California lawmakers have voted to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day in the wake of shocking allegations that the labor leader sexually abused women and young girls.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor, is expected to sign the bill on Thursday authorizing the renaming ahead of the state holiday on 31 March. The state has observed the holiday honoring Chavez, who in the 1960s built a major farm-worker labor rights movement California’s agricultural heartland, for more than two decades.
State lawmakers quickly moved ahead with the legislation after the New York Times published a report last week in which several women, including Dolores Huerta, who co-led the movement with Chavez, said they were sexually abused by the president of the United Farm Workers (UFW). Two women who were daughters of fellow organizers said they were children when he began to groom and abuse them. The Times reported that Chavez used women who worked and volunteered in the organizing movement “for his own sexual gratification”.
The allegations have sparked a wave of efforts to rename or alter memorials to Chavez, who had long been admired for helping secure better wages and working conditions for farm workers. The swift and sweeping effort to erase Chavez’s name from public life was previously unthinkable, as his status had only grown since his death in 1993.
California was the first state to designate Chavez’s birthday, 31 March, as a holiday nearly 30 years ago. The legislature in 2000 passed a bill to make it an official paid day off for state employees and require that students learn about his legacy and his role in the labor movement in California. Barack Obama moved to honor Cesar Chavez on that date in 2014.
The California bill passed in the assembly with bipartisan support on Monday.
“We cannot ignore wrongdoing and we should not continue to celebrate a single person when the movement itself is so much bigger,” assembly member Cecilia Aguiar-Curry said before the vote on Monday.
Republican assembly member Alexandra Macedo said the change was to honor workers and their families.
“This isn’t just about a date on a calendar or a name on a building,” Macedo said. “It is about the hands that feed this nation. It is about the men and women who are in the orchards, in the fields, before the sun even touches the horizon, and who are still there long after it sets.”
Since the allegations came to light, California State University, Fresno, has covered up Chavez’s statue on campus, while San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento have taken steps to erase his name from public landmarks. Some advocated for Huerta’s name to replace Chavez’s, and several states had said they would not observe the day.
Elsewhere, the city council in Phoenix, Arizona, voted to remove his name from city facilities and rename the day honoring him, while in Texas the state department of education said it would remove him from its curriculum.
The California state senate’s pro tempore president, Monique Limón, said honoring farm workers is especially important in the face of a series of federal raids across the state last year. A worker in her district died while being chased by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent last summer, Limón said.
“His death is a reminder of how much farm workers risk every day to put food on our table,” she said before the vote. “Our farm workers remind us that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
