In San Jose, Calif., Cesar Chavez is everywhere.
The labor leader held his first community organizing meetings at a church in East San Jose. A non-profit had plans to convert his former home into a community center. The city’s central plaza, the site of a summer jazz festival and a winter fair, bears his name. His face adorns a mural at the community college. At least one nursery school is named after him.
There is even a walking tour that takes visitors to key locations associated with Mr. Chavez and the farmworker movement he co-founded and led.
Now, in the wake of allegations that Mr. Chavez, who died in 1993, had sexually abused young girls, San Jose residents are trying to work through their feelings about the man who is so intertwined with their community.
On Saturday afternoon, Zeke Solorio sat in the shade outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where a parish hall bears a plaque informing visitors about the early organizing work Mr. Chavez did there.
Mr. Solorio, who was a strawberry picker in those days, attended one of Mr. Chavez’s farmworker rallies in Oxnard, Calif., in the 1970s. He recalled Mr. Chavez as charismatic, and quick with a joke.
Mr. Solorio said he was stunned by the abuse allegations. “I didn’t think he was like that,” he said softly.
Mr. Solorio, who, at 80, still works as a gardener, said he hoped there would be a thorough investigation. The truth is important, he said, and he supported the efforts underway to possibly remove Mr. Chavez’s name from memorials, streets and buildings.
City officials are taking it slowly. There are so many monuments, place names and public artworks associated with Mr. Chavez in San Jose that the city, as a first step in a reckoning, is establishing a commission to catalog all of them. Once that work is complete, the city will hold public hearings to “consider potential renaming actions in a trauma-informed, inclusive and culturally respectful manner,” according to a memorandum released by city leaders.
Mr. Chavez was born in Yuma, Ariz., in 1927. In the late 1930s, Mr. Chavez’s family joined a wave of other immigrants from the Southwest who were moving to California to find work in the fields, said Gregorio Mora-Torres, a professor emeritus of Mexican American studies at San Jose State University.
The family moved from one migrant camp to another, and Mr. Chavez quit school early and joined the Navy. By the early 1950s, he had settled in San Jose with his young family, and his years there were formative in his growth as a labor leader.
San Jose, meanwhile, had a postwar boom in its Latino population, and it became a hub of Latino culture in the Bay Area and a central place for labor organizing and the activism of the Chicano civil rights movement. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church was an early locus of that activism. Mr. Chavez, a Roman Catholic, becameclose to Father Donald McDonnell, who established the church and introduced a young Mr. Chavez to “a universe of writings about spirituality, labor rights, human rights, and social justice,” according to the plaque on the church grounds.
A few blocks away is the Cesar Chavez Early Learning Center. There, one wall is painted with a large mural of Mr. Chavez’s face, with farmworkers on either side. There are also two blue benches. One has a quote from Mr. Chavez. Another reads, “Every minute, a chance to change the world.” That is a quote from Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Mr. Chavez and said last week that she had been raped by Mr. Chavez in the 1960s.
A few blocks in the other direction is the modest one-story home — squat, brown and set back from the street — where Mr. Chavez once lived. A sign outside the home, whose small patch of lawn is anchored by a large carob tree, marks it as the place where Mr. Chavez “began his work in the Civil Rights Movement.”
Braulialina Rivera, 46, lives across the street from the house and said she was still processing the abuse allegations.
“The movement wasn’t one single man,” said Ms. Rivera, whose grandfather was a farmworker.
She said she had complicated feelings about Ms. Huerta, saying that if she had come forward sooner, maybe others would not have been victimized. But, she quickly added, “Back in those days, they didn’t care what a woman had to say.”
As politicians rush to deal with the fallout from the abuse allegations, some residents worry that the achievements of an entire movement — whose members included many foot soldiers, like Mr. Solorio, who are still living — will be tainted.
“For a lot of people in the community, they know they were part of this movement to bring national attention to the plight of farmworkers,” Mr. Mora-Torres said. “They know thousands of people had a role.”
He said that most people believe that Mr. Chavez’s actions should be condemned. But he added, “They know that erasing his memory in full is denying ourselves our own history.”
Already, California lawmakers have said they will change Cesar Chavez Day, which has been a state holiday since 2000, to “Farmworkers Day.”
In San Jose, city leaders moved quickly to cover Mr. Chavez’s name from the stairs at Plaza de Cesar Chavez, the central gathering place in downtown. On Friday, workers applied concrete over the stairs, leaving just a faint trace of the labor leader’s name.
San Jose leaders have stressed that as they reconsider Mr. Chavez’s legacy, they will continue to honor the broader movement.
“The farmworker rights movement has never been about one person alone,” city leaders wrote in their memorandum. “It has always been a people-driven movement grounded in dignity, sacrifice, and collective action. As the city considers its response, it is important to distinguish between honoring that broader legacy and continuing to bestow public honors on a single individual whose legacy is now under serious question.”
At San Jose City College, the area’s community college, a 40-foot mural depicting Mr. Chavez adorns the library named for him. In recent days, a sandwich board sign was placed in front of the mural, reading, “You are not alone,” and listing resources for students who have experienced sexual violence.
San Jose State University, which has made a college degree accessible to legions of Latino students, features the Arch of Dignity, Equality and Justice, a monument created by the artist Judy Baca that includes mosaics of Mr. Chavez, along with Ms. Huerta, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Robert F. Kennedy Sr.
The university is among the many institutions in the city grappling with how to respond to the news about Mr. Chavez’s past.
“As many in our community have noted, the movement itself, the workers, the marchers, and the women who stood on our front lines must continue to be celebrated,” Cynthia Teniente-Matson, the president of San Jose State, wrote in a message to the university community. “Their contributions cannot be dimmed by the actions of one person.”
Over the weekend, a group of middle-school children were touring the campus. Stopping at the arch, Javier Ortega, a teacher, told them of Mr. Chavez’s accomplishments, saying that he had established “a civil rights movement on the West Coast.”
Quietly, one student asked a teacher if they had heard the news. Vanessa Valdez-Cruz, a teacher, said: “Yeah, we’ve heard. It’s important to reflect on it.”
Away from the students, Ms. Valdez-Cruz said that the revelations have been painful, and have catalyzed conversations within Mexican American families about not just Mr. Chavez, but also the broader culture of silence within their community around sexual abuse by men “who have done a lot of harm.”
“It’s an opportunity to break these cycles and change the narrative,” she said.
Tim Arango is a correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles.
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