Two weeks ago, The New York Times published several women's accounts of sexual abuse by farmworker rights activist César Chávez. Since then, conversations have sprung up around how to separate the movement to improve conditions for field workers—which is ongoing—from the man whose name is closely attached to it.
UC Santa Cruz philosophy professor Lauren Lyons says there's a human tendency to use one person to explain a historical movement. While that can be—as she says—narratively satisfying, it's also quite problematic because it doesn't represent reality.
Lyons spoke with KAZU’s Amy Mayer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lauren Lyons: Zooming out from this case, I think it's really important to resist this sort of thinking; to not ask what an individual did, but to ask what the movement did. In the case of Chávez, the farmworkers movement was never just one man. There were countless other leaders and farmworkers who participated in strikes, who organized their workplaces, who showed up at the picket line. The whole moral logic of a union is that as individually we're powerless, but together we can attain huge victories. [It was] already an issue that we thought about labor history in terms of heroic individuals, and now this is a moment where we can have a reckoning about the collective power and the collective action that went into this.
Amy Mayer: There have been many powerful people whose complexities and flaws have come out, and I don't think we've seen such a quick and collective effort to almost erase a name. Do you have thoughts about why this is happening in this way now?
The solution is not just to tear down the monuments. We actually have to ask, how can we affirm and express those values that made those monuments valuable in the first place?
LL: I think we're already in the mix of a historical reckoning about memorials, that they're not just historical recordkeeping that just says what the facts on the ground [were], what happened, this person lived here. But what most philosophers think is that they have this important communicative function. They sort of speak to everyone who passes them and this is especially important for monuments, given that they're in public spaces. What they express is actually quite morally loaded. On one hand, they might express our values as a community, who we are. And on the other hand, they might function as a sort of moral endorsement—saying this is the type of person that we want to emulate.
And what these monuments to Chávez expressed prior to these revelations is still so important: solidarity with exploited workers, the power of collective action, the dignity of people rendered invisible. Those values are no less important in the wake of the Chávez revelations, but now these monuments express something different given what we know. I think that the solution is not just to tear down the monuments. We actually have to ask, how can we affirm and express those values that made those monuments valuable in the first place?
And there's a lot of moves to do this in California and elsewhere, [like] the renaming of César Chávez Day as Farmworkers Day—that expresses the more collective nature of the movement instead of this individual heroism.
AM: Do you think there will be, on a broader level, any more consideration for not memorializing individuals?
LL: I hope so. And I think that this is a moment that can encourage that reckoning because reducing social movements to individual people is always a reduction of the historical reality and the collective power that went into them. And so, maybe this is a moment not to just look for another name, but to actually think about ways to express collective power and to express it creatively.
