Council considers renaming Bakersfield street to honor César Chávez

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – A couple weeks ago, we here at KGET.com pointed out that more than 30 U.S. cities have streets and boulevards named after labor leader Cesar Chavez – but that Bakersfield, near where Chavez was based for half his life, is not one of them.

Well, we have an update.

Chavez is one of the most famous and influential labor leaders in U.S. history – and certainly the most famous Latino labor leader. The number of cities around the country that have named streets, large and small, after the late civil rights icon, underscores that fact. There’s at least 35, from Oregon to Michigan, and San Diego to Kansas City.

But no such street in Bakersfield, but that may be changing.

Two members of the Bakersfield City Council, Manpreet Kaur and Eric Arias, were to have proposed the creation of a Cesar Chavez street, avenue, boulevard, highway, something – at the April 10 city council meeting.

“The hope is, now that young people growing up in this community who are the children of farmworkers, the grandchildren of farmworkers, will be able to drive down a boulevard or a street named after Cesar Chavez,” said Kaur. “It’s a household name already. We’re just kind of building on that legacy.”

Bakersfield has about 10,000 streets – and among those stretches of asphalt are streets named for Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Edward Fitzgerald Beale, Kevin Harvick and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Still none for the man who, along with Dolores Huerta, improved life immensely for farmworkers.

Before Chávez and the union he co-founded came along, farmworkers had no collective bargaining rights, no toilets or clean drinking water in the fields, and there was little public awareness about pesticides and other dangers that workers must endure to put fruits and vegetables on our table – the workers we’re implicitly referring to when we brag about Kern County’s status as the breadbasket of the world.

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Camila Chavez, niece of Cesar Chavez and daughter of Dolores Huerta, says the honor is long overdue.

“We were able to do that for Buck Owens Boulevard, which is a great honor, right? To have a legend, a music legend,” said Camila Chavez, executive director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. “Well, we also have a civil rights legend that we need to honor and so it is time.”

The fate of the proposal is unclear at this juncture. The name César Chávez still gets a chilly reception in many corners of the Central Valley.

But how many culture changing visionaries have failed to ruffle a few feathers along the way?  César Chávez certainly did.

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