People of Spanish ancestry have a long history here in the United States. Spaniards made the first permanent European settlement in what would become the U.S. and had reached the Pacific coast before the arrival of their English and French counterparts. Unlike the English and French, however, Spanish colonizers generally didn’t view the indigenous peoples of the Americas as obtuse savages.
Despite this extensive heritage, Hispanics have often been left out of American history and – as a result – we’ve had few heroic figures in mainstream literature and news. One noteworthy individual, however, is the late César Chavez.
Born in Arizona in 1927, Chavez joined his parents and other family members in one of the most strenuous of jobs: crop-picking. It’s an industry that’s inherently fickle and strenuous. It can also be unforgiving, especially during Chavez’s youth. His family moved frequently, barely surviving each year, and eventually settled in California. After a brief stint in the U.S. Navy, Chavez returned home and to the fields of various crops…where things hadn’t changed much. Sometime in the late 1950s Chavez’s frustration with the farming business metamorphosed into political action and, in 1960, he led a gallery of farmworkers in creating the National Farm Worker Association, which sought to improve working conditions for people who toiled in farming. They demanded higher pay and better working conditions. Most farmworkers were non-White, but regardless of race or ethnicity, all worked hard to feed American families, as they struggled to care for their own.
After his death in 1993, a number of communities across the Southeastern U.S. named, or renamed, schools and streets after Chavez. It was homage to a common man who understood the struggles of average working people – even if others didn’t understand or appreciate it.
One night around 1996, I was driving through East Dallas with a friend, when we passed an elementary school recently with Chavez’s name broadly displayed across the front.
“What do they teach there?!” my friend exclaimed, before adding something about picking fruits and vegetables.
In the midst of a busy urban thoroughfare, I literally slammed on the brakes of my truck and yelled back, “What the fuck that’s supposed to mean?!”
My friend is a little more than a decade older than me and was born and raised in what he and his sister called “LA” – Lower Alabama. He’s a true southerner who likes boiled peanuts and fried green tomatoes – two foods I’ve purposefully avoided. He’s also somewhat of a Confederate loyalist and would get annoyed when I said the Confederate Army were traitors to the United States.
“Now, you’re making fun of my heritage,” he once told me.
So I guess – with the Chavez vegetable quip – we were even.
One of the people who helped Chavez organize his movement was Dolores Huerta. A New México native, Huerta, like Chavez, had worked in the farming trade and personally witnessed the mistreatment of its workers.
Now – more than three decades after the death of Chavez – Huerta has turned against him. In a recent stunning admission, Huerta claims Chavez raped her twice in the 1960s; impregnating her both times. She carried each pregnancy to term and gave up the babies to other families. She says she didn’t come forward years earlier for a number of personal reasons; in part because no one openly discussed sexual assault at the time of the alleged offenses, but also because she didn’t want to undermine the mission of the farmworkers coalition. At the age of 95, Huerta really has nothing to lose.
Who’s going to call her a liar?
Now everything Chavez did has come under scrutiny. Almost overnight he has become the Bill Cosby of the Hispanic community – a man revered for decades as a leader and humanitarian whose reputation has come into question. The primary difference, of course, is that Chavez wasn’t an actor or a comedian and he’s now dead.
Last Tuesday, March 31, would have been Chavez’s 99th birthday. Communities across the Southwestern U.S. have been celebrating it as a venerable holiday. Many Hispanics have been demanding an official federal holiday (akin to Martin Luther King) be established to honor Chavez.
Recently Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state NOT to recognize Chavez on March 31. It’s interesting – hypocritical actually – considering that Abbott and other Republican officials were reticent to disavow allegiance to Confederate soldiers – a group that wanted to divide the nation over the issue of slavery. Many conservatives argued vehemently against removing monuments to the Civil War Confederacy, but are now quick to obliterate anything honoring Chavez.
More than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, we’re still dealing with this shit.
So what to do now?
I’m publishing this essay on April 4, 2026 – the 58th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King had always asked people to be judged on the “content of their character”. That’s not just a bit of poetic verbiage. It’s actually a sensible practice.
Yet, how much character can overcome egregious behavior? Behavior that occurred years ago.
I simply don’t know. The chaos surrounding Chavez’s legacy has been set in motion and won’t die down anytime soon.
As always we have to keep moving forward.
Chief Writing Wolf 