Fence around Chávez Home

This photo captures the Chávez home at La Paz through a high chain-link fence that surrounds the house.

NPS Photo

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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The photograph of the house of farm labor organizers César and Helen Chávez is surprising. It is a study of contrasts, capturing two things that are not supposed to go together: a high chain-link fence and a home. The image of a single-family suburban home is central to the twentieth-century American Dream. But the fence is supposed to be a white picket fence, at least according to popular culture.

The Chávez house depicted in the photograph is not in a suburb, but it was a home that reflected a dream. It was the Chávez couple’s final home, a humble single-story, two-bedroom house with white siding and green trim. It is located at Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz (“La Paz”), 187 acres in the Tehachapi Mountains of Keene, California. In the early 1970s, La Paz became the national headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), a union of mostly poor Mexican and Filipino immigrants working in the agricultural fields of the West.¹

The chain-link fence surrounding the Chávez home captures the disjuncture between community and the threat of violence but also the melding of union and home life that defined Helen Chávez’s life.

Credit: NPS Photo

César envisioned La Paz as a refuge for his family and the farm labor movement. The fact that a chain-link fence came to surround the Chávez home implies a history of conflict. In 1971, federal agents uncovered a grower-backed assassination plot of César and urged the leader to leave La Paz. In his absence, the union erected the fence for security with enough room for César’s beloved German Shepherd dogs to roam.²

The fence symbolizes the contrast between the Chávez dream of community and home with the threat of violence directed at minorities and union organizers. The chain-link fence enclosing the property, however, also serves as a symbol for Helen’s specific experience as a woman involved in the farm labor movement. Her devotion to family and home was always interlinked with the work of the union.

A Family Struggle

“There was no separation of home and union” in the farm worker movement, explains historian Viki Ruiz.³ This was certainly true for Helen Fabela Chávez. With a Mexican American Catholic upbringing, she valued a large family and had eight children with César in the decade after they married. In an interview from the early 1980s, she said, “I felt that my job was at home taking care of my children. That was the most important thing to me.”⁴

However, Helen’s domestic responsibilities were not stereotypical and encompassed union work. Whenever times were tight, she worked in the onion fields and grape vineyards to help support her family. In her early labor movement work, she provided administrative support, often working in the evenings after the children were asleep. She also joined picket lines with her children to demand union recognition despite intimidation and threats of harm from growers.⁵

As the UFW gained its footing, Helen became the manager of the Farm Workers Credit Union, a role she held for more than twenty-five years. Despite having to learn the skills on the job, she excelled at the work. Over the years, the credit union loaned over $20 million to farm workers.⁶

This type of support work, usually performed by women, goes unrecognized compared to the publicity that strikes and campaigns garner. Helen generally kept out of the public spotlight, but this did not mean her contributions to La Causa – the cause demanding farm workers be given the same freedoms and rights as other American workers – were not as crucial.⁷

Home at La Paz

When César decided to move the union headquarters to La Paz, he imagined a new vision of home and community. He sought a place in which union leaders and members could turn inward, away from the daily fray of union organizing, while seeking to broaden the union movement. As a former tuberculosis sanatorium complete with residential buildings, administrative spaces, cafeteria, water supply system, and more, the La Paz property could support a whole community immediately.⁸

UFW union members serve food in 1972 to a crowd at Helen’s Park, adjacent to the Chávez home, capturing the community that defined life at La Paz.

Hub Segur Papers on the United Farm Workers (D-605), Special Collections, University Library, UC Davis

Paul Chávez, the son of Helen and César, remembers that when they moved to La Paz in 1972, “[I]t was home right away, because we were around people that were working for the movement. It was a real community.”⁹ Beyond their shared work, the members shared their lives, often eating together and working in the community garden. At its peak, around two hundred people called La Paz home, but it was also a crossroads of the movement. Thousands passed through to learn from each other and take part in meetings, trainings, and conferences.¹⁰

Helen first hesitated to move to La Paz. She had horrible memories of spending a year as a young child there when it was still a sanatorium. However, over time and despite the threats on César’s life that resulted in the chain-link fence, she grew to love her home there in a community that embraced the fluidity between home life and La Causa. The fence, counterintuitively, is a tangible reminder of this fluidity. She remained in their La Paz home until her death in 2016. She is buried alongside César, a two-minute walk away from her home. César E. Chávez National Monument became a unit of the National Park Service in 2012, cooperatively managed with the National Chavez Center.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

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¹ “Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz,” National Historic Landmark Nomination Form (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 2011), 4, 26.

² “Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz,” 9. See also Jacques E. Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 443-46.

³ Viki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 134

⁴ Quotation cited in Margaret Rose,“Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism in the United Farm Workers of America, 1962 to 1980,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 11, no. 1 (1990): 29.

⁵ Rose, “Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism,” 27, 29.

⁶ J. Westen Phippen, “The Legacy of Helen Chavez: The Labor-Rights Activist and Widow of Cesar Chavez has Died at the Age of 88,” The Atlantic, June 7, 2016.

⁷ Rose, “Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism,” 27-28.

⁸ “Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz,” 4, 27.

⁹ Ibid., 29.

¹⁰ Ibid., 21, 29, 30.