Monday Musings #56: César Chávez: Another Hero Falls

It was with mixed emotions that I read the New York Times’ damning exposé published last week, which posthumously canceled Chávez as a civil rights leader and historic advocate for better living and working conditions for migrant farm workers. An enshrined hero was forever branded as a serial sexual predator in the space of days, as marches and other commemorations were rapidly canceled here and across the country.

I was not happy to see a Latino civil rights leader who has inspired generations with his “Si, se puede” mantra. The long-hidden truth about him was red meat for white nationalists on social media, even as the same trolls have plenty of white men at the highest levels with the same sordid history on their résumés. 

I understand that people need their heroes, and it’s always unsettling to see them fall by the wayside, alive or dead. Look at the parade of national political, business and academic figures who kept company with convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, including both President Clinton and President Trump. Well-lawyered published articles are careful to note that turning up in the Epstein files hundreds or even thousands of times is not proof that the subjects joined Epstein in his sociopathic conquest of young women and girls. But why else hang out with a predator on his private plane, in his hot tub or on his Caribbean island? 

Back to Chávez. I was not among those who favored changing Durango Boulevard to César Chávez Boulevard back when the topic first surfaced in San Antonio in the 1990s following the labor leader’s 1993 death. The street had carried the name of the northwestern Mexico state, even though it didn’t lead there, from the 1880s when it was part of the city’s original 36 square mile grid.

But the effort to join nearly every other U.S. city with a sizable Mexican-American population to name something significant after Chávez kept bubbling back up with each new City Council class until 2011 when it finally passed. It’s a street broken into pieces. One piece stretches from the Alamodome to the UT-San Antonio Downtown campus; another stretches from Alazán Creek to Elmendorf Lake, and yet another stretches farther west through some of San Antonio's poorest neighborhoods.

Back then and even now, I didn’t think Chávez’s connections to San Antonio and South Texas were strong enough to justify the expensive and socially divisive name change. He made multiple appearances here over the years, not as the head of a movement per se, but rather as a larger-than-life role model alongside Dolores Huerta and local civil rights organizers. He did not play a significant role in addressing the horrible work conditions South Texas farm workers endured during his time as head of the UFW, in my experience.

I never met Chávez. In 1977, when I was working at the Brownsville Herald in my first paid job in the newspaper business, a mutual acquaintance introduced me to Antonio Orendain, a California native and labor organizer working for farmworkers' rights in the Rio Grande Valley. By then, he had fallen out with Chávez over strategies and scarce resource allocation. That was the same year he led farm workers and rights workers on the 420-mile march from San Juan in the Valley to Austin to protest work conditions in the state and advocate for collective bargaining rights. Organizers invited me to come along as a young reporter, but Bill Salter, then the editor, was skeptical and asked me how long I would be on the road.

“At least one month, I was told,” I replied.

“Nice try,” Salter said, returning to his copy without looking up.

My story pitches improved over time as I learned to work around editors, but it was probably good that I didn’t get the okay at that moment. A large group marched out of the Valley in late February, thinned out along the way, and bulged again after finally reaching Austin in early April. 

Chávez and the California-based United Farm Workers did not join the march. His focus remained on the West Coast, where he attracted significant political and media attention. California in the 1970s had as many as 300,000 migrant workers, mostly of Mexican descent, toiling in the fields and vines during the planting and harvest seasons. Texas, in contrast, had about half as many workers.

California was more receptive to workers’ rights than Texas, and the migrant profiles of the two states differed. Agriculture was more industrialized with more large landowners. California migrants tended to be settled in the state. Most migrants in Texas crossed the border to work, or were consigned to miserable living conditions in border colonias, unincorporated shantytowns where state and many county leaders turned a blind eye to communities without running water or modern plumbing. Many Texas migrant families, adults and children, traveled north from here to follow the crop harvest. It might be cotton in Texas and cherries in Michigan. The pay was terrible, the living conditions inhumane, but it was survival. Everybody old enough to walk and pick was put to work.

Orendain, with his distinctive mustache and black cowboy hat, lacked Chávez's charisma. He was a grassroots organizer, far less mediagenic than Chávez, yet no less bold. When the UFW failed to dedicate the resources needed to mount more effective campaigns against Rio Grande Valley producers, Orendain broke off and formed the Texas Farm Workers in 1975 after working along the border for a decade.

He led strikes and protests, mostly in and around border communities. He scored sympathy in the court of public opinion, but less in the halls of power at the state capitol. By the 1980s, it seemed, the movement had petered out. Orendain died in McAllen at the age of 85 in 2016. The TFWU’s papers are now located at UT-Austin, but no streets honor the all-but-forgotten activist.

Union organizing has been far less successful in Texas, then and now, and conservative Democratic legislators in that era who controlled every level of state government just as the Republicans do now, refused to pass legislation codifying farm worker rights or allowing their union to win bargaining rights. 

This is all ancient history, I realize, but my point is that Chávez was not a native son of San Antonio or South Texas. The understandable shock and disappointment so many feel in the wake of his reputational downfall, 33 years after his death, will ease with time. Removing his name from a prominent street that courses through downtown and the Westside should be accomplished without much, if any, opposition. Bandits will probably remove street signs as keepsakes long before the city is ready to replace them.

Should we revert the street to its original name, Durango Boulevard? That seems to make the most sense, but city council members and others might propose elevating another, more locally known leader from the city's past to street sign status. That's a conversation worth having, so long as promoters do their homework first and make sure they don’t nominate another person with skeletons in their closet.

I have a modest suggestion on how such a scenario might be avoided: Nominate a woman.