I spent 2 days in New York City without checking news and saw the above sign at Judson Memorial Church in the Village. That’s why I didn’t know till this morning about the accusations of rape and abuse against Cesar Chavez.

Many years ago I read a book by Peter Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes, describing the three years he spent with Cesar Chavez in the late 1960s. Sal Si Puedes was a barrio in San Jose where Chavez spent his early adult years and began to organize. It means Leave If You Can. Imagine a home town called by that name.

I remembered it this morning. Matthiessen himself told me many years later, in a cautious note, that the great labor leader was a very complicated man. Extraordinary—and complicated. A man with little formal education and no imposing physique or eloquence; his very humility was a great draw. He seemed heroic for many years even as the Farm Workers Union, which he co-founded with Dolores Huerta, got into legal and ethical trouble later on.

He seemed beyond the pale of ordinary humanity, a religious Catholic who became more mystical in his later years and saw himself almost as a Christ figure, in danger of death not at the behest of priests or Romans but by big farm owners and the vigilantes they hired, loving the poor, the illiterate, the dispossessed. Peter didn’t write a biography of him, but rather described the three years he spent in his company, and even in that earlier time there was a kind of absoluteness in how Chavez saw good and evil. He saw his work as a religious mission, which helps strengthen one’s resolve in the face of overwhelming odds but can also breed fanaticism and blind loyalty and devotion.

In a way, the accusations were no surprise to me. I had long known of the macho values that are such an inherent aspect of many Latino cultures. Several years ago, while still handing out food cards alongside Jimena Pareja towards the end of Covid, I said to her: “Why do parents with such little money have four or even five children, when there’s barely enough to eat?”

She said: “This is part of the culture. Look at what happens when they shop in Walmart. When they’re ready to pay, the woman who works outside digs into her bag and gives her husband the money. He’s always the one to pay, not her. And if a woman wants her husband or herself to use contraceptives, she’s called a slut who must want to sleep around, otherwise why use a contraceptive?”

Obviously, these are generalizations. Not all Latino husbands act like that, and certainly not all do the things that Chavez did. But after that conversation, it didn’t surprise me that many Latino voters in this country voted for the current president because they don’t embrace liberal values such as separation of church and state and, of course, abortion. I have told friends who want open borders that many of the people they want to welcome here will bring cultural values that they themselves have fought against for many years.

The work of recognizing, honoring, and integrating differences is way harder than getting the right political votes.

In that spirit, the rush to drop the Chavez name from streets and schools deflated me (I’m glad for the substitution of Farmworkers Day). I’m horrified by the tales of rape and abuse by Chavez towards the women in his union. Those women felt they had to be silent in order not to betray the cause. Luckily, there’s no reason to stay silent anymore, but there’s also no reason for such fast erasure.

If anything, it should be seen as an invitation to further study the years of that struggle and to more closely examine what happens when cultures come together, when values collide. Which is not to say that all Latino men are prone to do what Chavez did, certainly not that, but we often seem so glad to ward off complexity in the rush to first create heroes, and then villains.

Once, after the murder of George Floyd, a then-member of our zendo expressed what I saw as self-righteous joy at the push to remove the names of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln from the rolls of the honorable. At that point I said this:

I would like to know who here has absolute confidence that if posterity examines their life 100 years from now, they’ll find nothing wrong. Who among us never wears clothes made in Asian sweatshops, who among us eschews all meat and fish products including dairy, which vegetarians among us can swear not to have benefitted from low-wage labor that goes into the agricultural products they consume (which Chavez and Huerta fought against), who among us can swear by the materials used to build their home and those used to deliver electricity, heat, and water, who among never participates in processes that pollute the air, streams, or earth. Who among us can certify without a doubt that 100 years from now, no one will study their life, shake their head, and say: How could they have done that? How could they have lived like that?

Rape is beyond the pale; nothing justifies it. But women being put in their place was standard in civil rights organizations and continues to be so in religions that nobly espouse other causes. It’s not enough to just bring things to light; once they’re there, look at them, hear them, study them. Bear witness, and then decide what to do. The rush to erasure doesn’t do that.