What remains of Chávez's legacy?

ONE SUMMER DAY in 1988, before the sun rose, my parents packed my three younger sisters and me into our beige Chevy station wagon.

- FLORENCIA RAMIREZ GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

CÉSAR CHÁVEZ, who led numerous marches for United Farm Workers, is accused of abusing women and girls over many years.

(Paul SAKUMA Associated Press)

We drove from Oxnard to Delano, Calif., to stand in support of what would become César Chávez's final fast. I remember the brutal heat, the crowded tent, the feeling we were part of something larger.

Chávez never came out to speak that day, He was too weak after 29 days of fasting. But we stayed. More than 3,000 of us waited there, believing in his campaign to draw attention to pesticide use in the fields where farmworkers labored with little protection from chemicals that he understood caused cancer among workers and birth defects in their children.

To learn now of the suffering Chávez caused — the sexual and emotional violence against young women, and against Dolores Huerta — is heartbreaking. It is infuriating. It forces a reckoning. Not only with who he was, but with the danger of turning people into symbols, placing them so high that their actions go unquestioned, and harm can happen in the shadow of that reverence.

There is no justification for his actions. It must be named clearly.

And still, the work that so many people fought for: the protections for farmworkers, the awareness of pesticides, the dignity of labor that work remains. It never belonged to one person.