Neither Erase Nor Enshrine: Toward a Collective Memory Beyond César Chávez
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
April 9, 2026
I offer this reflection with care—and with urgency. I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on this question—not in the abstract, but as a consequence of direct involvement.
I served on the committee that met regularly to plan and ultimately establish the César Chávez statue that now stands prominently on the West Mall at the University of Texas at Austin. That process was deeply intentional: it was about recognition, visibility, and affirming a history too often pushed to the margins of public memory.
Today, that work is being revisited more broadly. Across cities and campuses, communities—especially within Mexican American and farmworker communities—are debating whether to remove street names, rename schools, and alter murals tied to César Chávez.
While, to my knowledge, there is no current effort at the University of Texas atAustin to remove the Chávez statue, it is important to anticipate such debates and invite reflection on its presence and meaning within our own campus landscape.
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| César Chavez statue—UT-Austin |
The terms of the debate are stark: preserve or erase, honor or condemn.
But this binary is not only intellectually insufficient—it is politically dangerous.
It flattens complexity at precisely the moment when complexity is most needed. And it unfolds within a broader context in which the machinery of erasure is already accelerating—across public education, libraries, and curriculum. In such a moment, we must be especially vigilant about what—and whose—histories are made to disappear.
The question before us is not simply what to do with monuments to César Chávez. The deeper question is who controls memory—and to what end. Because if we are not careful, the debate over Chávez will not remain about Chávez. It will become yet another opening through which the broader history of the Chicana and Chicano movement—and the farmworker struggle in particular—can be quietly, systematically erased.
We are living through an aggressive political project—aligned with Christian nationalist and right-wing agendas—that seeks to narrow what can be taught, remembered, and valued. From book bans to curricular restrictions to the policing of “controversial topics,” we are witnessing an effort not just to contest history, but to discipline it.
In this context, calls to simply “remove” Chávez risk being folded into a broader logic of disappearance—one that does not stop at individuals, but extends to movements, communities, and entire histories and epistemologies.
And yet, let us be equally clear: uncritical celebration is untenable.
To enshrine Chávez as beyond critique is to betray the very movement he helped lead. It replaces history with mythology. It silences those within the struggle—particularly women and rank-and-file workers—whose experiences complicate the narrative. It insulates power from accountability under the guise of reverence.
If we are serious about justice, then we must be equally serious about truth.
History has never required perfection to warrant remembrance. Figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—both enslavers—remain central to the national narrative, not because they were without contradiction, but because their historical significance is institutionally secured. Their legacies have not been erased; rather, they have been increasingly contextualized.
But Chávez’s legacy does not occupy the same protected terrain.
Unlike Washington or Jefferson, the history of the farmworker movement remains fragile—its presence in curriculum, public memory, and institutional recognition still contested. To collapse that movement into Chávez—and then to dismantle Chávez without preserving the movement—is to risk losing the very history that made possible labor rights, dignity, and collective struggle for generations of Mexican American and immigrant workers.
The farmworker movement was never the work of one man.
It was built through the labor and leadership of countless individuals—many of them women, undocumented workers, and community organizers whose names remain far less known, but whose contributions were indispensable. To engage Chávez critically should not narrow our historical lens; it should widen it.
And this is where the current debate must evolve. The choice is not between erasure and enshrinement. It is between a politics of disappearance and a politics of transformation.
In this moment, I do not support removing the Chávez statue.
Not because it is beyond critique—but because the conditions into which it would be removed are already structured by erasure. To take it down now, without a clear and collectively grounded plan for what replaces it, risks creating a vacuum into which the broader history of the farmworker movement may also vanish.
But neither should the statue remain as it is—unquestioned, uncontextualized, and singular.
Instead, we should treat this as a transitional moment.
We should keep the statue in place until we are prepared to replace it with a representation that more fully and accurately reflects the collective nature of the farmworker movement itself.
There are exquisite representations to choose from.
That future representation might take the form of a broader memorial—one that honors the movement as a whole, rather than centering a single figure. It could include the iconic imagery of the United Farm Workers, such as the Aztec eagle, a symbol of collective struggle, resilience, and self-determination.
Such a shift would not erase Chávez. It would situate him—properly—within a larger history.
It would move us away from hero worship and toward collective memory. Away from individualization and toward movement-building. Away from static commemoration and toward living history.
This is the work of recontextualization—not erasure.
It requires community engagement, especially with farmworker communities themselves. It requires curricular and institutional commitments to Ethnic Studies and labor history—fields that are themselves under threat. And it requires political clarity about the moment we are in.
This decision does not occur on neutral ground.
In another time, removal might function as accountability. But in this moment—when the state is already engaged in a broader project of historical narrowing—we must ask: What will be lost? And who benefits from that loss?
Rejecting erasure is not the same as defending harm. It is a refusal to allow critique to be weaponized against communities whose histories are already precarious.
The task before us is harder than choosing sides.
It requires us to hold contradiction—to recognize that Chávez can be both consequential and flawed, that movements are always larger than their most visible leaders, and that public memory is not fixed, but contested terrain.
But this is precisely the work of education.
If we do this right, the result is not silence, nor mythology, but a richer and more democratic public memory—one that tells the truth, honors collective struggle, and resists the forces that would prefer we forget.
Because the greatest danger is not that we will remember Chávez imperfectly.
It is that we will stop remembering the movement at all.
References
Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. (n.d.). George Washington and slavery. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-slaveryThomas Jefferson Foundation. (n.d.). Slavery at Monticello. https://www.monticello.org/slavery/introduction
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