San Francisco Fought to Name a Major Street After Cesar Chavez. Will It Be Renamed Again?

On Cesar Chavez‘s birthday in 1995, a crowd of hundreds gathered in San Francisco’s Mission District to commemorate new street signs, installed along the 3-mile thoroughfare stretching from the Bayview waterfront to Noe Valley.

City supervisors voted unanimously that year to change the name of Army Street to Cesar Chavez Street in honor of the labor leader, who had died two years prior.

“Cesar Chavez lives in our hearts, and from now on he will live on this street,” Frank Martin Del Campo, a spokesperson for the local 790 United Public Employees, told the San Francisco Chronicle that year.

Many Latino San Franciscans saw the dedication as an acknowledgment of the farmworker movement Chavez helped build.

But after allegations surfaced this week that the civil rights icon sexually abused multiple young girls, and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, as he led the movement in the 1960s and ’70s, politicians have quickly proposed stripping his name from dozens of streets, schools, parks and monuments, and the state holiday in his honor at the end of the month.

The revelations have raised questions about how to further the movement’s legacy, without Chavez as the figurehead.

“He was a symbol,” San Francisco State University labor historian John Logan said, “for a recognition of the farmworker movement, of the Chicano civil rights movement.”

“This [is an] incredibly important social movement and incredibly important worker movement,” he said, adding that now, it will be important “to find a way of trying to recognize those things without using his name.”

Reckoning with abuse

On Tuesday, The New York Times published an investigation revealing accounts from two women, now in their 60s, who said that they had been assaulted repeatedly by Chavez for years in the 1970s, beginning when they were 12 and 13, and he was in his 40s.

Huerta came forward with her own allegations that on two separate occasions in the 1960s, Chavez had pressured her into intercourse and later raped her.

Within hours, local officials and organizations across California launched efforts to strip Chavez’s name from public view. Sacramento’s mayor appointed city council members to rename Cesar Chavez Plaza in the state capital.

Fresno officials set a meeting for this week to remove Cesar Chavez Boulevard street signs and groups at San Francisco State and Sonoma State University announced plans to shroud his image and name on campus murals and on buildings.

Early Thursday, California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón announced legislation that would rename the state holiday honoring Chavez at the end of March to Farmworkers Day.

“This moment calls for honesty. It calls for reflection. And it calls for a renewed commitment to the values that the farmworker movement was built on,” Rivas said, speaking on the California Assembly floor on Thursday.

While San Francisco leaders haven’t taken any concrete steps to strip Chavez’s name from the street, or from the public elementary school renamed in his honor around the same time, it seems more than likely in the coming weeks.

“My office will support community efforts to remove Cesar Chavez’s name from any District 9 institutions,” said Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who represents the Mission, which includes both sites.

“I think there should be no hesitation,” said former Supervisor Susan Leal, who served from 1993 to 1997, and helped lead the renaming effort.

A divisive renaming

Leal said the decision to name Army Street after Chavez was meant to acknowledge “unrecognized work of a lot of farmworkers.”

“The meaning of having Cesar Chavez Street is that it signifies we have a place here too,” Maria Paya, a grocer in the Mission District, told the Los Angeles Times that year.

But by the time the new street signs were unveiled that April, the decision had already sparked controversy, and a campaign to repeal the name change. Opponents put a citywide measure on that year’s general election ballot to restore the road’s name to Army Street.

The battle became one of the most divisive that election cycle, according to newspaper reports at the time, pitting residents of the then-predominantly Latino Mission District, backed by thousands of United Farm Workers volunteers who traveled from as far as Bakersfield to campaign, against wealthy, majority white Noe Valley residents and small business owners who said they had an affinity for their addresses, and the 140-year-old Army Street name.

The renaming came at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment, Leal said, not unlike today. The year prior, California voters passed Proposition 187, which aimed to block undocumented immigrants from accessing most health care services, public education and social services.

“If you would come up with another San Franciscan who was not of the farmworker movement, I think he might’ve gotten more support. It was not unlike Prop. 187,” Leal said.

“It was very personal about him being Latino,” she said. “Some of the comments were, ‘He’s not even a citizen.’” Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona.

When the city voted by a wide margin to uphold the new name that November, it was seen as an affirmation of support not just for Chavez, but for Latino San Franciscans, and the farmworker movement.

“It was more than him,” Leal said. “It was about Dolores. It was about, for a lot Latino people … pushing back,” against efforts like Proposition 187.

If San Francisco did launch an effort to rename Cesar Chavez Street, Leal said she’d hope to see that sentiment remain.

“It should be named for something connected to that movement. Probably Dolores Huerta,” Leal told KQED.

Plans already in motion to scrub Chavez’s name from other public places are also taking similar considerations.

“The farmworker movement was never ever about one man,” Rivas said Thursday. “It was built by tens of thousands of workers. People who labored in the fields. People who organized, who sacrificed, and who stood up when it was hard.”

“Now, we have a responsibility not just to remember that movement, but to carry it forward with integrity,” he said.