In the last week of March 2026, the phones in Latino Los Angeles went quiet. Gustavo Arellano (b. 1979) noticed it first as a pattern of small refusals. Men he had known for years stopped returning his texts. Organizations canceled parades and dinners and lectures with no reason given. Then the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation put out their statements, and The New York Times published what the silence had been guarding. Two women said Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) had abused them as girls in the fields. Dolores Huerta (b. 1930) said he had raped her. A secular saint turned into a monster between one morning and the next.
Arellano wrote his column the same day. He did not defend the man. He did not bury the work the man had done. He kept both in view and reached for an old union slogan, la lucha sigue, the fight continues, and he added five words that hold his whole life: damn its imperfect messenger.
To read that line through Ernest Becker (1924-1974) is to see a man at the exact center of his hero system, doing the thing it built him to do.
Becker says man is an animal who knows he will die. He alone among the animals carries that knowledge, and he cannot bear it, so he builds a hero system, a set of stories that tell him how to earn a place in something that outlasts his body.
Arellano’s hero system has two terrors at its base, and they are not the terrors of the men around him. The first is erasure. He grew up in Anaheim, where his great-grandfather came to pick oranges in groves the city later bulldozed to build his elementary school. His family lost its Indigenous tongue generations back. He knows what it feels like to watch a people get paved over and forgotten, and he has spent a career fighting the moment when the record closes and no one remembers who was there. The second terror is the lie. He learned it as a cradle Catholic who covered the men who ran his own Church, the pedophile priests the Diocese of Orange hid for decades. He learned that the institution which sells you salvation will protect itself with your silence. Oblivion on one side, the comforting cover-up on the other. His whole vocation runs in the narrow channel between them.
Around that channel he has built a subtraction story, the account of what the modern world took away. The groves are gone. The language is gone. The cradle Catholic refuses to enter a church now except for funerals. By every secular measure he should have nothing sacred left. And yet he keeps the faith. He still names his patron saints, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Santo Niño de Atocha, and Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. He still believes the arc bends, that justice will come slow and come anyway. The subtraction stripped him of the Church and left the faith standing, and the faith is the thing his hero system guards.
So take his sacred word and turn it in the light. Faith. For Arellano faith means loyalty to a cause that outlives the men who carry it and the institutions that betray it. Faith is the power to separate the sacred fight from the fallen vessel. He keeps faith with the farmworker movement while he calls its founder a monster. He keeps faith with the survivors of the Church while he names the Church a racket. His faith is built to survive the disgrace of its heroes. That is what the word means inside his system, and it makes sense nowhere else.
Move one seat over and the same word changes its whole meaning. To the cradle Catholic who never left the pew, faith means the opposite of what Arellano made it mean. Faith is obedience to the institution, the sacraments taken from the priest’s hand, trust that the bishop knows more than you do. The pew Catholic keeps faith with the vessel. Arellano broke the vessel to keep the faith. They use one word and stand on opposite sides of it.
Move again, to Westminster, a few miles from Anaheim, to the Vietnamese grandmother who fled in 1975 and built a shrine and a yellow three-striped flag into her front room. Faith for her means the vow never to forgive the men who took her country, the refusal to let the lost republic die while she breathes. Her faith is exile and memory and a closed fist. It carries no slogan about the fight continuing, because for her the fight was lost and the work now is to keep the grief alive and accurate. Arellano’s faith bends toward a future. Hers guards a past that will not return.
Move again, to the empiricist who treats every claim as a thing to be checked. To him faith is the failure itself, the word for believing past the evidence, the sin Arellano commits each time he says la lucha sigue with no proof that it does. What Arellano calls his deepest virtue, this man files under credulity. The word does not survive the trip across the table.
Move once more, to the working-class Mexican American man in a stucco tract house who broke toward the right in the last elections, who is tired of being told his pride in the flag is a sin and his wish for order a betrayal. His faith sits in the nation and the paycheck and the rule that the line means something. He hears la lucha sigue as the slogan of people who never had to make payroll. Arellano writes about this man with care and some alarm, and he knows the man holds a faith of his own, aimed at a different altar.
And the Marine, who keeps faith with the dead of his unit, for whom the word means an oath sealed in bodies and never broken, a thing with no politics in it at all.
Five men, one word, five hero systems, and the word means a different thing in each because the terror underneath each one is different. Becker’s point lands here with full weight. The sacred word is never the same word. It is a slot, and each hero system fills it with whatever holds back its own particular night.
Arellano knows more of this than most of his trade. He tells his journalism students that almost no one will read them, that maybe a thousand people out of seven billion will ever see their work, so write the stories certain communities will keep. He knows the throwaway rant goes viral and the years of real reporting sink without a ripple, and he has made his peace with the joke of it. He quotes Godard (1930-2022), to become immortal and then die, and he means it as a reporter’s prayer. He does not want his name remembered. He wants the stories to survive him, the taco history and the priest victims and the salt-stain Madonna on the Chicago underpass. He has looked straight at his own immortality project and named it out loud, which is rare.
The thing he sees least sits closest to his strongest move. When Chavez fell, Arellano saved the cause by cutting it loose from the man. The movement is the hero, one victim told the Times, and Arellano built his column on that line. It is a clean rescue and a humane one. It is also the same move the pew Catholic makes when he keeps faith with a Church he knows hides its abusers. Relocate the sacred one level up, from the man to the movement, from the priest to the faith, and you can keep believing through any disgrace. Arellano spent his career exposing that move in the men who protected Chavez and the bishops who protected priests. He performs a higher version of it and calls it keeping the faith. A faith that survives every crime of its heroes is a faith that can no longer be falsified, and a cause immune to its founders’ sins may grow immune to its own.
So three coordinates, drawn in plain lines.
The shape of his hero is the reporter as keeper of memory, the one-man Spotlight who drags the forgotten and the buried back into the record and humbles the comfortable men who would rather the record stayed closed. He serves Saint Jude. He takes the lost causes on purpose.
The rival he fights without ever naming is not the nativist at the border, the enemy he names every week. It is the loyal believer, the man who keeps faith with the vessel instead of the cause, the parishioner who stayed and the friend who stopped returning calls. Arellano has built his life against the man who protects the sacred object by hiding its sins, and the discomfort of his position is how near that man stands to him, sharing the same word.
The one cost his ledger cannot price is the chance that la lucha sigue is the same anesthetic he diagnoses in everyone else, that the movement is the hero offers a way of never counting the dead the movement makes, and that a faith built to outlast its imperfect messengers may also be built to outlast the truth. He can price the man. He cannot price the cause. That is the one debt he carries and cannot read.
