Where’s Cesar Chavez Boulevard? Chavez Hated Illegal Aliens!!!

I guess Robert Price does not know the vicious, vile background of Cesar Chavez.  Nor does the Bakersfield City Council.

Did you know Chavez had his UFW union spend up to $80,000 a WEEK to beat, threaten and rob illegal aliens?

“In the mid-70s, Chávez launched what he called the Illegals Campaign, an effort to raise awareness about illegal immigration and report undocumented workers to federal authorities.

”The idea was – much like we’ve heard today – ‘Well, the Border Patrol isn’t doing a good job at keeping people from crossing illegally. So we’re going to have to go out and do it ourselves,’ “ Pawel said.

The most intense aspects of this informal effort, however, did not take place in the form of secret phone calls to the government; they took place right along the border. In an effort led by César’s cousin Manuel Chávez, reports began to emerge of Mexican immigrants being threatened, beaten and robbed as they tried to cross over into the United States.

At one point, the patrol operation was so large, it employed 300 people and cost the UFW $80,000 a week.”

Today CNN considers it racist to call an illegal alien, an illegal alien—which is the term written into Federal law.  Yet. The Bakersfield city council just named a street after Chavez, who call illegal aliens WETBBACKS, cohort Dolores Huerta, a known communist said this, “A 1969 article in the Lodi News-Sentinel quotes Dolores Huerta, who helped found the UFW with Chavez, using the term. “There is a detention camp for wetbacks at Coachella from where they’re (wetbacks) (sic) taken out every day to work in the fields,” one article says.

Huerta told The Huffington Post the term always has been derogative and was surprised to hear Chavez using it. She denied saying the word “wetback” during the 1969 newspaper interview.

“Maybe the reporter inserted the term,” Huerta said. “That’s not the first time I’ve been misquoted.”

Chavez himself used the term wetback before Congress and in numerous speeches.  Did you know that he testified before Congress that all “wetbacks” should be deported?  Form the HuffPost:

“Think Mexican posted a link Wednesday to video of a 1972 televised interview with United Farm Workers union co-founder Cesar Chavez to its Facebook and Twitter accounts. In it, Chavez calls undocumented immigrants hired to break a strike, “wetbacks” and “illegals.”

“As long as we have a poor country bordering California, it’s going to be very difficult to win strikes,” Chavez says in the interview.

With todays standards Chavez street needs to be renamed and he needs to be vilified in DEI curriculum.  Otherwise we are promoting someone who uses the Hispanic term for the “N” word.  Shame on Bakersfield and any other city that glories this racist.  If we oppose Jefferson, Washington, the Founding fathers, why do we have a double standard for Chavez?

ROBERT PRICE: Where’s Cesar Chavez Boulevard?

• By ROBERT PRICE For The Californian, 3/31/24  https://www.bakersfield.com/columnists/robert-price-wheres-cesar-chavez-boulevard/article_19221410-eeda-11ee-8838-53b3d26b0050.html#tncms-source=article-nav-next

In the 31 years since labor leader Cesar Chavez died at the age of 66, at least 31 cities in 11 states have seen fit to name a street or other community thoroughfare in his honor.

Albuquerque, N.M.; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; San Francisco — places you might expect to appreciate the man who, perhaps more than any other individual, transformed the lives of millions of working-class Latinos — are among them.

But Chavez’s name also appears at major intersections in places you might not expect — Dallas; Boise, Idaho; Salt Lake City; Milwaukee; San Diego; Kansas City, Mo.; Las Vegas; Houston; Lubbock, Texas; and others.

On this Cesar Chavez Day, a holiday in at least six states including California that honors the life and legacy of the late civil rights icon, who would be 97, it’s also instructive to note where his name does not appear on street signs.

The city that jumps out is the city in which he spent some of the most meaningful days of his adult life. In Chavez’s adopted hometown of Bakersfield, he’s honored with only a Bakersfield City School District elementary school that opened the year after his death. Local government, however, has not seen fit to recognize him.

Bakersfield proper has 6,600 streets and the greater metro area about 10,000, from Avenue A to Zerker Road. Among those stretches of asphalt are streets named for Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Edward Fitzgerald Beale and Kevin Harvick — all worthy individuals of local renown, to be sure. Bakersfield has also named roads for two civil rights icons with national profiles: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott hero for whom a portion of Highway 58, between highways 99 and 184, is designated.

Two names that qualify for both those lists — Chavez and wartime California Gov. Earl Warren — are nowhere to be found on Bakersfield maps.

Before Chavez and the union he co-founded came along, farmworkers had no collective bargaining rights, and no toilets, heat breaks or clean drinking water. There was little public awareness about pesticides and other dangers workers face in and around the fields.

These are the workers we’re implicitly referring to when we in Kern County brag, justifiably, that “we feed the world.”

Naming a street in honor of Cesar Chavez or any other American isn’t just a sign of respect for that person, however. It’s a sign of respect for the entire ethnic community that most closely identifies with that person. It helps establish them as part of a greater national fabric. Naming a street, school or park after Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t just honor King, it reminds Black Americans that their race, their culture, their contributions have helped build this country, too, and, in a sense, admonishes and encourages them to continue to better themselves and their communities.

Local and regional governments across much of the U.S. recognize this, too. There are Cesar Chavez streets, Cesar Chavez boulevards, Cesar Chavez avenues, and Cesar Chavez lanes, from the Pacific Ocean to Lake Michigan.

In Kern County, however, there’s only Delano’s Cesar Chavez Lane, a modest middle-class residential street of about 30 homes built in 1995-96 — well-intentioned but hardly the prominent boulevard one would expect of a city like Delano with its long, deep ties to the labor movement. At least Delano has Cesar Chavez High School, which lies 3 miles east of the sister school named for one of Chavez’s greatest champions, Robert F. Kennedy.

I could find no record of a proposed Cesar Chavez Street ever having been debated or discussed by a Bakersfield City Council. No surprise there. As someone important once said, a prophet is not without honor except in his own country.

I get it. Chavez, Dolores Huerta and their United Farm Workers battled growers for decades, at the negotiating table and in the fields. There was animosity and violence, and resentment lingers. The name Cesar Chavez still gets a chilly reception in many corners of the Central Valley.

Fresno is only now moving ahead with a plan to honor Chavez after years of debate including, some 30 years ago, approving and then rescinding a decision to rename a street for him. Now, finally, Fresno, despite an opposition group’s lawsuit, will rename a 10-mile stretch that includes a portion of Kings Canyon Road.

Some “refuse to recognize the work that Cesar, myself and many of us did for farmworkers,” Dolores Huerta said in a recent television interview, referring to the long-running Fresno controversy. “They still have that resentment, and I think there’s still an amount of racism against people of color” involved in that resentment.

One could argue, and many have, that a Cesar Chavez Boulevard would be even more appropriate in Bakersfield than in Fresno, given the amount of time he spent in Kern County. But his impact on both cities, as well as the many small farming burgs in between, was immense.

Camila Chavez, executive director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation and niece of the labor leader, said Bakersfield’s oversight is especially galling.

“It’s such a disservice that an international icon is not recognized in the place he called home for 50 years,” she wrote in a Friday text message. “So many Kern County/Central Valley students don’t learn about Cesar, Dolores or the farmworkers movement until they go away for college. We should do a better job recognizing our local heroes and ‘sheroes’ of color.”

In Camila Chavez’s mind there is no debate. The fact is, though, there literally is no debate. Never has been, at least not here. Of all places.