Public officials in Oxnard will consider renaming both the street and the school in the city named for Cesar Chavez, the late union leader and civil rights activist recently accused of sexually abusing women and girls.
Chavez was born in Arizona and lived most of his adult life in the San Joaquin Valley, but he had real connections to Oxnard. He lived in Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood for a time when he was a child in the late 1930s, and he returned to the city in the late 1950s to work as a labor and community organizer. In the 1960s, the union Chavez helped start, the United Farm Workers, had one of its first offices in Oxnard.
The elementary school in La Colonia is now called Cesar Chavez School. Less than a mile to the north is Cesar Chavez Drive, which runs for about a mile through residential neighborhoods both east and west of Rose Avenue.
The Oxnard City Council will discuss renaming Cesar Chavez Drive at its next meeting on April 7, City Manager Alex Nguyen said in an email to The Star. The Oxnard School District Board of Trustees plans to discuss its school naming policy at its next meeting on March 25.
If either agency decides to remove the Chavez name, it will join a wave of such decisions across the state and the nation.
The UFW has distanced itself from its founder and announced it will not participate in any Cesar Chavez Day activities. In Sacramento, lawmakers reached an agreement on March 19 to rename the March 31 state holiday Farmworkers Day. And in Ventura County, the Port of Hueneme canceled its annual Cesar Chavez March, which had been scheduled for March 22, starting at Cesar Chavez School.
“I think it’s apparent we need to step back,” said Gabriela Basua, a member of the Oxnard City Council. “In the city of Oxnard, we have the school, the street, the parade. It’s a conversation we need to have, and I’m looking forward to having that conversation.”
‘Something horrific’ was coming
On March 17, the Oxnard City Council’s agenda included an official proclamation to mark Cesar Chavez Day. Before the meeting, Mayor Luis Mc Arthur removed that item from the agenda, at the request of City Councilwoman Michaela Perez.
Perez said she didn’t know at the time what the specific allegations against Chavez would be, but she could tell “there was something horrific that was going to be coming out.”
The next day, The New York Times published a 4,700-word article in which multiple women described being groomed, harassed, molested, assaulted or raped by Chavez from the 1960s through the 1980s. One of the women said she was 12 when Chavez molested her. Another said he raped her when she was 15.
One of the women who spoke to the Times was Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the UFW with Chavez. She said Chavez pressured her into sex once in 1960 and forcibly raped her once in 1966.
Some of the women quoted in the article said they told people around Chavez of the abuse when it happened and no one did anything about it. Huerta told no one, in part because she thought no one would believe her.
Perez said she was “horrified and devastated” to read the stories of Huerta and the other women.
“Women have been pivotal to the labor and farmworker movement and continue to lead community organizing and the fight for worker protections,” she said. “We must acknowledge that women are still facing these harms today. This news really made me reflect about women and all people who carry trauma of sexual assault and the disbelief, the doubt, the dismissal that they often meet in their experiences.”
Jennie Luna, a professor of Chicana/o studies at CSU Channel Islands, said she cried when she read the Times article. She is 50 and lives in Ventura, and she grew up in San Jose, where Chavez spent his teen years and where he later raised his own children. In the 1980s and 1990s, she would run into Chavez’s children and grandchildren at the grocery store.
“It took me half the day to realize what was happening,” Luna said. “This is a deep part of my own education and my own activism.”
Street name change has some council support
The Star spoke with five of the seven members of the Oxnard City Council on March 19, and all five said they would at least be open to changing the name of Cesar Chavez Drive.
“I want to be mindful of the process of community input and engagement,” Perez said. “I’m open to the community’s input on what the renaming would look like.”
Councilman Gabe Terran said he’ll consider any costs that might be associated and the opinions of residents whose addresses would change, but that he feels it would be “the right thing” to change the street name.
Cesar Chavez Drive is in Councilmember Aaron Starr’s district, and Starr lives on the next street over. He said renaming the street is “worthy of consideration.”
“In the big scheme of things this is more symbolism than anything else and I’m not a big fan of symbolic actions, but I wouldn’t object to changing the name of the street,” he said.
Starr said he’d like to see the street named after Huerta instead. That might not be possible, though, since there is already a Huerta Street in the neighborhood, about half a mile southwest of Cesar Chavez Drive.
Council member Bert Perello said he’s also open to the idea of a name change.
“I can imagine there will be voices on both sides of this matter,” he said. “It’s a heavily Hispanic city, and there are strong feelings about Cesar Chavez but there are also strong feelings that you don’t violate women’s rights.”
Basua said the council should consider changing the street name. Basua and Perez both said they also think the school district should change the name of Cesar Chavez School.
The Star also contacted all five members of the Oxnard School District board. They referred all questions to district administrators, who released a statement that said they were “deeply saddened” by the news and “stand in solidarity” with the victims.
“At this time, our focus remains on connecting with our community to reflect on the impact of this news and what it means for our Cesar Chavez School community, and related programming,” the district’s statement says.
The district board will discuss the name at its March 25 meeting.
‘It’s heartbreaking’
A reckoning about Chavez might be difficult for some people in Ventura County, the ones Luna called the “elders” of the movement. Many of them participated in UFW boycotts and union drives with Chavez; some marched with him up and down the state.
“There are definitely elders and folks who might need a little more time, and we need to offer them grace to sort of internalize what’s happening before our eyes,” Luna said. “It’s heartbreaking, and I don’t blame people for needing to take a moment to understand and accept this truth.”
The fact that Huerta is one of the women who says she was raped by Chavez could matter a great deal to these elders, Luna said.
“It’s unfortunate that we live in a society where people don’t believe survivors and victims of sexual assault and violence, but Dolores Huerta has been a trusted figure for so long,” Luna said. “Because of who she is, it definitely forces people to have to reckon with this truth.”
Perhaps, Perez said, the entire sad affair will help people to realize that social movements are never the work of one heroic figure leading a bunch of faceless followers.
“It’s never been about one person,” she said. “It’s always been about a movement of the people who came together to organize. There have been many people who have been fighting this mission and never got the spotlight that Cesar Chavez had.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Oxnard officials weigh pulling Cesar Chavez name from school, street
Reporting by Tony Biasotti, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
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