What’s in a Name? Enough to Divide a City Along Racial Lines : Fresno: The City Council renames a street after Chavez, then takes it away. Will Latinos, accustomed to disappointment, finally exact a political price?

Growing up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, one is taught to view Mexican farm labor through the cloudy prism of divided loyalties. At one extreme, organizations like the United Farm Workers generate an almost sacred reverence in the Mexican community for bringing a dose of dignity into the grueling fields of our grandfather’s summer memory. At the other, the farming industry generates its own kind of reverence from Valley residents, including some Mexican-Americans, who have harvested the Earth’s bounty to enrich their lives and those of their children.

For generations, the passion fueling these opposing sentiments has built itself into a powder keg of human emotion. Now, in the Valley’s largest city, a political circus is a fiery spark threatening explosion.

It began with a whimper. On Oct. 12, the Fresno City Council, by a vote of 4-3, approved a motion to rename a venerable city street in honor of Cesar E. Chavez, the late UFW president. A 10-mile stretch of Kings Canyon Road was transformed into Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

Last week, confronted with an audience brimming with the unsettling imagery of brown faces on one side, white faces on the other, the same Fresno City Council, by a vote of 4-3, taketh away what it had giveth.

The high level of emotion surroundingthe controversy from its beginning indicates there is much more at stake, on all sides, than simply renaming a street after a hero. In most places, streets are named after dignitaries--and renamed and named again--with little fanfare. The dignitary of the moment is Chavez.

Immediately after his death earlier this year, Chavez took up his last march--one toward sainthood in the nation’s sprawling Latino community. Partly because millions of Latinos in the United States lack any other heroes and partly because the current assortment of leaders is no more inspiring, Chavez has become more popular in death than he was in life.

Fueling the Chavez canonization is not only respect but also, perhaps, a bit of guilt. Mexican-American politicians and middle-class professionals may be using efforts to immortalize Chavez as a form of cultural penance, to atone for abandoning the UFW when their support would have meant the most--in the ‘80s.

In Washington, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus--a group whose support of farm-labor issues has been halfhearted--proposes that Chavez’s birthday be made a national holiday. In Sacramento, a prominent Latino legislator--a former union ally who was taken off the UFW Christmas card list years ago for publicly challenging Chavez--asks that the same be done in California. Locally, the Sacramento City Council votes unanimously to establish the day as a paid municipal holiday.

In Bakersfield, a park is renamed after Chavez. In Stockton, it’s the main library. And, in East Los Angeles, both the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the City Council have voted to change portions of Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar E. Chavez Avenue.

In Fresno, things work differently.

Ask proponents of the recently deceased Cesar Chavez Boulevard why that is, and some will charge racism. As Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, our individual family histories are brimming with ugly stories and hurtful childhood memories of low expectation and hostility and overt racial discrimination. A lingering coraje brews over the reprehensible manner in which our parents and grandparents were treated not long ago, and the subtle manner in which their children are reminded of how far they have come and how far they have to go.

Still, I do not believe that racism played as prominent a role as some of my fellow Latinos would suggest. Notwithstanding the sort of racist phrases bandied around during last week’s City Council meeting--”Go back to Mexico!”--it is possible that opponents were not motivated by a distaste for the idea of a Spanish surname displayed on a street sign. Instead, the resistance had much more to do with exactly which surname it was.

Yes, cities name streets after dignitaries. Yet, in this case, the fact that the municipality is Fresno--the city that grapes built--and the dignitary is Chavez--a controversial political figure whose passing local farmers hardly mourned--all but ensured the indignity of the reversal.

Despite the opposition’s sticking to its story about concerns for “due process,” it is hard to imagine that such a fuss would have been made had the street not been named after someone so vilified by a powerful farming industry that touches the lives of every resident of the San Joaquin Valley. For those farmers who fought so hard and so long against Chavez and his boycotts, the gesture was insult added to injury. In any case, if the City Council had used the same method to rename Kings Canyon Road as Rush Limbaugh Drive, there would have been not a protest but a christening.

The whole sordid affair leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. And for Mexican-Americans, it leaves behind not only hurt feelings but disappointment.

Ah, but disappointment is part of being Mexican-American. Our grandfathers tell us that there is a certain strength that comes from enduring injustice. But I am growing so tired of a grandfather’s resolution to nothingness.

I was no fan of what Chavez became in his final days. Still, I supported Cesar Chavez Boulevard and mourn its passing. For me, there is no contradiction. The issue in Fresno is not Chavez; the man is dead and cares not one way or another what is named after him.

The real issue is whether the political strength of Latinos, who make up the largest ethnic group in San Joaquin Valley, and soon in the country as a whole, is to be respected as it deserves to be. There are certain things that politicians do not do. They do not go into South Boston and tease the Irish-American community with a park named after John F. Kennedy, then take it away. They do not go into New York’s Little Italy and boast about renaming La Guardia Airport, then take it away. And they do not, ever, go into an African-American neighborhood in Atlanta, dedicate a center to Martin Luther King Jr., then take it away. The reason why is because the voters in those communities will make them pay a political price for playing with their emotions like toys in a schoolyard. For the inexcusable breach of political respect dealt the Mexican-American community, which it is supposed to serve as fairly as it does others, the Fresno City Council should be ashamed. The question is whether that same community is prepared to make them pay the price for it.