WHAT WE’RE READING: Don’t Just Replace Chavez—Rethink Monuments
Harold Phillips | Published on 4/19/2026
From The Atlantic:
"Almost every day, I drive along a street named after Cesar Chavez, past a mural of Cesar Chavez that shows the labor leader, who died in 1993, clutching the billowing flag of the United Farm Workers with one arm and a group of anonymous laborers with the other. For years, I’ve been struck by the work’s ardent theatricality: Chavez appears sturdy and powerful, whereas the figures look like they’ve fainted. In Los Angeles, where I live, Chavez is everywhere. Within a mile of that mural are two others. A multitude of municipal sites, both grandiose and mundane, bear his name. The transfer station downtown where I wait for the bus is named for Chavez. So is a city park in San Fernando, on the northern fringes of L.A., where a naturalistic bronze statue always looked as if it was about to break into a rally speech.
"I now look on those tributes with horror and dismay... The reassessment of Chavez coincides with a volatile debate over public memorials and the forms they take. We live in a reactionary moment: The Trump administration has resuscitated a monument to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C., and installed a statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds, while generally promoting a vision that prizes the heroic and the classical. (Think: man on a plinth.)
"But this is also a time when communities and designers are radically reimagining what a monument can be..."
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