Biden's Cesar Chavez bust in the Oval Office signals a new era for Latinos, activists hope: ...

[DonViejo]

Biden’s Cesar Chavez bust in the Oval Office signals a new era for Latinos, activists hope: ‘It shows that he’s authentic’

Andrea Salcedo

Paul Chavez was watching TV coverage of President Biden’s first address from the Oval Office on Wednesday when he suddenly recognized the sculpture right behind him.

It was his father

The 22-inch-tall bronze bust of civil rights and farm labor leader Cesar Chavez stood just behind the Resolute Desk, surrounded by portraits of the president and his family.

“We were just as surprised and thrilled as everybody else to see its placement, it was so prominent,” Paul Chavez, 63, told The Washington Post late Wednesday. “We were excited not just because it was a bust of my father, but what it represented. To us, it was an affirmation of the importance and the contributions of our community, immigrants and Latinos.”

more/no paywall
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/bidens-cesar-chavez-bust-in-the-oval-office-signals-a-new-era-for-latinos-activists-hope-it-shows-that-hes-authentic/ar-BB1cXKP8

[ananda]

1. Also, Chavez' granddaughter, Julie Chavez Rodriguez...

is on Biden's team.

She is the White House Deputy Director of Public Engagement.

[oasis]

2. Biden's going to bring out the best in America. nt

[frazzled]

3. I hope some day we can just call them Americans

That nobody will have to be hyphenated.

I say this as the granddaughter of four immigrant grandparents, who although they spoke with thick accents in sometimes “funny” English and ate foods that might have been quite foreign to most people, I always thought of as quintessentially American. True, their skin was not dark, but neither did they resemble the average white Protestant American of long standing.

I hope someday that Cesar Chavez will be remembered and honored as a great American, and not only a great Latino American. I didn’t eat a single grape for a decade (long past the end of the boycott!) because of him. He was a hero of my young adulthood. An American hero.

[Aristus]

4. That day is a long way off.

Even Teddy Roosevelt wanted to get rid of the hyphen.

But as long as white Americans continue to denigrate newly-arrived Americans (from wherever they may hail), and treat them and their cultural background as "less than" American, people will continue to voice their pride in where they came from.