My grandmother, Dolores Huerta, and the cost of protecting the story

⏱️ Reading time: 6 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for social impact professionals navigating power, career, and change.

What's inside today's newsletter:

1. Why my grandmother left everything she knew to follow a man who wasn't worth it
2. What Dolores Huerta chose to protect for 60 years — and what it cost her
3. What Marshall Ganz got right, and what he left out
4. Heart and strategy: is there a third way, or does something always have to give?

I haven't written in a month.

That's not like me. So I owe you an explanation.

I was in California for 10 days visiting my family for Eid al-Fitr — the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. It had been years since I spent it with them. This time I brought my partner and my puppy. Both had been met with some skepticism before. My father, who is 79 and who does not express his feelings unless he is cutting and handing you fruit, handed my partner fruit. That's love, in his language. You learn to read between the lines.

I've been working on a family history project — documenting the stories of the Partition generation before they're gone. My father agreed to be interviewed on camera. He said he might not be around to see the fruits of it. But as long as we remember, that's enough.

What he told me sent me into a spiral I haven't fully come out of yet. In the best way.

1. 🌙 What Dadi Amma knew when she packed her bags

My grandmother — Dadi Amma — grew up in Sironj, a village in what was then the princely state of Bhopal in British India. Her husband, my grandfather, already had another wife and family in Delhi. When Partition broke out, he fled to the newly created Pakistan. He left her and her two small children behind.

She had a choice.

She could have stayed in Sironj with her blood relatives — her father, her brothers, the people who had always known her.

Instead, she packed up her two children, including my father as a baby, and followed him. Across a border still being drawn in blood. Her sister and mother eventually followed. Her father, her brothers, their families — they stayed in what became modern-day India. That branch of the family, for all practical purposes, was gone.

Here is the part that cuts me every time: the marriage was never good. My grandfather and grandmother were effectively separated for most of their lives. He wasn't even invited to his own sons' weddings, including my father's.

She left everything. And the thing she left for wasn't what she thought it was.

Or maybe it wasn't entirely about him. Maybe it was about possibility — a new country, a different kind of future, the belief that something better was waiting on the other side of an impossible decision. I've thought a lot about what moves a woman to make that crossing. I don't think it was one thing.

She made a strategic decision and a decision from the heart. I keep asking whether they were the same decision. I still don't know.

2. 💔 What Dolores chose to protect — and what it cost her

On the plane to California, I read the New York Times investigation into Cesar Chavez, the leader of the Mexican farmworkers movement in the US. And I kept thinking about Dadi Amma — about women who make enormous choices in service of something they believe is bigger than themselves, and what it costs when the thing they were protecting turns out to have been worth less than they paid.

If you haven't read it: the reporting found extensive evidence that Chavez groomed and sexually abused girls as young as 12 within the movement. Girls whose fathers marched alongside him. Girls who trusted him because their families trusted him.

And Dolores Huerta — his co-founder, the woman who coined "Sí, se puede" — disclosed publicly for the first time that he had assaulted her. Twice. Once in 1960. Once in 1966, when he drove her to a secluded field and raped her.

She told no one. Not her friends. Not her children. She held it for nearly 60 years.

She said she stayed silent because she didn't want to hurt the movement.

I watched the Dolores Huerta documentary on that same flight. There's a through-line in her story — how slowly, painfully slowly, she came to feminism. She was Catholic. She was committed to unity. She believed, for a long time, that raising what happened to her would be a stain on something larger than herself.

I am a survivor of intimate partner violence. I am not going to tell you her choice was wrong. I understand, in my body, the calculus she was making. You protect the thing you built. You protect the people who depend on it. You absorb the harm so the work can continue.

But I also know what that absorption costs. And I know that the narrative she was protecting — the mythology of Chavez — was ultimately protecting him, not the movement.

The movement was real. It was built by thousands of people. It mattered enormously. But one man got to stand at the center of it, and that gave him cover for decades of harm.

3. 📜 Marshall Ganz's letter, and the love that disappoints you

Marshall Ganz — the Harvard professor whose organizing framework I've drawn on in my own work — published a letter last week responding to the investigation. He worked alongside Chavez for seven years. He was on the UFW national executive board.

His letter was honest. It was careful. And for me, it was not enough.

He acknowledged the harm. He asked one of the survivors for forgiveness for not seeing her. He wrote about the necessity of holding the good and the harm together — that erasing Chavez entirely would cheapen the movement thousands built, and that defending him would dishonor those he hurt.

He is right about that.

What he didn't do: name Dolores Huerta. Acknowledge what she lost. Reckon with what the inner circle enabled by not asking the questions it could have asked. She wasn't someone who looked away — she was someone he worked beside for decades who had been carrying her own assault the entire time. She deserved to be named. She deserved acknowledgment. Her omission from his letter is its own kind of erasure.

I read his letter twice. I was disappointed. I also still respect him. I have learned from him. I can hold both.

That, actually, is the point.

Good people protect narratives when the stakes feel high enough. That's what makes this so hard to untangle. It's not that everyone around Chavez was cynical or complicit. It's that the mythology had become the movement, in their minds. And questioning the mythology felt like burning down something real.

4. 🧭 The third way I'm still looking for

Here's the question that won't leave me alone.

Was Dadi Amma's choice strategic or was it from the heart? Was Dolores Huerta's silence strategic or was it from the heart?

Both. I think it's always both. The strategic calculus is made inside a body that is grieving or hoping or afraid. The emotional decision is shaped by a realistic read on what is possible. They are not separate things. We just tell ourselves they are.

At Fearless, we talk a lot about leading from both — not heart or strategy but the place where they meet. I believe that. I teach that.

But I'm sitting with the harder version right now. What happens when protecting the people and work you love requires protecting a narrative that is actively harming someone else? What happens when loyalty and accountability point in opposite directions? Is there a third way? A path where you don't have to absorb the harm to keep the movement alive?

I don't have a clean answer. Dadi Amma didn't leave one. Dolores Huerta is 95 and still holding contradictions that would break most people.

What I keep coming back to is something my father said during our interview: he may not be around to see the fruits of this work. But as long as we remember, that's enough.

Maybe the third way starts with remembering the whole story. Not the mythology. Not the erasure. The whole, complicated, painful, real truth — including the women who held it together while being torn apart.

I'm still processing. I'll keep writing.

There are women in this story — Dadi Amma, Dolores Huerta, Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas — who made choices under conditions most of us will never fully understand. They paid prices we will never fully know.

What strikes me is that all of them, eventually, chose to tell the truth. Even when the timing was costly. Even when no one was ready to hear it.

That's the leadership this moment is asking for. Not the kind that protects the narrative. The kind that can hold the full truth — especially when it's inconvenient.

Maya 🧡

P.S. Next week on Thursday, April 16, I'm hosting a free 90-minute workshop: From Reactive to Strategic: Spring Leadership Reset. If any of this landed — the questions about leading when you're processing something hard, about staying grounded when the pressure is relentless — come. We already have 118 people registered. Spots are limited.

If this brought up difficult feelings: Please reach out to a trusted friend, therapist, or support resource.

If this newsletter resonated with you, please forward it to a leader who needs to hear this. Sometimes we need permission to check in with ourselves. Sometimes we need language for what we're experiencing. Sometimes we just need to know: you're not alone, and community is also how we heal.

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