The cast of “¡Sí Se Puede!” had been rehearsing for weeks when the story broke.
On March 18, 2026, the final day of tech rehearsal at Boyle Heights City Hall, the New York Times published an investigation into Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder, detailing allegations that he sexually abused and raped girls and women. Among those who came forward: Dolores Huerta herself, the labor leader whose life the play is entirely about. Huerta wrote in a statement that Chavez had coerced her into sex on one occasion and forced her on another, and that she had become pregnant each time and hidden those pregnancies.
Director Sara Guerrero read the story and wept. Then she started thinking about what came next.
“What would be the best way to continue to elevate this woman who endured a lot?” Guerrero said.
A Play Already in Motion
Center Theatre Group commissioned playwright Eliana Pipes to write “¡Sí Se Puede!” in March 2025, part of a pilot program to bring live theater to smaller, less-prominent regional venues across Los Angeles. The organization built its reputation on its flagship downtown theaters and its Culver City space, but the new initiative reflects an older impulse, the idea that theater has to move.
“We have to exist outside of the institutions, otherwise we’re not part of the global citizenship,” said Jesus Reyes, Center Theatre Group’s director of learning and community partnerships. “There’s so many young people and older people who have lost touch with art. So it’s also our responsibility to put it out there.”
Boyle Heights City Hall is the kind of venue that fits that vision. It’s a neighborhood space, not a performing arts complex. The audience sitting in those chairs comes from the same community whose history is being staged in front of them.
Pipes spent months preparing. She watched documentaries, read books, and interviewed people with direct ties to the farmworker movement. What she kept running into was a gap in how the story gets told.
“There’s this perception that farm work was only done by men,” Pipes said. “But there were women on the fields, there were women on the picket lines, and there were women in leadership in the United Farm Workers movement.”
Huerta, who cofounded the UFW alongside Chavez and organized the union’s legendary grape boycotts, often gets written into the margins of her own story. Pipes built a play that puts her at the center.
Deciding to Continue
When the Times investigation published on that last tech rehearsal day, Guerrero gathered with Pipes and other Center Theatre Group staff to figure out what to do. They could pull the show. They could delay. Or they could go forward.
“What really stood out to us was that we had always intended to elevate the story and call to action of Dolores Huerta,” Guerrero said.
That framing turned out to matter. The play was never really about Chavez. It was about Huerta: her organizing, her sacrifices, the decades she spent fighting for farmworkers who had no other advocates in the fields or at the bargaining table. The allegations against Chavez don’t erase that work. They also don’t make it simpler.
The question the creative team now sits with is one that a lot of people are sitting with after the Times story. How do you hold the genuine, documented gains of the farmworker movement alongside the harm caused by one of its central figures? The UFW grape boycotts forced growers to negotiate. They produced real contracts, real protections for workers in some of the most physically brutal and economically precarious jobs in California. Chavez built that. So did Huerta. So did thousands of unnamed workers.
The story was originally reported by LAist.
Those things happened. So did what Huerta described.
What the Play Does
“¡Sí Se Puede!” is designed for all ages, which shapes how it moves through this material. The show doesn’t avoid difficulty, but it keeps Huerta’s own story and voice as its anchor. Myrna Velasco plays Huerta, and the production’s staging at Boyle Heights City Hall puts actors in a space that feels less like a stage and more like a community meeting room, which is fitting. That’s where a lot of this history actually happened.
The farmworker movement was organized in small rooms, in church basements, in fields, in neighborhood halls not unlike the one where the show runs now. Pipes wrote toward that texture rather than away from it.
The timing of the production has added weight the creative team didn’t anticipate when they started rehearsals. Spring 2026 has become an unexpectedly significant moment for the legacy of the UFW and for how California reckons with the people who shaped its agricultural and labor history. That reckoning is still happening in real time, and “¡Sí Se Puede!” is now part of it whether the production intended to be or not.
Guerrero’s instinct, to keep going and keep the focus on Huerta, reflects what a lot of the women in this movement have always done. They stayed when it would have been easier to leave. They kept organizing when the conditions were hostile. Huerta herself has continued to speak and advocate well into her nineties.
The play runs at Boyle Heights City Hall as part of Center Theatre Group’s community touring program. Check Center Theatre Group’s website for current performance dates and community venue information.