When Our Heroes Fail Us

The New York Times story detailing the sexual abuses attributed to the late United Farm Workers union founder Cesar Chavez has shocked all of us. One of the victims, union co-founder Dolores Huerta, has confirmed what Chavez did to her 50 years ago. She kept silent about it, she said, because she was worried about damaging the farmworker movement Chavez launched.

Many have already decided to remove his name from schools and streets, hide his statues, and cancel celebrations in his honor, even changing the name of the holiday created for him.

But can these revelations diminish Cesar Chavez's accomplishment? In the civil rights field, he did for Latino farmworkers what Martin Luther King Jr. did for blacks: made them and their plight visible. The creation of the United Farm Workers union liberated many from exploitation and put the issue on the map for the whole country, not just California. Should his crimes constitute grounds for erasing him from consciousness?

This Jekyll and Hyde dynamic is not new. Thomas Jefferson, one of our most revered Founding Fathers, is also known for fathering children with a female slave. But it doesn't change the foundations of our country. Remember Christopher Columbus? He may have "sailed the ocean blue in 14-hundred-and-92," but most states have renamed his holiday because he oppressed indigenous people when he got here. We admire the work of artists and performers until we learn about their bad habits, extreme political views, or even criminal activity. But it doesn't change one stroke of their painting nor one frame of film in the movie that won them an Oscar.

I've often said that when you put a statue of someone up in the town square, it had better come with interchangeable parts so that when your hero falls out of favor, you can easily replace them on the pedestal with someone else.

I'm not calling for anyone to forgive Cesar Chavez. What he did, as reported, to women and young girls is unforgivable. But we can't erase history, and many of our leaders have already been trying to do just that for other reasons, long before these New York Times revelations came out.

The other message here, though, is that as a civil rights issue, the women's liberation movement is far from over. If the Epstein story hasn't made that point, maybe the Chavez story will.

As for March 31st, Cesar Chavez's birthday and still officially a holiday here in California, it may be renamed Farmworkers Day. I prefer Campesinos Day, using the Spanish word for farmworkers, which at least preserves the spirit of what this man did for tem.