The Ceres Unified School District board of trustees will be considering the renaming Cesar Chavez Junior High School at its meeting on Thursday evening.
A number of school districts are in the process of removing Chavez’s name after UFW labor union legend Dolores Huerta revealed that the late farm labor union founder sexually assaulted and got her pregnant twice.
Huerta made the shocking claim after the New York Times published the claims of former United Farm Workers (UFW) workers Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas who say they were sexually abused by Chavez as teens. Both told the Times that they remained silent for decades for fear of “tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.”
CUSD Supt. Amy Peterman said staff will be asking for board approval to conduct an information gathering community outreach to determine whether or not to rename Cesar Chavez. If approved, staff would return to trustees at its May 7 meeting to report the feedback so that the Board can evaluate if and how to rename the school.
CUSD Board Policy allows for the renaming of schools or facilities “under extraordinary circumstances and after thorough study.”
Huerta, who birthed 11 or 13 children from four different men in her life, publicly revealed that she was sexually abused by Chavez, which resulted in two of her children, a secret she kept for 60 years to protect the farmworker movement. She gave up the two children to adoptive families.
Huerta said that the formerly revered UFW founder Chavez sexually abused her as a young woman and decided to speak out after Murguia and Rojas told the Times that Chavez sexually abused them over a five-year period in the 1970s, beginning when they were 12 and 13.
When asked why she kept her secret so long, Huerta said she “believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”
On Instagram Huerta wrote: “As a young mother in the 1960s, I experienced two separate sexual encounters with Cesar. The first time I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to. The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.
“I had experienced abuse and sexual violence before, and I convinced myself these were incidents that I had to endure alone and in secret. Both sexual encounters with Cesar led to pregnancies. I chose to keep my pregnancies secret and, after the children were born, I arranged for them to be raised by other families that could give them stable lives.”
In 2009 the CUSD Board of Trustees chose the name of Cesar Chavez for the new junior high school in east Ceres. It was a controversial choice given CUSD’s policy of naming schools after local figures who contributed to education in Ceres. That policy resulted in Ceres schools being named after Mae Hensley, Virginia Parks, Sam Vaughn, Joel Hidahl, Patricia Kay Beaver and Walt Hanline as well as the Berryhill, La Rosa and Sinclear families. The board, which had been populated by more Latino members then, however, went against the policy, grating against those who were suggesting the names of community members Wayne Salter and Phil de la Porte among others.
The renewed talk of renaming the school has produced some recommendations from the community that have included locals former mayor Louis Arrollo, late scout leader Ray Baltz, former CUSD teacher and superintendent Scott Siegel, Sid Long Sr., and Marine Lance Cpl. Juana Navarro who was killed in Iraq in 2006. Some have also suggested swapping out Chavez’s name with Huerta’s.
