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The FBI's Secret File on César Chavez(nothing....)
UCSD ^ | 1996 | Richard Steven Street

Posted on 03/18/2026 6:59:15 PM PDT by Vendome

Stimulated by little more than idle talk and unsubstantiated gos-
sip, FBI surveillance of Chavez under the administrations of Lyndon
B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter contin-
ued over ten years, occupying the attention of dozens of FBlagents in
California, a half-dozen other states, and even Mexico. When all
related materials are added in—including parallel and cooperative
investigations with other intelligence agencies—the FBI dossier on) “
Chavez runs to over 1,500 pages, with new documents being disi
closed regularly. Outlining J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to uncover
communist infiltration and control the farmworker movement, the
file emerges as an extended brief reiterating one central, overriding,
and completely astonishing fact about Chavez. It is something that
can not be said of Martin Luther King or Robertand John . Kennedy
after the FBI scoured through their lives and rummaged through
their garbage. In fact, it is something which can not be said about
most people after they have been subjected to years of surveillance
by such a vaunted law enforcement agency as the FBI

What becomes abundantly clear in Chavez's FBI file is that after
Hoover’s men wrapped-up their spying, bound up their foot-thick  dossier, cross-referenced and indexed their material, and analyzed
hundreds of reports, they came up empty. They found nothing on
Chévez, No communis* leanings stained his reputation. No ugly
incidents detracted frem his reputation. No misappropriation of
funds marred his union administration. No extramarital affairs
undermined his reputation as a family man. No subversive activities
castsuspicion on the movement he chhampioned. ... Chavez never
displayed even one iota of disloyalty.

(Excerpt) Read more at library.ucsd.edu ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: cancelled; cancelledbycommies; cesarchavez; defamation; dumb; is; news; sexualabuser; todays; wasteofatopic
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1 posted on 03/18/2026 6:59:15 PM PDT by Vendome
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To: Vendome

So are the democrats turning on Chavez because of his anti-illegal alien stance?


2 posted on 03/18/2026 7:02:25 PM PDT by mitchjackson1972 (End usury - It's OK to be white - https://ussliberty.org/)
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To: Vendome; All
HELP NEEDED
3 posted on 03/18/2026 7:04:24 PM PDT by deport
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To: Vendome

DNA will tell the tale.


4 posted on 03/18/2026 7:04:57 PM PDT by Mariner (War Criminal #18)
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To: mitchjackson1972

dunno what the game here is.....

they certainly had ample opportunity to demolish his reputation particularly when the last biography movie was released....”Cesar Chavez” 2014


5 posted on 03/18/2026 7:12:18 PM PDT by Vendome (I've Gotta Be Me https://youtu.be/wH-pk2vZG2M)
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To: Vendome

If Chavez was around now the left would call him a hitler nazi ICE loving fascist:

“Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) historically opposed illegal immigration, viewing undocumented workers as strikebreakers who undermined union labor, lowered wages, and hindered organizing efforts

During the 1960s and 1970s, Chavez even reported undocumented workers to federal immigration authorities and set up “wet lines” on the border to stop them

Key aspects of Chavez’s stance included:

Anti-Strikebreaker Focus: Chavez believed growers used undocumented workers to undermine union efforts and break strikes, famously leading to the “Illegals Campaign”.

“Wet Lines” Initiative: In the 1970s, Chavez authorized the creation of “wet lines”—teams of UFW members who acted as a private patrol to prevent migrants from crossing the Arizona-Mexico border, according to VOA - Voice of America English News and San Jose Inside.

Pressure on Federal Officials: He pressured federal authorities to stop the flow of undocumented workers from Mexico, according to abcnews.com and Reddit.”


6 posted on 03/18/2026 7:16:00 PM PDT by mitchjackson1972 (End usury - It's OK to be white - https://ussliberty.org/)
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To: Vendome

When will the files on JEdger [and the Fey Wray] be released?


7 posted on 03/18/2026 7:16:36 PM PDT by Paladin2 (YMMV)
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To: mitchjackson1972


8 posted on 03/18/2026 7:24:24 PM PDT by Vendome (I've Gotta Be Me https://youtu.be/wH-pk2vZG2M)
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To: mitchjackson1972

La Raza types use the word coconut to describe race traitors. Brown on the outside, white inside.


9 posted on 03/18/2026 7:27:58 PM PDT by shotgun
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; BraveMan; cardinal4; ...

10 posted on 03/18/2026 7:33:24 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (The Demagogic Party is just a collection of violent, rival street gangs.)
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To: mitchjackson1972

Whatever the reason they are now - 30 years later - having a freak out....

I’m enjoying the show.


11 posted on 03/18/2026 7:34:12 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd (Import the third world. Become the second world.)
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To: Paladin2

I didn’t know that JEHoover was a gardner, nor that Miss
Ray swung the other way.


12 posted on 03/18/2026 7:50:17 PM PDT by szweig (HYHEY Have You Had Enough Yet??!?)
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To: mitchjackson1972

You bet.,.


13 posted on 03/18/2026 8:01:01 PM PDT by sheik yerbouty ( Make America and the world a jihad free zone!)
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To: Vendome

Files on MLK due to be released next year kept sealed by a judge for 50 years


14 posted on 03/18/2026 8:01:36 PM PDT by Nextrush (FREEDOM IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS, REMEMBER REV; NIEMOLLER)
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To: shotgun

That is an interesting factoid on a thread about a man who condemned La Raza.


15 posted on 03/18/2026 8:10:49 PM PDT by TigersEye (Are the RINOs helping the Democrats wage their color revolution?)
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To: Vendome; piasa

Street is a left-wing activist from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement who worked with Chavez, and he’s summarizing the files on Chavez very selectively and inaccurately, following a pattern typical of Marxist academics who publish sympathetic summaries of FBI surveillance targets. But even his exonerating summary doesn’t match the details in his article, as he notes several names linked to Chavez that were indeed indicative of Communist associations. There’s plenty on Chavez in the FBI’s files. Much of it is cross-referenced with other file subjects, and anything on Chavez’s sexual crimes would likely not be unredacted in his main file. If it was recorded at all, it’d probably be buried in the Official and Confidential files, but even those aren’t complete records of everything subjects did. The O&C files do note an investigation into ties (via Chicago Outfit representative Sidney Korshak) between Chavez’s union and Schenley Industries, a mob front linked to Joseph Kennedy. As far as his Communist ties, I summarized some info that came up in the FBI’s 1972 report on VVAW, where the Bureau was looking into the alliance between VVAW and UFWOC, with La Raza and the Brown Berets figuring into the mix. One item the file notes they were looking at was Cesar’s brother Andy Chavez and his involvement with the Black Panthers. Other names of note (some mentioned in Street’s piece) were Harvey Richards (one of Street’s fellow photojournalists for the Delano Grape Strike—even Street’s article mentions he was a Communist Party member!), Pangburn Goepel, Sam Kushner, Larry Itliong. And Huerta was under surveillance herself. She’s still alive, so her full file isn’t likely yet available, but here’s a piece of info on her:

* * *

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/dec/01/cesar-chavez-fbi-file/

December 1, 2015
FBI thought Cesar Chavez was only into labor organizing for the money
Bureau’s informant insisted the union activist was “solely interested in making a name for himself and to gain financially”

Written by Lukas Knight
Edited by JPat Brown

“The document also made note of Chavez’s intentions to start a credit union on behalf of the financially-troubled Filipino and Mexican farm workers whom he sought to represent, as well as the fact that Dolores Clara Huerta, a woman closely associated with Chavez’s movement had secured a $267,887 grant for the NFWA from the Office of Economic Opportunity.”


16 posted on 03/19/2026 1:58:21 AM PDT by Fedora
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To: Vendome
I actually met Cesar Chavez and got to know him a bit back in the 1980s through a strange set of circumstances.

Our campus loud mouth activist jerks had invited him to campus and staged a protest with high profile media attention on Chavez's grape boycott.

I was with a group of counter protesters. We didn't really have anything against Chavez or the United Farm Workers - we were just really fed up with our affluent and obnoxious communist campus activists who were always bringing guys like Chavez and Jesse Jackson on campus to stage intentionally disruptive protests for the media who always turned out in droves.
We were all wearing cloths with funny grape paraphernalia or humorous grape rhymes and we were handing out grapes, grape juice, grape soda, grape jelly bellies, peanut butter sandwiches with grape jelly and stuff like that just to piss off our obnoxious campus radicals

It worked spectacturalyy and we actually might have stolen more media attention from them than they got - the guys wearing fruit of the loom underwear on the outside of their street cloths may have put us over the top.

I was invited to a faculty event honoring Chavez later that evening. He recognized me from earlier in the day and approached me to ask me if I was one of the guys with the counter protesters and, if so, what the heck I was doing there.

I told him we had nothing against him or his union, we just really disliked the entitled little rich commie loud moth brats who had never worked a day in their lives and who seemed to spend all their time disrupting campus life with protests, sit ins and building take overs instead of studying. Except ,of course, when they weren't using misappropriated student union funds to take group trips to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro or to travel to national Marxist conventions where they lived high on the hog staying at expensive hotels and eating at expensive restaurant using money intended to go to student groups they defunded after their Marxist take over of the student government.

He laughingly agreed with my assessment of his entitled , never worked a day in their lives dilettante student activist hosts but said he needed them to help bring media attention to his cause and his workers for whom he seemed genuinely concerned.

He invited me to a protest march later that weekend to see what a real protest march with real farm workers was all about. Amazingly, I ended up marching with Cesar Chavez in a United Farm Workers demonstration - I got to know the guy enough to learn that that the Chavez was a real deal labor leader trying to help better the lives of his genuinely exploited workers, not some commie poser like Jesse Jackson who used his position to shake down corporations for personal gain. .

Ended up respecting and actually liking the guy.

I think I still have the UFW shirt and cap he gave me for the march tucked away somewhere.

17 posted on 03/19/2026 4:30:34 AM PDT by rdcbn1 (..when poets buy guns, tourist season is over................Walter R. Mead)
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To: Vendome

Former Freeper Holyscroller (died in 2020) used to have a monthly newspaper called the Silent Majority V.O.I.C.E (Voters Objective Information about Current Events) that was sent to subscribers around the country. I first learned about Chavez when she did an expose on him back in either the late 60’s or the early 70’s when he was leading strikes.


18 posted on 03/19/2026 4:57:03 AM PDT by RainMan ((Democrats ... making war against America since April 12, 1861))
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To: Vendome

Grew up in San Joaquin Valley when he was active, i heard that he was a pimp before UFW.


19 posted on 03/19/2026 5:06:23 AM PDT by Striperman (Striperman)
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To: Vendome

Either A. This summary is a laughably dishonest edit; or B. The FBI was incredibly inept even back in the day.


20 posted on 03/19/2026 5:51:54 AM PDT by misterdarcey (Abandon all nuance, ye who enter here.)
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