Dolores Huerta is smiling in the photo, wearing a trim teal-blue suit, her hair still black at 82, as President Obama places the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck. It was a moment that brought the best of American culture together in one room: an astronaut, a lyricist, a Nobel Prize'winning writer, the first female secretary of state, and Huerta'the labor activist who founded the United Farm Workers alongside Cesar Chavez. Last week, The New York Times revealed that Chavez had allegedly abused two underaged girls. Those girls, now 66 years old'Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas'told their stories to the Times. Rojas says that Chavez, who died in 1993, touched her breasts when she was only 12 and that three years afterward, while she was on the 1,000 Mile March with him in California, he arranged for her to stay at a motel where he raped her. At the same time as the article was published, Huerta issued a short but cutting statement, in Spanish and English, saying that...
learn more
