The Burden of Sixty Years of Silence
What kind of world makes women’s truth telling take so long?
When news of the storied civil rights activist Cesar Chavez’s extensive sexual abuse was revealed by the New York Times last month, his public dethroning was swift.
He had been an icon in the Latino community for decades — fighting for the fair treatment of farm workers — with statues erected, murals painted and streets renamed to honor his work, especially after his death in 1993.
But after these revelations, those statues were pulled down, some murals painted over, and his name erased from streets and schools in just a few days — or, in some cases, just a few hours.
By contrast, Dolores Huerta, one of Chavez’s co-founders of the United Farm Workers’ Union as well as one of his victims, says she carried the truth of what happened to her silently for 60 years. She felt that advancing the rights of farmworkers was more important than speaking out, she told the New York Times.
Sixty years vs. a few days: That disparity tells us something uncomfortable about life today. We are quicker to strip a fallen idol of his honors than to ask what it costs a woman to live beside her suffering in silence, often for decades. And it happens all the time.
The New York Times investigation into Chavez’s abuses exposed the long-hidden allegations about what he did to Huerta, along with Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, who were abused as girls; and at least several other women. But it also revealed what the world still struggles to make sense of: the long years that pass before so many women’s disclosures of abuse.
E.B. Boyd
Silence does not mean that nothing happened
As a society, we are good at narrating a scandal once it breaks. We are much less practiced at interpreting the silence of women like Huerta, or of Annabella Sciorra, the actress who was raped by Harvey Weinstein and stayed silent for 25 years; or of Virginia Guiffre, who was serially abused by Jeffrey Epstein and others, but didn’t go public for more than two decades.
Huerta’s silence, like the silence of so many other women, is not incidental to this story. It is one of its revelations.
Silence does not disqualify truth. It does not erase the harm. And it does not mean that nothing happened. Silence can be fear, shame, love, protection, calculation, exhaustion, or simply the only way to keep a life intact long enough to continue.
We misread silence when we treat it as dishonesty, or when we consider speaking out publicly to be the only valid form of courage — or the only path toward healing.
To me, a Korean immigrant and a scholar of clergy sexual abuse in immigrant faith communities, the story of what happened with Chavez and the women he hurt is painfully familiar: a revered leader, a righteous cause, fear of scandal, and the quiet expectation that the wounded will carry the burden so the institution can survive. When the leader becomes too symbolically necessary to question, the cause too important to endanger, and internal truth starts to look like an external threat, silence becomes the non-negotiable; the horrific by-product.
According to The New York Times, Huerta kept the truth secret because she believed exposing it would hurt the very movement to which she had dedicated her life. She also told The Times that although she had never thought of herself as a victim, she now understands herself as a survivor. But the blinding speed of Chavez’s public reckoning reveals the pressure Huerta must have been living with all along. She knew that telling the truth would not just affect one man. It would shake the public mythology built around him.
Over and over we have seen this. With Harvey Weinstein, the head of a movie empire. And Bill Cosby, who made America laugh. With Matt Lauer, to whom Americans tuned in every morning. With the hip hop mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and the restaurant empresario Maria Batali. The list goes on. Some women stayed silent to prop up the men and their enterprises — how can I be the one to ruin a good thing? — some spoke out and tore them down. Either way, however long it took, it is their choice.
Josie Cox
From Chavez to the Church
Members of any church know this pattern well. The culture within religious institutions of tolerating sexual abuse is sustained by the idealization of leaders, a community’s dependence on an institution, fear of scandal, and formal and informal penalties for telling the truth. Too often, disclosure is reframed as betrayal, and silence is equated with loyalty. The harmed person is asked to carry not only their own pain but also the burden of institutional and even community survival.
In my own work as a therapist and scholar of religious harm and trauma, I’ve learned that healing does not move on a standard timetable. Nor is there one sole narrative that fits the pattern. Some understand themselves as victims, others as survivors, others, like Huerta, as both. Some experience their life mainly in terms of coping; others, at times, as thriving. Some may speak of what they endured directly, indirectly, partially, or never. But it is only by making women’s well-being central that we can explode this myth: that speaking out, immediately and in public, is the only authentic form of agency. Quiet endurance, confiding in one trusted person, practicing a healing ritual — all of these can be part of how people begin to move forward.
Like Huerta, a person can be politically powerful and profoundly harmed at the same time. She can help build a movement and still keep a violation secret. Silence can mark the labor of staying alive, protecting others, and refusing to destroy a cause worth believing in.
That is one of the deepest contradictions the Chavez reckoning exposes: Communities under siege often speak the language of justice in public while privately asking the most vulnerable to keep quiet and defer justice. And the more threatened a community feels from the outside, the easier it becomes to demand silence inside. That forces women from immigrant communities, especially, into a cruel bargain: Speak out because it is the right thing to do (but risk being ostracized) or stay silent and protect the community’s reputation at enormous personal cost.
The real question here is not why Delores Huerta waited so long. It’s what kind of world makes truth-telling take 60 years? Real solidarity does not ask women to absorb harm quietly, for the sake of a movement or a powerful man. And for any woman who has carried harm in silence, this should be said plainly and clearly: Your silence does not cancel your truth. It may be what your survival demands.
