Blanca Alvarado is 94 and struggles to catch her breath. But she still remembers the early days alongside Cesar Chavez — when the soft-spoken activist met with her in her garage on Sunset Avenue and knocked on doors in East San Jose’s Mayfair neighborhood to register voters.

Her devotion to the legacy of the civil rights leader — she was once a farmworker herself — led her to campaign for decades to name local plazas, streets and holidays after him. When she became the first Latina elected to the San Jose City Council, she hung his photo above her desk.

“There was a reverence toward him that now feels like nothing but shame,” Alvarado said. “From honor and respect and dignity and love to horror, monstrosity and shame. That happened within a matter of hours.”

A New York Times investigation published Wednesday detailed allegations that Chavez molested girls as young as 12 and raped fellow United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta.

Alvarado and the East Side neighborhood, whose identity is so closely tied to Chavez, are now struggling to understand who they are without him.

“He was like a relative, he was like a son, he was like a brother, he was like us,” said Alvarado, her voice breaking. “And now — what is he?”

Mayfair was Chavez’s home on and off over the years. Born in Arizona, he moved often with his farmworker parents who followed the California crops, settling briefly in San Jose. After serving in the Navy, he married and returned to Mayfair, where many relatives lived, and joined the Community Service Organization, the activist group co-founded by Alvarado’s husband, Jose. By the 1960s, he had moved to the Central Valley’s Kern County.

Chavez’s legacy here, Alvarado said, “was part of our living. It was a testimony to who we were as people.”

Across California, civic leaders have begun removing his name from streets, schools and public spaces and canceling marches and celebrations planned for his March 31 birthday. But the rupture may be felt most deeply in Mayfair, a neighborhood long defined by both neglect and resilience.

In the 1950s and ’60s, mud filled its streets during the rainy season. Residents called it “Sal si puede” — “Get out if you can.”

With Chavez’s organization and the rallying cry “Sí se puede,” or “yes we can,” the community reshaped its identity.

For decades, his presence has been woven into daily life here. Children from his namesake school marched along Alum Rock Avenue each year carrying “Viva Cesar Chavez” signs. The Mexican Heritage Plaza stands on the site of a former Safeway where he organized early boycotts. At Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, a mosaic shows Chavez beside Robert F. Kennedy, who visited in 1968 to support the farmworker movement.

That legacy is already beginning to shift.

On Thursday, a sign marking the “Cesar Chavez Memorial Walkway” — linking his former home on Scharff Street to seven sites across San Jose — was removed from a pole outside the house.

“A sacred covenant has been broken,” said Maritza Maldonado, founder of Amigos de Guadalupe, the nonprofit that now owns the home and uses it for community events.

In her office Wednesday, hours after the Times report was published, photos and posters of Chavez still covered the walls.

“He was our national hero,” she said. “It’s so wrong, so fresh still, that we are all still processing.”

The community has long honored Chavez through annual breakfasts, school lessons and acts of protest modeled after his own. His story is written into the San Jose Unified School District curriculum, where students write poems about his life and work.

Chavez’s civil rights record was not without controversy. In interviews, including with KQED , he disparaged farmworkers who entered the U.S. illegally, using racial slurs against them, believing growers were using them as strikebreakers to inhibit their efforts for higher wages and better conditions.

Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas said that history had complicated her view of him. Her father migrated from Mexico, working farms across California with the seasons.

“I knew that he didn’t have a level of respect for Mexican nationals,” she said of the labor leader. “And so there was already, for me, a level of caution, if you will, about him as a human being.”

But those earlier controversies never fractured his base of support the way the new allegations have.

John Martinez, who spent his childhood summers working on his knees picking prunes that would shake from the trees along Capitol Avenue, remembers Chavez attending a community dance to thank everyone for raising money to help the poor.

The allegations, he said, “are a shell-shocker,” and he hopes the legacy of his work will transcend the scandal.

They come at a particularly fraught time, however, with mass deportations under President Donald Trump, who has disparaged immigrants who enter or live in the country without permission.

“We feel powerless,” said Alvarado. “Will society turn its back on the rest of us?”

Community leaders say the focus now must shift away from a single figure and back to the broader fight for justice.

“The movement was about justice and equity that needed to happen, and that movement started here in East San Jose,” said Maldonado, of Amigos de Guadalupe. “That will be uplifted constantly, because we will continue to work to lift up justice and combat inequities that continue to plague our East San Jose community.”

San Jose Councilman Peter Ortiz, who said Chavez’s legacy inspired him to leave a gang life behind and run for office in the Mayfair district, said that what’s important now is “how we can show up to reclaim both our identity and the greater Chicano and farmworker movement as a whole.”

When Chavez died in 1993, some 50,000 people formed a funeral procession behind his pine coffin in his adopted home of Delano in the Central Valley. Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, and her son Joe attended. Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson spoke. Former Gov. Jerry Brown and former U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums of Oakland were part of the crowd. President Bill Clinton awarded Chavez the Presidential Medal of Freedom the year after he died.

Blanca Alvarado’s daughter, Teresa, remembers the outsized influence of Chavez on her mother. She remembers attending the funeral march with her.

“We cannot hold up one individual as a singular hero,” Teresa said. “This is a story of many heroes.”

In Mayfair, that idea already has a name.

Somos Mayfair.

“We are Mayfair.”