Naming things after people is a dumb idea

Cesar Chavez Boulevard anyone?

Denali… also named after a man who never once even saw it in person. Photo by Barth Bailey on Unsplash

Welcome to Free Thought Friday (or Free Thought Weekend if this comes out on Saturday/Sunday). In addition to Why Wednesday articles, this is a new opinion-focused article that will come out every Friday, Saturday or Sunday. It’ll still be highly geography focused, but it will give me (and whoever else might write it) a chance to be a little more expressive. A bit bolder. And perhaps a tiny little-bit more scandalous. Probably not the latter, actually. But it WILL be a place where we get to let our geography hot take flags fly loud and proud. So, with that said, let’s get to something that has been burning me up for a while.

I have a bone to pick with people and it’s one that will likely get me in some hot water. But it needs to be said because we keep making the same mistake over and over and over and over again. The mistake is that we, as humans, LOVE to name our places after people. People we think are meritorious in some way. People who we believe provide some recognition to an event, culture, or movement. And especially people we tend to want to curry favor with. But also people who are deeply and inherently flawed.

Let’s take a very recent example of why this is a bad idea: Cesar Estrada Chavez. Now, if you live in the United States and you live in a major city, you likely have a street somewhere named for this particular person. Cesar Chavez, if you’re unfamiliar, was a labor organizer for migrant workers in the United States. He helped lead the charge, along with Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla to help get these workers better protections and wages for the incredibly hard and grueling work they do to make sure we all have fresh food. The work these three, an many, many others did was admirable. Nobody can take that away.