odds we face, despite our society’s continued denial of our full humanity, despite the efforts to ban our words and to decimate our entire lives, despite the media and publishing industry’s failure to actually reckon with—let alone correct for—any of this.
What follows is hardly meant to be comprehensive. I hope it inspires others to write their own reviews of whatever books they’d wish might be covered. I’d love teachers to assign this as a group project to writing classes, as I’ve heard of at least one doing already. I hope this project won’t be perceived as anything except the start of a conversation—one I feel everyone with stakes in this must join us in having.
–Sandy Ernest Allen
(Snip: please go to the page-that’s a link, righthere, too–to see the books and the reviews.
Plus, AI is a subject of current event interest. (Lookin’ at autocorrect programs…)Meanwhile, I got a great deal of nerdy pleasure reading this, and I hope all who read, do as well!
A new exhibition at Yale Library explores the history of typos across five centuries. Visitors will see corrections that were listed inside copies of works by James Joyce, Upton Sinclair and Nicolaus Copernicus
A 1631 copy of the Bible that includes the text “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
James Joyce wrote the manuscript of Ulysses with a steel pen over seven years. By his typists’ accounts, the Irish author’s penmanship was atrocious, and his revisions were overwhelming. When the book was published in 1922, it was full of mistakes. In a letter to his wife, he wrote, “The edition you have is full of printer’s errors.”
The following year, Joyce’s editors compiled a massive list of the book’s errors to be fixed in new editions. Joyce rejected some of the corrections, saying, “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” Even so, some future printings of the book came with a seven-page errata sheet listing more than 200 mistakes.
Errors like those in Ulysses are the subject of a new exhibition at Yale. “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake,” which opens at the university’s Sterling Memorial Library on March 30, examines the history of typos across five centuries.
“What we found was that errata sheets were not only spaces for corrections but also sites of humor, legal maneuvering and reinterpretation,” Rachel Churner, a visual studies scholar at the New School and the exhibition’s co-curator, tells Artnet’s Min Chen. “With this exhibition, we wanted to share ways in which even small corrections can reshape meaning and authority.”
According to a statement from the library, “errors committed” lists first appeared in the 15th century. Authors slipped these lists—containing typos, additions and apologies—into the backs of books after publication. The exhibition examines errata lists alongside their companion texts, examining themes of “censorship, misrepresentation, intervention and instability,” per the statement.
An errata slip from an early printing of James Joyce’s Ulysses Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
The exhibition spotlights around 30 artifacts from the collection of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Items on display include “inaccurate maps, book corrections and religious texts with very grave typographic blunders,” reports Artnet.
In addition to the errata slip from Ulysses, visitors can see several other 20th-century examples, including a self-published copy of Upton Sinclair’s 100 Percent: The Story of a Patriot, in which he “mistakenly identified a founding member of the Communist Party of America as a government agent,” per Fine Books & Collections. Also on view is a fold-out errata from Allen Ginsberg’s 1968 Airplane Dreams. According to the statement, he included the error sheet as a “legal strategy for political resistance.”
Churner and her co-curator Geoff Kaplan, a graphic designer at the Yale School of Art, co-founded the publishing company No Place Press. As they researched errata at the Beinecke, they found “unexpected poetry,” Churner tells Artnet.
Wade & Croome’s Panorama of the Hudson River From New York to Albany, published in 1846, listed Fishkill Village’s population as 11,000 instead of 800. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
The exhibition features an infamous 1631 edition of the Bible, which lists “Thou shalt commit adultery” as the Seventh Commandment. (The omission of the word “not” earned this edition the nickname “the Wicked Bible.”) By the time the mistake was discovered, 1,000 copies had been printed. The British king Charles I reprimanded the publishers, fined them £300 and stripped them of their printing license. In the centuries that followed, rumors circulated speculating that a rival printer had introduced the error. But as Chris Jones, a medieval studies scholar at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told the Guardian’s Eva Corlett in 2022, the more likely explanation is that the printers hadn’t wanted to spend money on copy editors.
Nearly all the Wicked Bibles were destroyed, and only about 20 known copies survive. In the copy on view at the Beinecke, someone fixed the error by hand, adding “not” to “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
In some cases, corrections have been used to influence public perception. During the Reformation in the 16th century, books were released describing “mistranslations” of Protestant and Catholic Bibles, “mobilizing the errata well beyond a list of typographic corrections,” Churner tells Artnet.
Plat Maps of Appanoose County, Iowa, 1986 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Many other errors, however, are simple mistakes. For example, the exhibition features a 1986 book of Iowa maps with a note correcting a mislabeled township. “Dear Sir, or Madam,” it reads, “We goofed in the Appanoose County Plat Book.”
On Monday, March 23, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Watson v. Republican National Committee. It’s one of, if not the most important, cases in front of the Court this term.
Conservatives have long maintained that federal laws that refer to an election “day” trump state laws that permit mail-in ballots to count, even if they are received later, so long as they are postmarked by election day. They rely on provisions like 2 U.S.C. § 7 that provide that “The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States.” Mississippi is one of the states that allows ballots cast and postmarked by election day but received by election officials shortly thereafter to count.
Mississippi is, oddly enough, defending its law, which allows a five-day grace period for ballots to arrive, against the attack from the Republican Party. The district court ruled in the state’s favor, holding that the election “day” established by Congress was intended to prevent elections from spanning several days, which would be cumbersome to administer and could result in undue influence from early results. The Judge held that allowing time for the Post Office to deliver ballots postmarked by Election Day does not implicate those concerns.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. They held that Congress established an election “day,” and all ballots must be cast and received then. They relied on the Constitution’s Elections Clause, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1.It reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” The appellate court reasoned that a ballot is “cast” when the state “takes custody of it.” Five judges dissented from the en banc decision.
In defending its position, the state argues that federal law only requires that voters cast their ballots by Election Day; it does not require that election officials receive them that same day. The National Council for State Legislatures, a nonpartisan organization, reports that “Mississippi is one of 16 states, plus Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Washington, D.C., that currently accept and count mailed ballots from any voter received after Election Day but postmarked on or before (sometimes only before) Election Day.” In addition, 29 states, including Mississippi, accept ballots from military and overseas voters sent before or on Election Day but received after, under certain circumstances.” Members of the military who are stationed away from their homes are among those whose ballots take advantage of the safe harbor.
Then on Tuesday, the Court takes up Noem v. Al Otro Lado, where the issue is whether the government can systematically turn back asylum seekers before they arrive at the border and make their asylum requests. Immigrants can request asylum when they arrive at or are physically present in the U.S. That request triggers asylum proceedings. In 2017, the Trump administration began using CBP officers to turn away immigrants who did not have valid travel documents before they reached the border and could apply for asylum.
When the case made its way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the court rejected the government’s efforts to circumvent asylum proceedings. The three-judge panel held that people who were turned away from entering the country before they could present themselves to apply for asylum had “arrived in” the country once officials, on either side of that border, made contact with them. The full court declined the government’s request to reconsider that decision en banc; there was a 12-judge dissent from that denial of en banc, arguing for 126 pages that U.S. law could not be applied outside of the United States and that “aliens in Mexico” were not in the U.S.
The Solicitor General has asked the Supreme Court to adopt the dissent’s view. He also relies on a case called Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, where the Court ruled 27 years ago that Haitian refugees trying to reach the U.S. were not protected by immigration law when they were intercepted at sea before reaching the U.S. The Court held that the President had the power to deploy the Coast Guard to repatriate “undocumented aliens” intercepted on the high seas.
The case is in an unusual posture because DHS has discontinued “metering,” as the practice of intercepting asylum seekers before they reach the U.S. border with Mexico is called, during the Biden administration. But the Solicitor General is arguing that the government “seeks to retain the option of reviving the practice” if it is needed in the future, a rare move by the Trump administration to ask for permission first. The rule the government is advocating for could lead to desperate scrambles to cross the border in dangerous conditions by people who would otherwise be denied their lawful right to seek asylum. On Tuesday, we’ll learn how many votes there are on the Court to permit that.
Other developments to watch for this week include:
A hearing on Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction, in its lawsuit against the Department of Defense’s sudden rejection of the AI company when it drew a red line prohibiting the use of its models for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. We discussed the lawsuit when it was filed.
Following a delay from last week, former Venezuelan president Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are expected in court on Thursday in the Southern District of New York. As we discussed a week ago, prosecutors say Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and hasn’t been considered by the U.S. to be so for several years, and therefore may not use Venezuelan government monies to fund their defense. Maduro and Flores’ lawyers argue that the laws and traditions of the country permit it.
Friday, federal district Judge J.P. Boulee will hold a hearing in Atlanta in the election records seizure case. We discussed that here last week, when he set the date.
Also on Friday, legal papers are due for Epstein survivors’ proposed settlement with Bank of America. Reuters reports that “Lawyers for both sides are scheduled to submit legal papers about the settlement by March 27, and the judge scheduled a court hearing for April 2 to consider approving the deal.”
ICE officers set to deploy to airports as delays mount, border czar Homan confirms
Border czar Tom Homan says ICE agents will help the Transportation Security Administration “move those lines” while also enforcing immigration law.
Editors Note: The following article is an Op-Ed submitted by Max Freedman. Max Freedman is a journalist covering LGBTQ+ topics, primarily but not entirely politics and music, from Philadelphia, PA.
When transgender runner Sadie Schreiner was allegedly removed from the heat sheet at Princeton University’s May 3, 2025 Larry Ellis Invitational track meet simply for being transgender, she sued the university and accused it of discrimination—and she’s not the only transgender runner taking action. Winter Parts, a well-known transgender running advocate, is organizing a boycott of Princeton’s two spring 2026 track meets, the Sam Howell Invitational on April 4 and the Larry Ellis Invitational on May 1.
“I want to see [the Larry Ellis Invitational organizers] face visible consequences for excluding someone from their meet,” Parts said. “My hope is that a lot of [athletes boycott]. I think it would send a strong financial and visual message to the Princeton officials if they’re going through the effort of trying to put on this meet, and nobody wants to show up because everyone’s upset with how they treated Sadie.” Notably, Parts doesn’t personally know Schreiner—who ran as “unattached” at the 2025 Larry Ellis Invitational, meaning unaffiliated with a running club or university track and field team but eligible to participate based on prior official race times—but was moved to take action nonetheless.
Although excluding transgender runners is, unacceptably and despicably, par for the course these days at professional running events—current NCAA and USA Track & Field policies ban transgender women from competing with other women—the two Princeton track meets aren’t professional events, making their alleged transgender exclusion an alarming escalation. Just as potentially concerning is that, whereas both track meets have previously been open to unattached runners and runners from clubs, Parts said that a coach from a prominent running club told them that, for the 2026 meets, only runners on university track and field teams are eligible to participate. It is unclear if or how this newly restricted eligibility is related to Schreiner’s pending litigation against Princeton athletic director John Mack and Princeton director of track operations Kimberly Keenan-Kirkpatrick. Mack, Keenan-Kirkpatrick, and a representative for the third defendant in Schreiner’s lawsuit, Leone Timing & Results Services, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Schreiner was unable to comment due to her litigation.
Parts has emailed the track and field coaching staff at just under three dozen prominent colleges and universities, including Rutgers University, Temple University, and Columbia University, to demand that they and their runners boycott the 2026 meets. They have also contacted Mack and Keenan-Kirkpatrick to inform them of the boycotts, and some of their friends have joined their boycotting efforts and contacted their alma maters to encourage non-participation.
Avery Prizzi, a non-binary runner who has encouraged eligible runners not to attend the events, said that it feels like an escalation of transphobic rhetoric that a mere track meet, rather than a professional race, has excluded transgender runners. “[The events are] an experience [where] there’s no qualification, there’s no prizes, no first-place trophy,” Prizzi said. “People go to run fast and get a time for themselves. It’s all post-collegiate stuff. There’s no incentive besides running fast. To know that [the event organizers are] just gonna be garbage toward what, effectively, is just a place for people to go and better themselves or race a clock seems completely pointless or outside the mission I figured they were touting.”
Non-binary runner Will Vedder said that “the whole issue that’s been raised on a national level around trans inclusion or exclusion in sports is this, pun intended, trumped-up issue.” Vedder is a 2025-2026 board member of Philadelphia Runner Track Club (PRTC), and although PRTC members are ineligible to participate and the organization does not endorse boycotts, Vedder has told people about the boycotts to nevertheless support transgender runners, saying that excluding transgender people from sports is “based on misinformation. As we know, trans women don’t have any advantage over cis women when it comes to competitiveness in sports. Studies have shown that again and again. The fact that people are acting against what science says and excluding people who just want to run and compete, it’s infuriating.”
A 2023 Frontiers in Sports and Active Livingstudyacknowledges a lack of evidence that transgender athletes are superior in performance and concludes, “Individuals should not have to make a choice between being their authentic selves or being athletes.” Only one transgender person, Quinn—a non-binary Canadian soccer player who uses a mononym in place of a traditional first and last name—has won a gold medal at the Olympics. Additionally, some transgender women runners, including Schreiner herself, have noticed that their performance permanently decreases after starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT). As made clear by the lack of scientific evidence about transgender runners’ supposed athletic advantages, transgender participation in not just running but all sports harms absolutely nobody. It’s the exclusion of transgender athletes that causes harm, and the consequences of this maltreatment reach far beyond the field.
“In the context of the things going on with trans people,” Parts said, “small actions like kicking a trans person out of a track meet build up to the general public thinking lowly of trans people, thinking it’s okay for laws to be passed affecting our lives, demonizing us, trying to eventually result in us being jailed or killed. Trying to push back against that will, hopefully, help increase acceptance of trans people in the public eye.” And with that, the chances of anti-transgender laws being passed — or even proposed — could decrease. A boycott might feel small, but it could help reverse the tides in a big way, and if you know runners on college and university track and field teams, you too can demand that they not participate in the 2026 Sam Howell and Larry Ellis Invitationals.
The sexual abuse allegations against Chavez have rocked them. But their focus is still on protecting other women.
This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana, Shefali Luthra and Marissa Martinez of The 19th. Meet Chabeli, Shefali and Marissa and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Monica Ramirez has spent much of her life spotlighting the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women farmworkers. She, like many in that movement, considered civil rights leader Cesar Chavez an icon.
Since allegations came to light this week that Chavez sexually assaulted women and girls as young as 12 — including fellow movement leader Dolores Huerta — Ramirez and the larger farmworker community have been left reeling. Now, they’re trying to reconcile how this man who so many revered — whose name is on streets, schools and even a holiday — could perpetrate the violence that has plagued women farmworkers for decades.
The community has been “shaken to its foundation,” said Ramirez, the founder of Justice for Migrant Women, a civil rights organization focusing on farmworker and migrant women. She and other leaders are now trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women — not just Chavez — spearheaded.
Monica Ramirez, founder of Justice for Migrant Women, said the farmworker community has been “shaken to its foundation” by the allegations against Cesar Chavez. (Courtesy of Monica Ramirez)
“The farmworker movement is a leaderful movement, and women have always been part of that leadership,” Ramirez said. But their work has often been made invisible, sometimes by the very men who stood beside them in building worker power for Latinx people in the United States.
“In order to have a movement, in order to have a boycott, in order to organize any kind of action, it’s often women who are helping to organize the meetings, helping to bring their compañeras,” Ramirez said.
Chavez was one of the most revered figures in the Latinx civil rights movement. The labor leader cofounded what became the United Farm Workers union alongside Huerta, and was most known for a series of strikes and protests that grew unionization efforts across California. After Chavez’s death in 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2014, former President Barack Obama designated his birthday, March 31, as a federal holiday to celebrate his legacy, which many states had already marked.
Now, many of those celebrations are being canceled or renamed after a bombshell, yearslong investigation published by The New York Times Wednesday found evidence of a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Chavez. Two women said Chavez sexually abused them for years as girls, when the organizer was in his 40s and had already become a powerful global figure. Ana Murguia said Chavez first assaulted her when she was 13; Debra Rojas was 12.
In the years following the abuse, both suffered from depression, panic attacks and substance abuse.
“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Rojas told the Times. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”
Huerta, the renowned activist who coined the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” spoke at length about emotional and physical abuse from her longtime organizing partner — a disclosure she had never made publicly. She told the Times that he raped her in a secluded grape field in 1966, and had pressured her to have sex with him another time during a work trip in 1960. Both encounters resulted in children. Huerta concealed the pregnancies and arranged for the baby girls to be raised by others.
She was shaken upon hearing the allegations from other women, and told the Times she struggles to reconcile the man she knew and the one who assaulted her.
Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta sits during an interview in San Francisco, Saturday, June 8, 2024. Huerta revealed she was raped by Cesar Chavez and pressured into sex during their years organizing together, disclosures she kept private for decades while building the farmworker movement. (Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/AP)
In a statement released Wednesday, Huerta said she carried her secret for 60 years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”
She said she spoke up because she learned there were others coming forward.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
Magaly Licolli knew exactly what Huerta was talking about in her statements about Chavez.
Licolli is the co-founder and executive director of Venceremos, an organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas, and she’s heard stories about sexual harassment and assault on women for years.
Before she started Venceremos, she was fired from another poultry worker organization after speaking up about multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault against a well-known organizer.
“Women came forward and accused the organizer of sexually assaulting them or sexually harassing them. When I brought that to the board, they didn’t believe it,” Licolli said. “I had to stand with the women … I cannot do this work pretending I’m doing justice when I’m hiding injustice.”
Licolli felt that echoed this week.
“Women of color, we are not trusted on what we go through. We have to prove with pictures, with testimony, our own stories for our own stories to be validated,” she said. “I’m happy that now it’s something that people are talking about, and I’m happy that people are now reflecting about what is the role of women in the movement and when we have to be silenced toward that kind of injustice to protect the work that we do.”
Magaly Licolli, co-founder of Venceremos, pointed to a pattern in organizing spaces where women who report abuse are doubted, ignored or pushed out. (Courtesy of Magaly Licolli)
A growing share of farmworkers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: about 26.4 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Most are Latina.
A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, found that women farmworkers are often at risk of sexual harassment or assault, with virtually every worker interviewed for the report saying they either had experienced harassment or assault or knew someone who had. Farmworkers work in mixed-gender settings, and they have limited worker protections But women typically lack avenues to report their experiences, the report’s authors wrote, in large part because of immigration status. As of 2022, most farmworkers were immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
“Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers,” the report said.
A 2024 review published in the Journal of Agromedicine suggested that as many as 95 percent of women farmworkers in the United States have experienced workplace sexual harassment.
None of the women in the Times story spoke publicly until recently because of the shame and fear associated with reporting abuse against prominent organizers.
But over the past decade, after the growth of the #MeToo movement and the release of millions of Epstein files that have implicated numerous people in powerful positions, survivors have been more willing to speak up about their experiences.
Ramirez, who also founded the public awareness campaign known as the Bandana Project to raise awareness of sexual violence against farmworker women, said she now expects more women to come forward with their own stories. At an event Wednesday night shortly after the news broke, she said one woman came up to her to tell her how sexual assault was a problem in the fields where she worked as a teenager.
“Now that we understand clearly that this issue of sexual violence is an endemic problem in our society … the question we have to answer is: Knowing that, how serious are we going to get in our commitment to ending the problem?”
California lawmakers already plan to change the name of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 to “Farmworkers Day,” and efforts are underway to remove his name from landmarks. But the real work to come will be about investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who worked in organizing before entering politics, said it was “devastating” that the claims took so long to come out. She said when she became an executive director of a nonprofit at 21, she, too, had faced situations that in hindsight were not appropriate, and left the organization with a responsibility to create safer environments for other young women.
“Oftentimes women, especially women of color, we end up having to hold so many things for the sake of the movement, family, community,” Delia Ramirez told the 19th. “I don’t believe that there is one hero for our movements. Movements are led by a collective, and you can’t create some pedestal for one person, because humans will always fail you.”
Rep. Delia Ramirez said movements are led by a collective and warned against placing any one individual on a pedestal. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/AP)
Moving forward, Monica Ramirez said people will be watching how leaders in the farmworker movement respond to the allegations. Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts? The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people.
Licolli, the poultry organizer, said she has “never romanticized the immigrant community and the immigrant movement.” Sexual abuse happens in every movement and it doesn’t negate the work that’s been done to secure worker power, she said.
And for the farmworker women who are leading this work, it feels more urgent than ever that they continue leading.
Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer in Washington state, leads Community to Community Development, an explicitly feminist and women-led organization — a perspective that she said lends itself to advocating for workers who are also parents, and that she said offers space for women farmworkers to assert their needs.
Guillen never met Chavez but was inspired to devote herself to organizing on behalf of farmworkers after his death. The news has been a “revision of everything that many of us know about the farmworker movement,” she said.
Her organization is removing images of Chavez from its office, Guillen said. “We revisited our values and principles in how we work together, reiterating there is no room for that,” she said, referring to sexual misconduct.
On Wednesday, while staff were still processing the reports, five farmworkers walked in. They had just lost their jobs.
Her staff switched gears, turning to figure out what those workers needed and how they could support them.
“They walked in reminding us this is the focus,” Guillen said. “This is why we’re here: To protect farmworkers.”
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