Hundreds join U.S. Interior Secretary Salazar, UFW
president and Chavez family in dedicating Delano’s
‘Forty Acres’ as a National Historic Landmark
Delano, Calif.—“Forty Acres,” once a barren 40-acre plot a few miles west of Delano, became home in the 1960s to a mass poor people’s movement that would shake America’s agricultural industry. On Monday, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Paul F. Chavez, Cesar Chavez’s son and president of the Cesar Chavez Foundation, and United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez will join other Chavez family members and hundreds of school children, supporters and veterans of long-ago strikes and boycotts in formally dedicating the Forty Acres as a National Historic Landmark.
Many of the most momentous events that shaped Chavez’s movement, which inspired millions of people to social and political activism, took place at the Forty Acres during the 1960s,‘70s and ‘80s. Forty Acres hosts the adobe-brick cooperative gas station where 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.
Who: U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, Cesar Chavez Foundation President Paul Chavez, hundreds of students, supporters, farm worker veterans.
What: Plaque dedication ceremony for Forty Acres, site of many of the most historic 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s events in Cesar Chavez’s farm worker movement.
When/Where: 9 a.m. guided tour of Forty Acres; 9:50 a.m. press availability;
10 a.m. program—1314 Garces Hwy. (at Mettler Rd.) Delano 93215.