Shiny Chandravel, Assistant Opinions Editor
A recent New York Times investigation revealed allegations that famous workers’ rights activist Cesar Chávez sexually abused women and girls. A figure who was once a monumental hero for union rights and the celebrated founder of the United Farm Workers union now taints the very movements he helped pioneer.
As his legacy topples, so are the numerous statues and memorials once mounted in his honor. The California State Legislature, in a moment of rare bipartisanship, even passed a bill to rename March 31 from Cesar Chávez Day to Farm Workers Day.
This rapid unraveling of a once glorified legacy reveals something beyond Chávez. It illustrates a deeper problem — the way we choose to memorialize history is fundamentally flawed.
For generations, we have built statues and named institutions after individuals we deem “heroic.” We set up bronze and marble embodiments of the individuals whose lives represent our country’s highest ideals and morals.
This approach of carving the visages of our nation’s heroes attempts to accomplish something that history repeatedly disproves — that any one person can fully preserve the values we ought to embrace like justice, perseverance, courage, equality and freedom.
As leaders emerge, our instinct again and again is to tie entire movements to their names. The labor movement became Chávez. Civil rights became Martin Luther King Jr.. Women’s suffrage became Susan B. Anthony. Intricate, collective struggles — built by thousands of people over decades — get reduced to a single name.
Over time, those names become a shortcut. They are easy to invoke, easy to celebrate and easy to memorialize. We build the statues, name the holidays and title the schools. But this instinct to idolize our heroes also flattens our past. And in that simplicity, something essential is lost — the thousands of ordinary people who made that change possible.
And when that one person falls, that entire history tied to them falters too.
Chávez’s tarnished legacy is only the most recent reminder that human beings, no matter how influential, fall short of embodying the cardinal values we are meant to internalize. When new truths emerge — as they inevitably do — the monuments we construct in their honor become unstable.
As quickly as we build statues up, it seems they fall just as speedily.
The demolition of once heroic statues reflects a decision to dismantle part of a community’s values and ideals. This isn’t necessarily wrong — often times dismantling old values allows for a renewal, an indicator of progress.
This was most notably the case in Richmond in 2020-21. After the public decried the numerous statues of the Confederates littered about the city, the decision to tear them down indicated a change in our community’s values. We decided that future generations ought not to honor, but carefully move forward from our dark history as the capitol of the Confederate South.
The deeper issue is not just that the statues we build can fall — it’s what we lose when we build them in the first place. When we reduce movements to individuals, we risk losing meaningful history. We are left grappling not only with who these figures really were, but with how little of the greater history we actually held onto.
The average person, when prompted, thinks of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks when asked about the Civil Rights Movement. But beyond that, many aren’t able to remember much else. I wish we would also similarly honor the Children’s March: regular children and citizens violently hosed down by police officers as police dogs were released on little kids. It was marches like these, composed of ordinary citizens as young as nine years old, that marked real change in the Civil Rights Movement.
Yet we often don’t recognize that history. Consequently, we forget that history was made by regular people, not just the heroes placed on bronze thrones — while their work is undeniably important, it doesn’t show the whole story.
Our focus is more often directed to memorializing role models instead of keeping their work alive. We sit waiting for saviors of grandeur to emerge rather than realizing that we can make a change too.
Statues don’t eternalize history. They only preserve names.
If we want to teach history with all of its nuance intact, we have to rethink what our memorials are actually for. They shouldn’t just honor individuals — they should remind us to finish the work those individuals were part of advancing.
In Richmond, the mounds of grass where the Confederate statues once stood have become a contested subject — leaving behind questions of who in our city’s history should replace them. But perhaps we are missing something more important — asking ourselves the wrong question.
Perhaps those empty spaces on Monument Avenue aren’t asking us to decide who in our history should be remembered next, but that we become the kind of people worth remembering.