Lansing City Councilors Trini Pehlivanoglu, Clara Martinez and Ryan Kost went into Thursday’s Committee on City Operations meeting with a draft resolution to rename Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in Old Town.
The meeting concluded as the three tabled the discussion and approved a 90-day hiatus on any efforts to rename the road.
Calls to rename the avenue began earlier this month after sexual abuse allegations against Chavez were made public.
Multiple states are in the process of renaming streets, buildings and schools with the farmworkers’ rights activist's namesake.
Discussion of a hiatus for Lansing’s own name change first arose during public comment, as Ernesto Mireles proposed the councilors take more time.
“Instead of making all of these knee-jerk reactions about what is to be done,” Mireles said, “we can have a thoughtful conversation about oppression and about resistance to that oppression, and what it means to acknowledge the wrongdoing that somebody has done and move forward in a way that is spiritually beneficial for the whole community.”
Mireles said the effort to rename the street should be led by Lansing’s Chicano and Latinx community, because they’d fought for 24 years for the street to have the name Cesar E. Chavez Avenue.
The whole of Grand River Avenue was renamed Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in 1994, but Lansing residents voted to reverse the change less than a year later.
Portions of Grand River Avenue were once again named Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in 2017 after multiple failed attempts to rename the entire roadway.
Unveiling the sign on Jan. 2, 2018, was one of Mayor Andy Schor’s first acts in office.
Another Lansing resident, Maria Garcia, spoke in favor of a 90-day hiatus during public comment.
“We need to bury Cesar Chavez for the second time, and we are prepared to do that,” she said. “We need the time to mourn, to heal, to move forward. And we will, and we'll probably be done before 90 days.”
Another public commenter, Bradly Rakowski, agreed that a 90-day hiatus would be beneficial for the community. However, he said the Chicano and Latinx community should work with the LGBTQ+ community in renaming the avenue.
“As a gay man that owns a business in a gay area of the city, I would love for my community to work with your community, so we come up with something and honor everybody,” Rakowski said.
Councilor Kost said he, too, would like to see the communities work together.
“Old Town is an LGBTQ cultural center, and so, as a member of that community, I think that it would be fantastic to have two communities that don’t have opposing goals work together to find a solution to not only the street, but the plaza, the parking lot.”
Councilor Garcia said the 90-day hiatus will be used to confer with the Lansing community and monitor what other cities and states are doing.
