Park Service considers protecting sites significant to Cesar Chavez's life

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cesar-chavez-20110516,0,301188.story

A complex where the legendary activist and his United Farm Workers colleagues signed historic contracts, a retreat where he is buried and the 300-mile route of the UFW's 1966 protest march from Delano to Sacramento are among the candidates for protection.


Suzanne Brinkley, a planner with the National Park Service’s Cesar Chavez Special Resources Study, photographs memorabilia inside the Agbayani Retirement Village on the grounds of 40 Acres, the United Farm Workers complex in Delano, Calif. Chavez, shown in the painting in the background, helped initiate the building of this retirement home for Filipino American farmworkers in 1974. (Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times / May 12, 2011)
By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times

May 16, 2011
Reporting from Delano, Calif.—

Forty-one years ago, Cesar Chavez and local table grape growers gathered in a squat white building surrounded by vineyards and weeds on the western edge of this Central Valley community to sign contracts that brought large-scale unionization to agriculture for the first time in history.

Back then, it was the hub of a United Farm Workers complex known as 40 Acres, and "Huelga! Huelga!" — the Spanish word for "strike" — was the familiar battle cry of fieldworkers and their supporters around the world.

Today, the old hall is among 80 sites in California and Arizona under consideration for National Park Service protection because of their significance to the legendary organizer's life and the turbulent history of the farm labor movement.

If all goes according to plan, some of them will become landmarks where people can ponder and debate the legacy of the diminutive, soft-spoken union activist who became a Gandhi-like figure to millions of Americans, especially Mexican Americans.

In addition to 40 Acres, other front-runners include the 187-acre Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz retreat in the community of Keene, about 75 miles southeast of here, where Chavez was buried in a rose garden in 1993, and the 300-mile route of the UFW's 1966 protest march from Delano to Sacramento. La Paz is also home to the National Chavez Center.

FULL story at link.

[htuttle]

1. Sí se puede!

;Cesar Chavez still influences us. Some of the same chants that the United Farm Workers used in the 1970's are heard around the Capitol in Madison today (well, last Saturday, at least).