César Chavez Day Is No More. But How Will Schools Address His Legacy?

While shockwaves reverberated from sexual abuse allegations against César Chavez this month, Maria Rodriguez-Salazar, a San Francisco mariachi teacher, immediately thought of her students.

They were putting the finishing touches on the public school district’s annual mariachi showcase planned for that Friday, and a song that 100 of the high schoolers had spent months preparing, “Corrido de las Heladas,” referenced the late leader of California’s farmworker movement.

“One of the sentences says, ‘Come, dove, and say to César Chavez to stop shedding tears for us,’” Rodriguez-Salazar said. “When I was listening to the news on that Wednesday, I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’”

She and the program’s director quickly swapped his name for “campesinos,” which means “farmers,” and the show went on.

But in the aftermath of The New York Times’ investigation revealing allegations that Chavez sexually abused two young girls in the 1970s and raped United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta in the 1960s, teachers across the state are grappling with how to address his widely studied and once-revered legacy.

Shifting lesson plans

David Ko, a ninth-grade ethnic studies teacher at George Washington High School, said his students wanted to talk about the news immediately after the investigation was published on March 18.

“I had some students who, even before classes started, during passing period, asked me about it,” he said.

Every year, Ko teaches a lesson about Chavez just before his birthday on March 31, a state holiday that many students have had off school for years. In the past, he would ask his classes what they knew about César Chavez Day and teach them about Chavez’s roles in the Delano grape strike and the founding of the United Farm Workers labor union.

Now, he said, that lesson plan will be more complicated.

Ahead of the holiday, which falls during the San Francisco Unified School District’s spring break, Ko last week gave a broad overview of the Times’ investigation. He also pointed out that the state has already renamed its holiday to Farmworkers Day, and that cities and institutions are moving to swiftly scrub his name from streets, parks and more.

Chavez is prevalent in California’s curriculum frameworks and model lesson plans, and the state provides a long list of activities and resources for every grade level framed around César Chavez Day.

But Ko said he didn’t have to throw his existing curriculum out the window last week; he’s never portrayed Chavez as solely a “hero” in the farmworker movement.

“There’s people who have done remarkable, amazing accomplishments in advancing people’s rights, and also, even before the most recent allegations, it’s also possible for those same people to have harmful ideas,” Ko told KQED.

A complex legacy

For years, Ko’s classes have studied the more nuanced parts of Chavez’s legacy, such as his opposition to undocumented immigrants working on farms.

At least in San Francisco, many educators have shifted their focus away from Chavez when they cover the farmworker movement.

“Students are often taught, ‘This one great man who was so exceptional, did all these amazing things and they are the reason that these rights happened,’” ethnic studies teacher Samantha Aguirre said. “What they don’t always learn is that it was hundreds, tens of thousands of people behind them in the movement.”

She focuses on the lesser-known Filipino leaders of the movement, including Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, as well as the contributions of women like Huerta.

“The Filipino farmworkers formed AWOC [the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee] and started staging resistance movements and protests before Latino groups,” she said. “If it wasn’t for those Filipino farmworkers, it wouldn’t have galvanized and they wouldn’t have worked together and helped the Latino farmworkers form the United Farm Workers.”

Now, Aguirre plans to include the allegations against Chavez as another part of the movement’s complex history.

“Hearing Dolores Huerta saying, ‘He assaulted me, but I felt like I couldn’t say anything because it would be bad for the movement,’ I think that is an important lesson,” Aguirre said. “It is important for students to know and be able to speak out when things are wrong.”

How to address a delicate subject?

Integrating the revelations into class won’t look the same for all grade levels.

Ko said that with his high schoolers, he pointed out that Chavez is accused of targeting young girls, but he referred his students to The New York Times and other trusted news sources if they wanted to read specifics, to avoid sharing information that could be unnecessarily triggering.

When it comes to addressing the allegations with younger students, Aguirre said, “there are developmentally appropriate ways for teachers to acknowledge and to talk about it.”

“It’s fair to say something like, ‘A man that we learned about, who we celebrate and we learned about in history, we found out that he hurt people,’” she told KQED.

Whether the state will offer guidance for teachers to address the revelations isn’t yet known.

The California Department of Education’s history and social science framework suggests teaching about his legacy in fourth, ninth and 11th grades, along with the plans for César Chavez Day.

Last week, after the state Legislature passed a resolution to rename the March 31 holiday Farmworkers Day, the Department of Education put a pop-up advisory on its pages of Chavez curriculum and teaching materials, telling educators to “focus on the movement as a struggle that is greater than one man.” It also compiled a new page of teaching resources on the broader movement under a “Farmworkers Day” page.

But the department did not respond to requests for comment about whether it plans to alter or remove any of its model curriculum dedicated to Chavez, or add lessons about the new allegations.

In the meantime, Aguirre said it will be up to teachers to evolve with the history.

“New information came out, and it’s our responsibility as historians, as educators, to take that new information and change what we teach and we know,” she said. “You’re not erasing a history; it’s just history is maybe just more complicated.”