UPDATE: Cesar Chavez Park in Seattle is now Parque Libertad.
After a city council vote today, César E. Chávez Boulevard in Portland (OR) will be renamed Campesinos Boulevard, which means farmworkers in Spanish. I like that it still honors the Latino laborers without the risk of naming it after a person.
Nice.
I agree with this move.
I can’t read more than the first couple of paragraphs without a subscription, so I don’t know if the article addressed this, but renaming a street introduces some additional complications that you don’t get when you rename something like a park. The biggest one, IMO, is that all the homes and businesses on that street all have a new address all of a sudden. I hope the Post Office will continue delivering mail addressed to “123 César E. Chávez Boulevard” or whatever in case some senders don’t get the memo that the name changed, at least for a while.
Meanwhile San Francisco still has not made any visible moves to change the name of our Cesar Chavez Street. The Mayor started a group to decide on a new name, and of course the budget will have additional expense of new street signs all along the 3-mile length. They only started in May, and knowing the sludge that passes for activity in our city government, I’m not expecting anything soon.
I believe I’ll be writing to the Mayor to suggest Portland’s choice as equally apt for our fair city.
@WildaBeast, I’m not worried about USPS being able to deliver mail, they have a protocol for street name changes, and they had no problem when our Army Street was changed to Cesar Chavez Street in 1995.
Unfortunately, we went through it in 2009 when it changed from 39th Ave, so residents, businesses, and the Post Office already have experience dealing with it. It’s a brief pain for those involved, but the post office will manage no problem.
Pretty much any street named after Chavez was done relatively recently and changed from something else. Similarly for streets named after MLK which of course won’t be changed. They have done it before and it’s not that big a deal.
Mail addressed with Zip+4 will autosort to the right delivery route no matter what, but yes otherwise USPS and the other carriers deal with that multiple times a year in multiple locations.
The mapping/driving directions apps can have it done in a couple days if they so choose.
Literally “country people” (“country” as in “rural”).
It will be renamed (in Santa Barbara) Limuw Street. Limuw is the Chumash name for Santa Cruz Island.
Since California still has Farmworkers’ Day on March 31st, has anybody proposed changing the date? The only reason it’s March 31st is that it’s César Chávez’s birthday (its former name). I think moving it to the Friday just before Labor Day would be a good idea.
Outstanding!
San Francisco seems to be looking to go with Las Campesinas which seems fitting.
Though apparently it is already getting some pushback from residents who think it is too long or potentially confusing to spell in relation to addressing snail mail and whatnot. Though considering SF already has streets with names like ‘Juan Baptista Circle’ I think that’s a weak argument. Some seem to want to revert to ‘Army’ (how I still think of it cuz I’m old, but still not a great name), others are suggesting something shorter like ‘Dahlia’ or simpler like ‘Esperanza’.
Eh, can’t please everyone.
Dolores Huerta, the hero in this story, has passed away at 96.
https://www.npr.org/2026/10/28/nx-s1-6020543/dolores-huerta-dies
I’m glad she lived to be listened to.
Yeah, me too. I wish she felt like she could speak out sooner, but at least she got to speak out.