Imagine my Surprise
by Jane Grovijahn
Say their names!
Debra Rojas and Ana Munguia, born as farmworker children, grew up in an America that denied them hope of livelihood, decent schooling, ordinary comforts of food, stable housing and healthcare. They also carried a punishing secret, now smashed open, naming César Chávez, the iconic leader of the United Farmworkers, as a sexual predator.
Say their names!
I can’t begin to imagine the weight put upon their tender selves by an entire movement that needed so badly their hero and a victory against unending indignities over bent backs and hands browned. Pain-riddled, from decades of exploitation and abuse in scorching fields; they endured neglect in segregated schools, hunger and indecent housing.
Say their names!
Standing alongside their parents, part of a vigorous generational commitment to la causa, I imagine they stood proud and determined, advocating for the decency of their lives, buoyed in ebullient wisps offering a future different from the past of their elders. Within those untold narratives, lives the warmth of love still lingering tangibly between parent and child, with its grace of hope and reserves of possibility, often unimagined by white America in its ignorance and arrogance of that time.
Say their names!
Imagine my surprise in feeling gut-punched in the most intimate way as I read the recent searing New York Times reporting of the connection we shared: childhood sexual abuse and rape; bringing me to a new revulsion rising from my tender and tenacious self so lovingly restored over the years. It wasn’t the shared agony of girlhood destroyed that ripped me open but what the torn away curtain revealed in the legendary life and legacy of a man, become hero, now identified as a rapist.
Say their names!
We can never really know the embodied sacrifices Debra Rojas and Ana Munguia made. Now fleshed out in years of grooming and predatory sexual harm, they too carried a people’s movement upon their backs. This unimaginable burden must be honored in our renewed work to restore the significance of girlhood, women’s agency and embodiment in the streets, our homes and history.
Say their names!
I wish I had known both Rojas and Munguia before I began teaching in an undergraduate classroom glistening with a majority of mostly Mexican American young women longing for a world that saw them whole. Instead, I handed onto them the words and deeds substantiated in years of sacrificial hopes born of a man who violated young women just like them. I too feel shame in this deep
scandal. I can no longer say his name. And that can never be enough! The books can be tossed, marches renamed and recurring signposts of las avenidas y calles, can be inscribed differently but what he took from us cannot be unspoken or left in the corners of history.
I can never know the luminous details embedded in decades of struggle in their labor of silenced sorrow. But I can learn from that silencing done to them in creative and courageous ways. What today, must I insist on when in classrooms, boardrooms or bedrooms, with walled-in efforts to speak for us, speak over us, speak us into shame by denying damage done to us?
I will say their names: Debra Rojas and Ana Munguia over and over, asking others to hold space for their bravery all around us, not just in the telling. Their sacred act of breaking silence always matters but demands more from us. Here we are called to make room for all our stories, hold space for the taking down of our heroes if necessary to insist on the absolute integrity of our indivisible right to
women’s bodily integrity.
Join me in repurposing our rage into a rigor of resolve to risk our reputations, like Rojas and Munguia, to give girls and women, including our trans sisters a new passage into embodied honor and hope.