Lyrianne González is a César Chávez Fellow in Latinx studies at Dartmouth College.
Lyrianne González was on her way to a conference of historians when she first learned that she had been chosen for the César Chávez Fellowship in Latinx studies at Dartmouth College.
“I was just happy and excited when I got the call,” González recalled of the phone call she took at an airport while awaiting a flight to Chicago for the Organization of American Historians’ 2025 conference, where she was set to give a talk about how race affected mid-20th century Mexican and Caribbean guestworkers.
“This is a longstanding fellowship that is seen as very prestigious within our field,” González said.
But in the wake of The New York Times investigation that alleges the late César Chávez – a central figure in the farmworkers movement of the 1960s and 1970s – molested children and raped United Farmworkers co-founder Dolores Huerta, González joined faculty at Dartmouth’s Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies in an effort to get the César Chávez fellowship renamed.
“This news is incredibly disturbing and difficult,” González, who is a fifth-year History Ph.D. candidate minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University, said in a videoconference interview with The EDU Ledger regarding the Chávez scandal. “It is very important that the name is changed very soon.”
González – whose grandfather picked cotton and various produce through the Bracero program of 1942 – grew up in a home where her mother taught her that Chávez was not the face of Mexican American and farmworkers' rights that he was often made out to be. She came to see Chávez as a problematic and divisive figure who viewed braceros, such as her grandfather, and undocumented immigrant workers as threats who drove down wages and were being used by growers to break strikes.
