When then-President Obama awarded California labor leader Dolores Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — one person was notably absent from the ceremony in the White House’s East Room: Julie Chavez Rodriguez.

Huerta has known Chavez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of the legendary Cesar Chavez, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union with Huerta, since she was an infant. Chavez Rodriguez was working in the Obama administration at the time, but those who know her said her absence from the ceremony was not the least bit surprising.

President Obama is introduced by Julie Chavez Rodriguez before a screening in 2014 of “Cesar Chavez,” a film about her grandfather and labor leader Cesar Chavez, at
the Old Executive Office Building on White House grounds.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

“I couldn’t find Julie because she was busy working. And it’s like, ‘You should be sitting in the front row,’” said Valerie Jarrett, who served as a senior advisor to Obama. “Well, there’s no way she was going to do anything like that. She always demurs from the spotlight and … has a reputation for getting things done, doing the work, but without any drama and ruffling of feathers, which is pretty extraordinary in the political world.”

This track record is among the reasons President Biden selected the 46-year-old Chavez Rodriguez to manage his reelection campaign. And once he decided to not seek reelection in July amid mounting concerns about his cognitive skills and lagging poll numbers, Chavez Rodriguez — who has a deep, long-standing relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris — was named her presidential campaign manager.

Her practice of staying behind the curtain no longer possible, Chavez Rodriguez has emerged as a public voice for Harris on issues from running-mate selection to border policy, and has courted critical voting blocs, such as Latinos and working-class residents in battleground states.

“I’ve seen who she’s fighting for when she’s in the halls of power,” Chavez Rodriguez recently told hundreds of Harris supporters at a union hall in Phoenix. “She fights for families like ours.”

Julie Chavez Rodriguez, then manager of President Biden’s reelection campaign, speaks at a news conference in Miami in 2023.

(Lynne Sladky / Associated Press)

Her role is a watershed moment for a Latina in national politics.

But her higher profile is also driven by questions about whether some Latino voters, whom Chavez Rodriguez’s family was instrumental in organizing starting decades ago in California farm fields, have soured on the Democratic Party — and whether the party can motivate enough of them to cast ballots in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona.

“The origin story of the Latino voter literally begins in her bloodline,” said Mike Madrid, a veteran Latino Republican consultant in California, whose book, “The Latino Century,” was published in June. “Can she be the Chavez who takes this to the next level and reconfigures it for a new age? Or will she be the last of her own kind and let it all burn down?”

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy breaks bread with union leader Cesar Chavez as Chavez ends a 25-day fast to support a strike against grape growers in Delano, Calif., on March 10, 1968.

(Bettmann Archive)

When Biden began his presidency, he selected a bronze bust of Cesar Chavez to place on a table in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk and alongside pictures of his own family.

To Chavez Rodriguez, her grandfather was “Tata Cesar.” But to the world, the onetime farmworker who died in 1993 was an impassioned labor and civil rights leader whose organizing work with Huerta and nonviolent protests — fasts, strikes and boycotts — led to dramatic improvements in the lives of farmworkers.

She was nurtured in the UFW headquarters in Central California, and she and her cousins joked that her family held pickets instead of picnics.

As an adolescent, Chavez Rodriguez was arrested alongside her parents and sister for urging a boycott of grapes picked by nonunion workers outside a New Jersey supermarket.

The same year, 1988, she fasted in solidarity with her grandfather to protest the use of pesticides on table grapes, and passed out fliers about the issue to grocery store customers in Fresno. What happened next was an experience that brought her the “deepest pain” she had felt in her young life — and a lesson from her grandfather she never forgot.

Chavez Rodriguez, recounting the scene in a 2009 speech at Sonoma State University, said she handed a flier to an older woman. “I hope he dies this time,” the woman spat.

Julie Chavez Rodriguez joins students from Los Angeles International Charter High School in a march honoring the legacy of her grandfather, labor leader Cesar Chavez, on March 30, 2006, in Eagle Rock.

(Phil McCarten / Associated Press)

Angry at herself for not challenging the woman, Chavez Rodriguez went to her grandfather for advice. She had wanted the woman to feel the pain she had felt.

Chavez’s reply: “Mija, next time something like that happens to you, you look that person in the face and you say, ‘I’m sure that you’re in his prayers too.’

“She doesn’t understand what the farmworkers are going through every day,” Chavez continued. If you had confronted the woman, he asked, would that really help her understand the issues better?

After Chavez Rodriguez graduated from Tehachapi High School, she organized strawberry pickers in Watsonville during breaks while she attended UC Berkeley. After earning her bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies, she worked at her grandfather’s foundation for several years.

These experiences, as well as her tata’s advice, define her life and her activism, Chavez Rodriguez said.

“There’s no substitute for hard work. That was one of his famous lines, there’s no shortcut, there’s no easy way out. There’s no like, ‘Oh, if we just get this one silver bullet, we’re gonna break through that,’” she said in an interview last year. “Just there’s no substitute for hard work.”

But Chavez Rodriguez has steadfastly made a point of not relying on her name.

“Oftentimes I would go to Washington, D.C. — I know a lot of people there — I would tell them Julie is Cesar Chavez’s granddaughter,” Huerta said. “And people said, ‘I never knew.’ She never used that to advance herself or advance her career. Julie is a hard worker. That’s what she does.”

Cesar Chavez, right, with other activists during the 1973 Coachella grape strike.

(Richard Ybarra)

In 2014, when she was serving as Obama’s deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was unaware of Chavez Rodriguez’s lineage until a movie was screened there about her grandfather.

Chavez Rodriguez had volunteered for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in Colorado. After he won the White House, she was hired first as his director of youth employment and then as deputy press secretary to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

She then became the White House’s deputy director of public engagement, initially focused on immigration and Latino voters. Her portfolio was expanded to include outreach to Asian Americans, Muslims, veterans, the LGBTQ+ community and others. Then, Chavez Rodriguez was appointed as a special assistant to the president.

A Democratic ally, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that as the administration’s stance on border control became more aggressive — immigrant rights activists called Obama the deporter in chief — Chavez Rodriguez frequently had to deal with the fallout.

“It was Julie dealing with the ire of Democrats and immigration groups not pleased with how it ultimately transpired,” this person said.

President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden listen as Julie Chavez Rodriguez speaks at the Biden for President 2024 campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., in February 2024. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and Vice President Kamala Harris also joined them onstage.

(Roberto Schmidt / AFP/Getty Images)

More recently, while under fire from Republicans who accused Democrats of allowing the southern border to descend into chaos, the Biden administration pursued tougher policies on border enforcement and asylum. Madrid, the GOP consultant, said he was impressed by the Democrats’ newfound embrace of border control — and Chavez Rodriguez is part of that shift.

“If you had told me three months ago that the Democratic nominee would be leading the campaign charge with the most conservative border security platform since the 1980s, I would’ve never believed you,” Madrid said. “But it’s where the voters are at, including Latino voters, and her leadership on moving away from the failing political platform of the past has been masterful.”

(Her grandfather’s history on immigration is complicated. He opposed illegal immigration and even encouraged union members to report undocumented workers to immigration authorities. Chavez’s defenders say his motivation was to drive out nonunion strikebreakers.)

In 2016, after Harris was elected to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, she named Chavez Rodriguez her state director. The following year, she began working for Harris’ unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign. After Harris dropped out of the race, Chavez Rodriguez was hired by Biden’s campaign as a senior advisor overseeing Latino outreach.

“Everyone saw Julie as kind of this force of nature,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), a longtime friend. He recalled that when she was a member of Harris’ Senate staff and he was mayor of Long Beach, they worked together to secure federal funding for the city.

After Biden took office, Chavez Rodriguez became director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and then senior advisor to the president before she was named as the manager of his reelection campaign.

As that bid began to struggle, Biden shifted two top White House aides — Jen O’Malley Dillon and Mike Donilon — to take control of his campaign, though Chavez Rodriguez remained the campaign manager.

One key concern was Biden’s standing among people of color, notably Latinos. When Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee, Chavez Rodriguez said that while Latinos overwhelmingly supported the Democratic ticket in 2020, the party needed to shore up the community’s support, particularly among Latino men.

“We’re gonna have to continue to work hard to keep that base as strong as it is,” she said. “And especially in this moment, where — and I’ll speak just based on my own experience — where this sort of sense of machismo is taking root in ways that I think have become, or that have penetrated politics in a way that has enabled voters to vote against their own interests at times.”

Polls show that public safety, education and economic issues such as inflation, along with immigration, are major concerns among Latinos.

Internal campaign polling shows that Chavez Rodriguez’s job may have gotten easier, with early polling suggesting that Harris fares better among Latino voters than Biden.

Harris topped Biden and Trump in favorability among Latinos in a poll of voters in seven battleground states conducted before the president announced he would not seek reelection. Her strongest advantage over Biden was among younger Latinos, according to a memo of the poll by BSP Research that was first reported by the Hill.

In a poll released Aug. 6, 58% of Latinos said they would support Harris, 7 percentage points more than last month, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll of 1,613 adults conducted Aug. 1-4. That’s 7 points fewer than the portion of the Latino vote Biden won in 2020.

But the poll was conducted in the new Harris campaign’s early days, before she chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and their stumping in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Voto Latino, a nonprofit co-founded by actor Rosario Dawson, had already announced that it plans to spend $44 million this year turning out young Latino voters in battleground states and in key races. The group saw a 221% increase in voter registration in the aftermath of Harris announcing her candidacy, Maria Teresa Kumar, the group’s president, told NPR.

“We were registering 60 to 100 voters a day from January until the Friday before Biden stepped down,” Kumar said. “On Monday with Kamala Harris as the potential nominee, we were registering 3,000 folks a day. By Friday, we were up to 8,100.”

Garcia, who served on Biden’s 2024 national campaign leadership committee, said that he was always confident about Chavez Rodriguez’s ability to mobilize Latino voters.

“When people ask, ‘How do we do Latino strategy?’ I’m like, ‘We’ve got Julie. We’ve got Julie Chavez Rodriguez at the top. I have every confidence she understands the community better than anyone,” he said. “Besides the fact she’s a badass and a hard worker, she symbolizes that movement, which I think is powerful as well.”

This month, the political action committee of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group, endorsed Harris. It was the first time LULAC had endorsed a presidential candidate in its 95-year history.

Still, it’s clear that Harris’ campaign is cognizant of potential weakness in this voting bloc. In late July, comedian George Lopez and Sen. Alex Padilla of California headlined a call focused on Latino men.

Julie Chavez Rodriguez, then the White House intergovernmental affairs director, is shown outside the White House in 2021. She left that post to lead Biden’s reelection campaign.

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

“Harris has been looking out for us and our shot at the American dream,” Padilla said, according to the Miami Herald. He was appointed to Harris’ Senate seat after she was became vice president, and in the 2022 became the first California Latino to be elected to the chamber. “She’s got our back. She always will.”

The organization Chavez Rodriguez’s grandfather founded endorsed Harris immediately after Biden announced he would not seek reelection. She had previously accepted the group’s endorsement of Biden last year at Muranaka Farms in Moorpark, where her father won a contract for field workers in the 1990s.

“I am a product of the farmworker legacy that we see behind me today,” she said at the time. “I can’t be more proud and honored to work with them to organize to make sure that we are reminding every voter in this country what’s at stake in this election.”

As for the Democratic National Convention starting this week,it’s unclear what public role Chavez Rodriguez will play. But even if she’s before the public more than in the past, no doubt she’ll still be in the background, working.