The City of Portland is closing homeless shelters, struggling to improve overlong police response times, and neglecting its roads and parks. But on Sept. 9, a frequently fractious City Council found an action to unite on: phasing out the only street name in the city that honors a labor leader.
Cesar Chavez is famed as the founder of the United Farm Workers union, but in the wake of revelations that he groomed and sexually abused underage girls, local governments around the country have been stripping his name from public spaces.
Portland City Council overrode city street naming rules in 2009 to rechristen 39th Avenue as César E Chávez Boulevard in 2009. Now in a 12-0 vote Sept. 9, the current City Council overrode the city’s rules on street renaming again, this time to decree that the seven-mile-long arterial will become “Campesinos Boulevard.” Campesinos is a Spanish language word for peasants or farm workers.
The ordinance was sponsored by City Councillor Loretta Smith. An earlier version of the ordinance declared a “widespread consensus across the community” that the name should be changed in a way that honors “la causa and Latinx labor leaders.” In fact, public input ran more than 10 to 1 against the Campesinos idea, with most favoring a return to 39th. In acknowledgement of that, City Councilor Steve Novick succeeded in passing an amendment that changed the finding of “widespread consensus” to “widespread support.”
Under city code, the name César E Chávez Boulevard could stay up alongside the new name for up to five years in order to avoid confusion.
At a Sept. 2 hearing on the ordinance, Portland Bureau of Transportation director Millicent Williams told City Council it could take up to a year to install the new signs. Because City Council didn’t appropriate any new funds, the cost of the work will come out of budgets the bureau already allocated to other work.
“Given that we don’t have any discretionary funding to do this work, we would need to reallocate, not do something else,” Williams said. “Frankly, we would be making the choice to delay another effort in order to make sure that we could do this.”
