As someone who was personally involved with the United Farm Workers and met with Cesar Chavez, the heartbreaking and disgusting stories about the union’s co-founder are revolting and deeply troubling. The abuse and rape allegations against the now departed Chavez deserve full treatment and exposure.

The New York Times thoroughly reported the union leadership’s chauvinism and the allegations that were ignored to protect the leader and the movement.

UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta said in a statement published by The New York Times: “I will continue my commitments to workers, as well as my commitment to women’s rights, to make sure we have a voice and that our communities are treated with dignity and given the equity that they have so long been denied. I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.”

Huerta is correct. The emphasis should be on the workers, especially the women, who deserve a full voice and deep respect. Every movement, no matter how valiant or aspirational, should reflect its values both internally and externally. Chavez and the union’s leadership team failed, and there is no excuse.

The farmworker movement brought national attention to the too often forgotten farmworkers, the people whose hard labor fills our tables. Huerta is a critical voice, and it is painful to learn about the secrets that troubled her soul as she rallied the nation for human rights. The farmworkers’ struggle for human decency inspired and shaped my young adult years.

In September 1973, I was a student at Illinois State University. As a good Catholic, I attended the Newman Center for Sunday Mass, where we were encouraged to support the UFW and the grape, lettuce and Gallo wine boycotts. The UFW had endured a bloody summer, with multiple beatings, arrests and deaths of farmworker activists in California. Workers left the Golden State to share their stories and build the boycott.

That month, we held a rally for the UFW on the ISU Quad. UFW organizer Gustavo Gutierrez and two women shared their stories.

I was deeply touched by their stories about working in the fields and their hopes for a better life through unionization. I became a UFW activist and helped organize pickets, marches and even the Newman Center choir as rally singers in Chicago.

Cesar Chavez was the public figure, but it was the basic dignity these workers displayed that inspired me. They reminded me of my own working-class family and our immigrant roots, striving for a better life and respect.

Women rallied for change downstate

In 1981, nursery workers in Onarga, a village 90 miles south of Chicago, wanted to organize. It was the farmworker women who led this effort. Maria Elena, Gloria Chiquita (“Little Gloria”) and Gloria Grande (“Tall Gloria”) all became fast friends. We tried to find medical care for Don Lupito, a slight, skinny man, with persistent ulcerous wounds on his legs, which he believed were from pesticide exposure. We gathered donations for the Illinois Farm Worker Service Center in Onarga. Chavez came to dedicate the center.

As the Reagan era dawned, the UFW was barely surviving in California. Yet the service center persisted because of those women. When the Illinois AFL-CIO asked what labor could do, they requested clean drinking water and portable toilets in the fields. The Illinois Field Sanitation Act resulted.

What Chavez did was shameful. Historians and advocates will rightfully probe the criminal allegations against him and the union executive board’s misogynistic failure to challenge his leadership.

Yet this is a moment to ask ourselves who still picks the lettuce and grapes, thins the broccoli and brings that bounty to our tables? Many are undocumented and live in fear of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are the neglected workers in our vast food system who are exposed to pesticides and do backbreaking, vital labor, and are proud of their contributions to our lives.

When it’s peach harvest time in Anna, Illinois, or melon season in the sandy soil outside Havana, Illinois, you’ll find farmworkers laboring. Metro Chicago has more agricultural workers than other parts of Illinois — they tend nurseries and landscape or mow lawns. When we consider Chavez, let’s not forget the workers, especially the women, still ignored and forgotten. What Chavez did was shameful and criminal; let’s focus on the workers who deserve dignity and decency.

Mike Matejka, of Normal, is a retired member of the Laborers International Union of North America Local 362 in Bloomington. For 40 years, he edited the Grand Prairie Union News for the Bloomington & Normal Trades & Labor Assembly. He was the governmental affairs director for the Great Plains Laborers District Council for 22 years.