Chavez was ripe for cancellation.
Back in 2014, when I designated Cesar Chavez’s birthday as National Border Control Day, it was, of course, partly a troll. The left had turned Chavez into the Hispanic Gandhi, naming streets after him and turning his birthday into March’s answer to Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Imagine my satisfaction when Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s more conventionally leftist co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, told NBC News my initiative was “a mean thing to do.”
But it wasn’t entirely a troll. Chavez really was a border hawk, because illegal immigration (and guest worker programs) really did undermine the efforts of U.S. citizen farmworkers to better their lot. And it wasn’t just some ancillary thing — fighting illegal immigration was at the center of his advocacy for American farmworkers.
But today, on what would have been his 99th birthday, it’s clear my troll succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.
Chavez’s shockingly rapid un-personing in response to a recent New York Times exposé of his alleged abuse of underage girls was the last straw for his defenders. Had that been the only revelation running counter to the regime-approved hagiographic narrative, you’d be hearing a lot more “let the investigation take its course” and “these are troubling allegations but it’s important not to rush to judgment.”
Instead, before the ink had dried on the Times piece, lefties started renaming streets, removing his name from buildings, taking down statues, and covering up engravings of his name with concrete. Robert E. Lee and Christopher Columbus fared better during the BLM riots. All that’s left is for the Washington Post to publish a picture of his face being melted down in a foundry.
This is because his alleged preying on girls wasn’t the first inconvenient truth about Chavez that Hispanic identitarians and the left more generally have had to grapple with over the past decade. His descent into megalomania (he literally thought he had a visible “aura” and could heal people by laying on of hands) and his fascination with the Synanon cult became more widely known, but they didn’t cut to the heart of his usefulness as a political symbol.
But over the past decade or so, no one could pretend they didn’t know what his real views on immigration were.
Miriam Pawel’s The Crusades of Cesar Chavez in 2014 was the first thorough and honest biography of the labor leader. It came out at the same time as I started National Border Control Day, but I wasn’t aware of the book when I started it, having gotten the idea from a 2006 piece by Steve Sailer in the American Conservative and been given a push by a dishonest 2014 propaganda biopic about Chavez that President Obama screened at the White House.
But Pawel’s book was devastating. Far from being a right-winger or an ag industry shill, Pawel was a longtime liberal journalist who had already written a sympathetic history of the farmworker movement. But a decade before the New York Times, she accessed the wealth of material available, including things like audio recordings of UFW board meetings, and told the truth.
The reflexive left-wing explanations of Chavez’s immigration hawkishness (“It was only about strikebreakers!”) were no longer tenable. Pawel reported that during one UFW meeting, Huerta objected not only to Chavez’s use of the then-common “wetback” but even to “illegals”: “The people themselves aren’t illegal,” she said. “The action of being in this country maybe is illegal.” Chavez would have none of it: “‘No, a spade’s a spade,’ he said. ‘You guys get these hang-ups. . . . They’re wets, you know. They’re wets, and let’s go after them.’”
Pawel wasn’t alone. Around the time she was writing her book, labor activist Frank Bardacke published an exploration of Chavez’s hawkish take on immigration that began: “It has become an embarrassment.” He made clear that the UFW’s mid-1970s “Campaign Against Illegals” wasn’t just about strikebreakers. The petition that kicked off the campaign was “calling on the Justice Department and the INS to enforce immigration laws and to ‘remove the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens now working in the fields.’ The petition explained that ‘these illegals are breaking farm worker strikes, displacing farm workers from the jobs in the U.S. and depressing agricultural wages.’”
Part of the campaign was the “Wet Line,” run by Chavez’s ex-con cousin Manny, who led a group of men with “UFW Border Patrol” armbands down to southern Arizona, initially to keep out illegal aliens trying to break a lemon strike. “But,” Bardacke writes, “soon this UFW border patrol was stopping and turning back everyone they could find trying to cross, as by this time the UFW policy against all undocumented workers — strikebreakers or not — had been made very clear by Cesar Chávez, himself.”
As Chavez wrote to a colleague, “We’re against illegals no matter where they work because if they are not breaking the strike they are taking our jobs.”
The “embarrassment” kept spreading. In 2018 and again in 2019, resolutions were introduced in Congress to commemorate his birthday as National Border Control Day (I may have had something to do with that). They were denounced as, among other things, “offensive, shameful & beyond the pale of normal logic.”
But his immigration views couldn’t be swept under the rug, and became a particular problem with the rise of Donald Trump. The last few years have seen an increasing number of stories about his “complicated” and “complex legacy,” marked by views that were “questionable” and “sobering.”
Chavez was ripe for cancellation, and the Times report on his alleged loathsome treatment of teenage acolytes gave the left permission to rid themselves of this increasingly inconvenient icon.
Taking down his statues is easy enough, but renaming all the streets, schools, parks, etc., that bear his name is a bigger problem. Most will probably just be renamed after Huerta, who now reports that she was also sexually assaulted by Chavez, and who’s always been more simpatico with standard leftism. (She’s a champion of BLM, the trans movement, and the fight against “climate change,” and opposes the “genocidal slaughter” in Gaza.) The history of the UFW will be retconned such that she will have been the prime mover all along, with some guy named Cesar-something helping out here and there.
But what about his birthday? It’s possible that after Huerta’s death (she turns 96 in a few days) some states may make her birthday the official Hispanic holiday. But for now, California has simply rechristened Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day
But there’s already a commemoration on March 31 that didn’t specifically mention Chavez’s name. So feel free to keep celebrating National Border Control Day!