I Wrote a Cesar Chavez Biography. This Is How His Secrets Stayed Buried.

There was a time more than a decade ago when I thought about Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers founder, almost every day. I pored over files and listened to him speak on hundreds of hours of tapes as I wrestled with writing a biography that captured his complexity and contradictions, his remarkable achievements as well as his profound flaws. The revelations earlier this month about his sexual assaults on young girls and women were shocking — but not altogether surprising.

He was never the secular saint he was successfully marketed as for so many years. That was why, long after he died in 1993, the most knowledgeable and logical potential biographers shied away from the subject. I knew enough to share their trepidation, but I decided that he was too significant to be rendered one-dimensional by the hagiography. Many destructive behaviors were well-documented and well-known, including the traumatic emotional abuse Mr. Chavez inflicted on people who had once been his closest allies. For many years, no one wanted to talk about that, either. Yet the record was there in the hundreds of boxes and tapes at the Walter P. Reuther Library in Detroit. Mr. Chavez had ordered it all preserved, understanding, perhaps, that it documented his place in history.

But the sexual abuse accusations remained hidden from public view until now. An investigation by the Times reporters Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes uncovered extensive evidence that Mr. Chavez groomed and abused girls and women.

I had heard plenty about his adultery, but nothing about sexual assaults. My overwhelming reaction to the new revelations was sadness, at the tragic coda to a story already full of heartbreak. I was not surprised that people who might have been in a position to know what happened either didn’t know or didn’t want to know — or, if they did know, they looked away. That was the ethos of the movement, intrinsic to both its success and ultimate downfall: “La causa” superseded everything else.

That is why reckoning with the Chavez legacy requires reckoning with the movement as well — a movement that once gave hope and inspiration to so many but withered away long ago.

In the last decade of his life, when Mr. Chavez had effectively dismantled the first successful union for farmworkers, he discovered people would pay money for his imprimatur. He refashioned himself as an entrepreneur. The union waned, the movement became moribund, but the Chavez name gained more and more currency and became shorthand for “Latino icon.”

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