Who Will Replace Cesar Chavez as the Official Mexican-American Hero?
There are a lot of Mexican-Americans, but remarkably few famous ones.
Who can replace Cesar Chavez as the designated Mexican-American hero?
It’s usually said that there are about 40 million Mexican-Americans in the United States (out of 62 to 68 million Hispanics in total), roughly the same as the number of African-Americans.
Now, there are several African-Americans who can be said without exaggeration to have been world famous: e.g., Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, and so forth.
So, if MLK gets memoryholed when the FBI tapes get released (scheduled date: January 31, 2027), blacks won’t be forgotten.
But world famous Mexican-Americans?
This week, there are suddenly a number of empty plinths and plastered-over carvings of the name “Cesar Chavez.”
So, who can replace Cesar Chavez as the Designated Mexican-American hero?
Not that Chavez is world-famous. He remained sort of famous in California because you get his birthday (March 31) off, and various streets and so forth are named after him.
But even in California, so many Mexican residents’ families arrived from Mexico after Chavez’s heyday around 1969 that there’s not much personal connection to events of 57 years ago
Similarly, you don’t see the word “Chicano” much anymore. By 2022, the comic wokeism “Latinx” was showing up in American books much more often than “Chicano,” which peaked in the 1970s.
Another challenge with finding a replacement for Chavez is, well, Mexican mediocrity. There just aren’t that many really famous Mexican-Americans, especially ones who are Mexican on all sides of their family trees (e.g., Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a French billionaire’s daughter, is a tiny bit Mexican).
Here’s Wikipedia’s enormous “List of Mexican-Americans.” It’s pretty exhaustive and up to date: e.g.,:
César Chávez (1927–1993) – disgraced labor leader and activist. Child molester and rapist[163]
For example, here is one enigmatic entry:
Andre “Big A” – mechanic known for changing his last name to a blank character to protest the Vietnam War
There are lots of worthy names on the list, but how many are individually worthy of you getting a day off from work, when Washington and Lincoln have to share a holiday?
Mexicans haven’t been here in big numbers as long as blacks have, and Mexicans seem on average to be less ambitious and self-confident than African-Americans.
You may have been wondering why a post with “Cesar Chavez” in the title is illustrated with a picture of Marilyn Monroe. That happens a lot with my off-the-wall thumbnail illustrations. But, usually, if you just read far enough (ideally, past the paywall because you are fully subscribing), you will be able to fully immerse yourself in my Plate of Shrimp Lattice of Coincidence.
As it turns out, the single most famous name on Wikipedia’s List of Mexican-Americans is probably …
Paywall here.
