I heard that the 2026 annual Cesar E. Chavez March for Justice was cancelled before I heard the reason why. My immediate reaction was defensive. Chavez is one of the only Chicano civil rights leaders that has garnered national celebration. Surely this was another attempt to eliminate “DEI” from public spaces. It wasn’t until I read Dolores Huerta’s statement to the New York Times, revealing that Chavez sexually assaulted her on two separate occasions, that the full picture came into focus. The news forced me into a kind of double vision between the civil rights icon I’ve admired and a man who had harmed the woman who built the movement alongside him.

When the reason behind the cancellation was announced, my unease was not entirely settled. Along with the streets, murals and statues across the country that have been renamed or removed in the past month, the sheer speed of Chavez’s public reckoning feels like more than moral clarity. Instead, it may suggest an opportunistic move to further undermine the minority groups that Chavez once championed, at a time when they face renewed threat.

The United Farm Workers, founded by Chavez, Huerta and Larry Itliong in 1962, organized some of the most consequential labor actions to date, including the Delano grape strike and the national boycott that followed. Their work secured protections for all farmworkers, especially migrants who had historically been excluded from labor laws. The movement was collective from the start, but Chavez’s ability to nationalize the cause played a crucial role in its success.

Now, Chavez’s achievements could never outshine his transgressions against Huerta and others. But put in contrast with similar public figures, Chavez’s history makes the swiftness of his removal striking. After he won the popular vote by a margin of two million in the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump made clear that many Americans can find a leader in a convicted sexual abuser. His ability to secure a second presidential term at all, despite a well-documented history of sexual violence, reveals the uneven quality of public accountability.

The immediacy with which the general public believed Dolores Huerta was a breath of fresh air. Yet, one has to ask, why her, and why now? Why not in 2023, when Donald Trump was found liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll? Trump’s near-singular political resilience aside, the contrast is less about equivalence between individuals and their actions, and more so the conditions under which certain public figures are permitted to remain on stage while others aren’t.

This is where an earlier comparison comes to mind, in Kyle Rittenhouse. In 2020, he fatally shot two people at a protest in Kenosha, WI. At the time, Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance said that in killing the men, Rittenhouse “made good decisions” and that the media “treated basic manly virtue as white supremacy.” Whether the general public agreed with Vance’s claims or not, a pattern had obviously emerged. Certain individuals are granted the benefit of the doubt, layers of context, a chance to explain themselves. Their legacies are not decided in a week.

I have to wonder what JD Vance’s angle would be had Chavez found himself in Rittenhouse’s position. What “manly virtues” could possibly emerge from the tragic stories that have unfolded in the past month?

In the years since the height of #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movement, scholars have noted a measurable contraction in public willingness to sustain outrage, especially when allegations implicate powerful people or challenge dominant narratives. A 2025 analysis published by the Skytop Strategies Institute describes this shift as a “post reckoning fatigue,” in which institutions gesture towards accountability while simultaneously narrowing the scope of who is allowed to be held accountable.

That framework helps to explain the dissonance I feel watching Chavez’s legacy collapse. The public’s willingness to believe Huerta, while overdue and necessary, stands in tension with a broader retreat from believing survivors. It raises the uncomfortable possibility that Chavez’s removal is not evidence of a newly principled consistency, and instead is an example of uneven, opportunistic accountability at work.

The opportunity arose at a time like no other. Since Trump returned to office last year, the political moment has been defined by an aggressive rollback of DEI initiatives and weakening labor protections, both developments disproportionately affecting the communities Chavez and Huerta organized alongside. States have loosened child labor restrictions. Organizing has become riskier, while union membership continues to decline nationally. With these trends in mind, Chavez’s erasure comes back into focus as a convenient opportunity to diminish a symbol of Latino labor power at the moment when that power is under renewed threat.

This is the part of the story that feels crucially absent from the national conversation. That is not to discredit those who, in good faith, have called for accountability since Huerta came forward. However, Chavez’s importance from the beginning had less to do with his personal virtue, and more his ability to command the country to witness the conditions migrant workers endure. At a time when those in power mean to disqualify and generalize all immigrants as criminals, we risk flattening a movement into a single man’s wrongdoing, rather than renew our confrontation of the structural forces that made the movement necessary in the first place.

I have no desire to rehabilitate Chavez, or cast doubt on the harm he has caused. I’d like to understand what his atypical erasure reveals about the present. The contrast between his case and that of Trump and Rittenhouse exposes a cultural logic in which only certain classes are granted interpretive generosity, and the allegations themselves have little to do with these categories.

The question, then, is not whether Chavez deserves a street name downtown. It is why his legacy could be dismantled in days, while others accused of more and wielding far greater power remain insulated by a culture eager to rationalize their actions. That disparity reveals a hierarchy of whose complexity we tolerate, whose harm is excusable and whose political contributions we are willing to forget. If we can’t see that hierarchy clearly, I worry that we risk mistaking convenience for justice.