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| - Chavez said people who illegally crossed over the border from Mexico into the U.S. were detrimental to the labor rights movement because corporations hired them to replace striking workers. He argued that such practices also drove down wages. Chavez also supported the U.S. Border Patrol's efforts to capture migrants attempting to cross the border illegally.
In March 2026, The New York Times published an investigation accusing labor rights activist Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, of having sexually abused girls and women over many years. The report led many people to reevaluate Chavez's contribution to civil rights movements in the U.S. and reflect on his past comments.
Numerous online users pointed out that Chavez allegedly used the pejorative term "wetbacks" to refer to people entering the U.S. illegally. Snopes readers also searched our website for proof that Chavez used such language. One post on X read:
Anyone who actually paid attention to Cesar Chavez knew he hated illegal immigrants called them wetbacks, was extremely violent, and literally held people hostage.
Yet the left pushed us to celebrate him like a saint.
Chavez did use the pejorative term "wetbacks" to refer to people illegally crossing over the border from Mexico into the U.S. Snopes confirmed his comments through video footage. As such, we rate this claim true.
According to Merriam-Webster, "wetback" is a common insult and contemptuous term for a Mexican who enters the U.S. illegally. It originated from migrants' practice of wading or swimming the Rio Grande along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Archival footage from the Bay Area TV Archive in San Francisco State University shows Chavez using the pejorative term in a 1972 interview. In a video titled "Chavez explains the need for boycotts" he spoke out against Proposition 22, a ballot measure he said would limit farmers' unionization efforts. A transcript of an excerpt from his remarks is as follows (emphasis ours):
CHAVEZ: It takes the right to strike from us, and it also takes the right of boycotting.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you need those rights? What's so important about that?
CHAVEZ: Well you say, one main thing in agriculture is different, is always been different, this is why agriculture and farm workers were never organized before — as long as we have a poor country bordering California, it's going to be very difficult to win strikes, as strikes are won normally by other unions. With an employer, as is the case right now, one of the strikes we have with the Butte Gas and Oil Co. where we've closed them down, they've been unable to get strikebreakers, or gotten very few. And then all of a sudden, yesterday morning, they brought in 220 wetbacks. These are the illegals from Mexico. Now there is no way to defend that kind of strikebreaking. And so therefore, the only way to win strikes is by then taking our fight to the citizens, to the people in the cities, especially, and have them help us boycott those products that we're striking. And we need that. And that's the only way we're going to be able to get contracts. I venture to say without that, we couldn't possibly organize unions.
Chavez used the same language for those migrants in a 1974 interview. He said (emphasis ours):
INTERVIEWER: This question of the illegals I find very interesting. Would you say that it's, at this particular moment, as important as any of the other problems facing the union?
CHAVEZ: Oh yes, in the last two weeks, it has become an emergency for us. There's an awful lot of illegals coming in by the hundreds, by the thousands. […] Some of the crews where there is now strikebreaking, some of those crews are 100% illegals. Outright, openly, with no attempt to disguise it. And so it's so bad now that we estimate that 60% to 70% of the farm workers in California — of the resident workers, of the citizen — are out of the job because of the wetbacks. They're coming in by the thousands, just unbelievable. See, they're coming in with the consent of the Immigration Service, which is part of the Department of Justice. How else could they come? We, for instance, know that if you go to Coachella, you go to around the El Paso area, the secondary immigration checkpoints have been unmanned now for at least three, four weeks. They're closed or at night, they're dark. There aren't any patrolmen there. It's a gimmick. We think that it's a prelude at the beginning to a big drive on the part of the administration and the Mexican government to bring the Bracero Program again [a federal farm labor program that brought Mexican migrants to the U.S. on short-term contracts to address labor shortages after World War II]. It's a vicious attack on the local worker, and it's just one of those things that every business thinks they can get away with. And our job is to inform the whole country what's happening together with a boycott and solve it that way. And so the workers themselves — even though a lot of them are of Mexican descendancy themselves — are very uptight, very, very worried and very mad about the illegals coming to break their strikes. And it takes away their jobs, their livelihood and so forth.
INTERVIEWER: Does that put you in an uncomfortable position to be against the illegal immigrants because they are from Mexico? In other words, part of your program has been an appeal to equal treatment of people of Mexican origin.
CHAVEZ: Oh yeah, sure, but we're speaking of the legal ones you know. We don't want Mexico to export its poverty to us and then we pay — it's not their culture, it's not society in general, it's a farm worker — again paying for those sins, you know. Mexico should take the initiative and stop exporting the poverty to us. They should do something about the rural economy over there and then, see, it's a way of breaking the strike, it's a way of demoralizing the farmworkers.
Footage of Chavez's
A 1968 archival report from Time magazine also illustrated the tension between Chavez's United Farm Workers movement and migrants entering the US:
All but a handful of the illegal immigrants are simply sent back across the border, but many return. They have become a special curse to the A.F.L.C.I.O. United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, which is waging an uphill struggle to organize migrant laborers. Illegal workers, the union charges, have been hired by union-hating farmers to break strikes. About 2,200 wetbacks have been arrested in the past six months in California's Kern County, the scene of a bitter strike against growers of table grapes organized by Cesar Chavez, leader of the farm workers. Other strikebreakers, the union alleges, have been recruited illegally from among "green-card" workers—aliens who hold U.S. residence permits but commute from Mexico. The going price for a forged green card, the union says, is a mere $150.
In the biography "The Crusades of Cesar Chavez," journalist Miriam Pawel detailed how the UFW carried out its own border enforcement led by Chavez's cousin
As soon as Cesar left the United States, Manuel set up the "wet line," a private UFW patrol along the Arizona border designed to stop workers who routinely crossed illegally in search of work. The philosophy behind the wet line (as in "wetbacks," the common term for those who crossed the border illegally) was consistent with the union's position that illegal immigrants should be blocked from working as strikebreakers. Ostensibly, the wet line existed to strengthen a citrus strike in the Yuma lemon groves by convincing Mexicans who might work as scabs to turn around and stay home. But the UFW night patrols did not stop to ask Mexicans walking across the open border where they planned to work, nor did the private patrol use verbal persuasion on those tempted to scab. By the time Cesar was en route home from his audience with the Pope, stories had begun to surface about widespread violence and beatings along the wet line.
Chavez amended his views over the years, eventually supporting the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave legal status to millions of immigrants. Today, the UFW also supports immigration reform.
For further reading, Snopes has reported on rumors of immigration raids against farm workers in California and the UFW's advocacy during that time.
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