Cesar Chavez, right, breaks his 25-day fast by accepting bread from Sen. Robert Kennedy in Delano in this 1968 file photo. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will pay a historic visit to Delano next Monday and join United Farm Workers and the family of Cesar Chavez in dedicating "Forty Acres" as a National Historic Landmark.
The 40-acre plot a few miles west of Delano became home in the 1960s to a movement that would shake America’s agricultural industry.
Forty Acres hosts the adobe-brick cooperative gas station where Cesar Chavez fasted for 25 days to rededicate the movement to nonviolence in February and March 1968, and where Sen. Robert Kennedy came to help break the fast.
There is the union hall where Delano-area grape growers signed their first historic union contracts on July 29, 1970, after five years of grape strikes and boycotts.
In the 1970s, a large medical clinic was built as well as a 58-unit retirement village for elderly and displaced Filipino American farm workers where Chavez conducted his last fast, of 36 days, in summer 1988, over the pesticide poisoning of farm workers and their children.
Forty Acres is still where the farm worker movement organizes and works daily to meet the basic human, cultural and community needs of farm worker and Latino families. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Farm Workers.
Guided tours of Forty Acres will be offered beginning at 9 a.m. with a dedication program to take place at 10 a.m.
Forty Acres is located at 1314 Garces Highway, at Mettler Road.