The Santa Rita Hall near downtown Phoenix has a new face thanks to renovation efforts by Chicanos Por La Causa launched in 2024.
Voices echo inside the site where current and former labor icons made history.
“You can spell the fresh paint. It looks fantastic from the last time I was in this building,” said Max Gonzales, CPLC executive vice president of strategy and relationship management. “This is the birthplace of our organization. So we’re proud of it. It means a lot to us. But we also think it means a lot, not only to this neighborhood, but to the history of the city of Phoenix.”
And U.S. history, too. Cesar Chavez held his final fast here in the 1970s. CPLC publicly denounced him the day the New York Times published its sexual assault investigation in March. The room where Chavez stayed won’t honor him.
“Who knows how we’re going to use it going forward. It’ll probably be an office or something,” Gonzales said.
Other history made at Santa Rita Hall came from one of Chavez’s accusers, Dolores Huerta.
“What happened here has really gone really international. And when I say that, I’m talking about si se puede, right. Because this is where si se puede started,” Huerta said during a 2022 visit in which she recounted her reply to those who said a law against farmworker unions could not be overturned.
Now the goal is to restore the site to when it was the gathering place for an old Latino neighborhood called Barrio Campito.
“It’s already had a number of delays. This is a very old building and we’ve been encountering a number of issues that we didn’t anticipate. Like the sewer. That was something we didn’t anticipate. So boom we had to dig that up,” Gonzales said.
He estimates that rehab work could be done between this fall and next spring.
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