¡Sí, Se Puede!

¡Sí, Se Puede!  Yes, we can!

After our visit to Lake Mead NRA last month, I was only one unit short of achieving the National Park Travelers Club Bronze Master Traveler Award for 2022. The closest place we could easily drive for a passport stamp to satisfy the requirement was César E. Chávez National Monument in Keene, CA, about two hours away. 

So on my first day of Christmas vacation, my true love came with me on an impromptu road trip!

We got off to a later start than intended, so that scuttled our plans to check out the musical road in Lancaster and take the scenic way home via CA-33. Maybe we can try to come up this way again in the spring when the California poppies are blooming...

We did have time to stop for lunch at The Original Karen's Kitchen in Palmdale. Well, technically we both had breakfast - eggs benedict for R, chicken fried steak and eggs for me, and a shared side of homemade biscuits 'n gravy. The servings were huge, so we had plenty left over to take with us!

Continuing north on CA-14 then west on CA-58, we arrived at César E. Chávez NM about an hour later. Officially designated as a national monument by President Obama on October 8, 2012, we first visited shortly afterward in January 2013. It was interesting to see how the NPS has developed the site and its interpretation in the 10 years since.

Strike = huelga (Spanish) or welga (Tagalog)

There is a good series of articles here about the Delano Grape Strike that began in 1965, the march to Sacramento the following spring, and the historical context of the farm workers' struggle for justice amid the larger civil rights movement of the 1960s, so I won't attempt to write a summary for this blog post. But I did want to make note of a few things that I learned from our visit today:

• The Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA), one of America's first multiracial labor unions, was formed in 1903. It organized a successful strike near Oxnard, CA, which is in the same county as where we live. I knew that there were many Japanese-run farms in the area prior to World War II and Executive Order 9066, but did not know about this.
• Although the Immigration Act of 1924 barred all immigration from Asia, because the Philippines were a U.S. territory, there were no restrictions on Filipinos. Many young Filipino men came to the States to work as laborers and to gain an American education. Reading about that today brought to mind our visit to the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum in October, where we learned about the Indipino Community on the island. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Indigenous women from various tribes in Canada, Alaska, and Washington came to the island to pick berries for Japanese-American farmers. There they met and married Filipino immigrant bachelors, also there to work as agricultural laborers, creating their own mixed-heritage community.
• The Delano Grape Strike was initiated by over 800 Filipino farmworkers affiliated with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), led by Larry Itliong. The growers could have replaced the striking Filipino workers from the large pool of Mexican and Mexican-American labor. However, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), organized by César Chávez, voted to join the AWOC in the strike.

César Chávez' office

When we visited in 2013, Helen Chávez was still alive. She passed away in 2016.

The ranger told us that there are plans to work on the interpretive exhibits in visitor center, so it will be interesting to see what changes will be in place the next time we visit.