A Salinas native takes up the cause of renaming Confederate Corners.

Here are just a few of the names that AJ Alvero has been called in the past week: punk; punk kid; punk kid from Stanford; liberal snowflake; Stanford snowflake; idiot; stupid; liberal crybaby; buttercup; and, my personal favorite, liberal sniveling crybaby. He’s been told to mind his own business, get over it, take his cultural Marxism and go away, stop trying to waste taxpayer money on “stupid shit,” and to take his intellectual terrorism elsewhere. The general tenor: How dare some uppity punk liberal intellectual from Palo Alto come to our town and try to tell us what to do?

At least most of the insults were spelled right.

OK, that’s being generous – some of them were spelled right.

The insults were delivered on the Facebook wall of Salinas City Councilman Steve McShane, and here’s why. Alvero, who is a Stanford University student working on his Ph.D. in education – specifically, educational linguistics – has asked the Monterey County Board of Supervisors to ask the U.S. Board of Geographic Names to change the name of the intersection at Highway 68 and Hitchcock Road from its current “Confederate Corners” to “Campesino Corners.” The county created a survey inviting people to weigh in and McShane posted a link to the survey to his Facebook wall to encourage people to fill it out.

Those of you who are surprised to find out Highway 68 and Hitchcock has a name, raise your hands. Yeah, me too. I’d always thought of it as that hellaciously dangerous intersection I had to go through to get my kids to school. Then a stop light was installed and it became that really annoying intersection.

It’s also where the Casillas Brothers Market and Beacon gas station is, and it’s whero Alvero has fond memories from his high school days of going with friends to get burritos from thelonchera that’s usually parked there.

That’s right: Alvero is from here. Born and raised for his first 20 years and a 2007 graduate of Salinas High School, where he was also the senior class president. He earned a master’s from Florida International University, specializing in teaching English to speakers of other languages. He taught high school in Miami for seven years, then headed back to California and Stanford. He was back in Salinas just a few weeks ago – since he was class president, he had to organize the 10-year reunion. (Full disclosure: I also write articles for the editorial department of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.)

For a few days, I watched McShane’s wall in growing horror as some of the so-called pillars of the community took shots at Alvero.

Alvero, when he responded, was calm and measured. “If people want to call me names, well, everyone’s a lot tougher on the internet and it’s totally fine,” Alvero says. “But it would be a complete disservice to everyone if I didn’t speak up.”

What’s happening is that white nationalists are seizing any opportunity to gather around monuments that hearken the Confederacy. While Confederate Corners isn’t exactly a monument, Alvero says, the violent events at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which one woman was killed and dozens of others injured, showed anything carrying the mark of the Confederacy can become a rallying point for people who hate diversity and culture.

“If you’re an African-American student, not to mention Japanese, Filipino, Central American or Native American, how do we explain why that’s a good idea?” Alvero says. “The Confederates stood for white supremacy, slavery and oppression. It was written into their constitution.”

To those who complain a name change would erase history, I offer a few thoughts: You didn’t know the name anyway, so why do you care? No one has a great idea on how it came to be called that, other than after the Civil War a few confederate soliders settled there. The Confederate Slough, a name that dated back to at least 1906, has already been changed and is now known as The Blanco Drain.

“If anyone wants to say it’s history being erased, does anyone know the history and lives of the people who work in the fields? Absolutely not,” Alvero says. “Their history gets erased every day.”

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com