A Chain-Link Fence Around a Home: Helen and César Chávez at La Paz

A photograph of the home of farm labor organizers César and Helen Chávez is striking for a contrast: a house — the heart of the twentieth-century American Dream — behind a high chain-link fence, where popular culture expects a white picket fence.

The Chávez home at La Paz, behind the chain-link fence that surrounds it. NPS photo

The house at La Paz

It was the couple's last home: a modest single-story, two-bedroom house with white siding and green trim, at Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz ("La Paz"), 187 acres in the Tehachapi Mountains at Keene, California. In the early 1970s La Paz became the national headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), a union mostly of poor Mexican and Filipino immigrants working the fields of the West.

César meant La Paz as a refuge for his family and the movement. The fence tells of conflict: in 1971, federal agents uncovered a grower-backed plot to assassinate César and urged him to leave. While he was away, the union put up the fence for security, with room enough for his German Shepherds to roam.

The fence around the Chávez home. NPS photo

The fence sets the Chávez dream of home and community against the threat of violence aimed at minorities and union organizers. But it also stands for Helen's particular experience: for her, family and union were never separate.

Helen Fabela Chávez

A historian of the movement has observed that for farm worker families there was no line between home and union, and that was true of Helen. Raised Mexican American and Catholic, she valued a large family and had eight children in the decade after marrying César, and in the early 1980s she described caring for them at home as her most important job.

Yet her "home" work included the union's:

• When money was tight, she worked in the onion fields and grape vineyards.
• Early on, she did the movement's administrative work, often at night after the children were asleep.
• She walked picket lines with her children, demanding union recognition despite intimidation and threats from growers.
• She ran the Farm Workers Credit Union for more than twenty-five years, learning the job as she went; it lent farm workers over $20 million.

Such support work, usually done by women, gets far less notice than strikes and campaigns, and Helen largely stayed out of the spotlight — but her part in La Causa, the fight for farm workers to have the same rights and freedoms as other American workers, was just as crucial.

A community

César saw La Paz as a place where union leaders and members could step back from daily organizing while widening the movement. A former tuberculosis sanatorium, it came with homes, offices, a cafeteria, a water system and more — ready for a whole community. When the family moved there in 1972, their son Paul Chávez later recalled, it felt like home at once, among people working for the cause. Members ate together, tended a community garden, and shared their lives. At its peak about two hundred people lived at La Paz, and thousands came through for meetings, trainings and conferences.

Helen was reluctant at first: as a young child she had spent a year at La Paz when it was still a sanatorium, and the memories were painful. But despite the threats that brought the fence, she came to love her home there, in a community where home and cause flowed together — something the fence, unexpectedly, now recalls. She lived there until her death in 2016, and is buried beside César, a two-minute walk from the house. César E. Chávez National Monument joined the National Park System in 2012, managed together with the National Chavez Center.

Sources

Based on "Fence around Chávez Home," by Nicole Martin, part of the Home and Homelands exhibition, National Park Service, drawing on the La Paz National Historic Landmark nomination (2011) and work by Viki Ruiz and Margaret Rose; a work of the United States government in the public domain, rewritten in hubnx's own words. A 1972 photograph of union members at La Paz, from the Hub Segur Papers at the University of California, Davis, is not reproduced.