(This story was updated to add new information and photos.)
The Hispanic Leadership Council of Abilene formally called for the renaming of the new Cesar Chavez Recreation Center during Thursday’s Abilene City Council meeting.
The local facility’s name could be the latest casualty of the Hispanic labor icon’s disintegrating legacy in the wake of sexual abuse allegations.
HLC President Samuel Garcia delivered group members’ request during the open public comment period which led the meeting.
He said they’d heard rumors before about Chavez, but nothing was proven to their satisfaction until now.
“You never go off of rumors. You always wait until there’s more substantial evidence,” Garcia said after the meeting.
At the group’s March 19 meeting, it was the investigation by the New York Times that settled the question for the HLC.
While married, Chavez is alleged to have sexually assaulted several victims in the 1960s, some repeatedly and as young as 13, who are now in their 60s and shared their stories with the Times, the NYT reported March 18.
Over 60 other witnesses, documents and audio recordings were also evidenced against Chavez. Additionally, the Times interviewed fellow Latino icon Dolores Huerta who alleged Chavez raped her on more than one occasion, fathering two children. DNA evidence from the adult children reviewed by the Times confirmed the relationship. Huerta told the newspaper she wore baggy clothes to hide the pregnancies at the time and enlisted relatives to raise the children in secret.
Upended legacy
A political activist who died in 1993, Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, borrowing Martin Luther King Jr.’s practice of nonviolent demonstration, securing better wages and working conditions for Latino workers.
As the allegations against Chavez came to light, communities across the nation turned to scrubbing the disgraced labor rights icon from civic memory. Streets have quickly been renamed, and holidays marking his March 31 birthday canceled. Many murals bearing his visage in barrios across the nation were painted over.
In Abilene, the Sears Park Recreation Center on the north side was renamed after Chavez in 2022.
Garcia, who has been an Abilene insurance agent for over 25 years and is also chair of the Taylor County Democratic Party, was one of those who pushed for renaming the center after Chavez four years ago.
“The constituency of that neighborhood is Hispanic,” Garcia said. “We felt it would be important for kids to see the name of a historical Hispanic leader. Well, come to find out, maybe he shouldn’t have been elevated to that. But we didn’t know that at the time.”
Heart of a neighborhood
Both the Cesar Chavez and G.V. Daniels recreation centers have been rebuilt over the last two years, thanks to a $28 million bond passed by voters in 2023. Both are near completion, but the city had been silent on the breaking controversy surrounding the Chavez name.
That changed late Thursday when officials directly addressed the issue in a press release after a Reporter-News video of Garcia’s address began to spread online. The newspaper was the only Abilene outlet to break the story on the HLC’s name change proposal.
In the release, the city confirms both recreation centers will be dedicated April 22 though the Chavez facility will “temporarily be renamed the Recreation Center at Sears Park.” The G.V. Daniels dedication is scheduled for 1:30 p.m., followed by Sears Park at 2:15 p.m.
The release adds that discussion of a permanent name change will be placed on the agenda for the May 19 Parks and Recreation Board meeting. Any new name request is to be submitted through formal application and presented to the board.
Garcia welcomes that process and is looking forward to learning the community’s suggestions for local names that might be considered. But bringing it up now was much less painful than doing so later.
“We didn’t want to wait for them to ask us because that thing is getting close to opening, and it’s looking great,” Garcia said. “So, we just thought, ‘Why wait on that?’ We wanted to be the first to step up and to say, ‘Hey, (the name) should come down.’”
Garcia said that as recently as Wednesday the Chavez name had already been displayed in two places on the Sears Park recreation center’s exterior.
The Reporter-News observed the name had been removed from the building by mid-afternoon Friday.
With the center’s place at the heart of a heavily Hispanic neighborhood, many have called for a new name relevant to Abilene’s Latino community to reflect that.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott declared the state would not observe Cesar Chavez Day and will push the Legislature to remove it from state law.
Following on that, the Texas Education Agency has ordered public schools to remove mention of Chavez from lessons, according to the Texas Tribune’s March 23 report.
How to remove someone so central to such a widespread movement isn’t exactly clear. Garcia argued that Chavez’ name is still going to come up.
“You can’t undo history because he was a part of it,” Garcia said. “But the admiration has always been about the workers, their suffering. It wasn’t a one-man show, it was a movement.”
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: UPDATED Abilene council asked to rename Cesar Chavez Recreation Center
Reporting by Ronald W. Erdrich, Abilene Reporter-News / Abilene Reporter-News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
