Nuestra Senora Reina de la Paz: Cultural Landscape Overview

University of Oregon

César E. Chávez (1927 – 1993), American farm worker, labor leader and civil rights activist, co-founded the United Farm Workers (UFW) and is widely recognized as the most important Latino leader in the United States during the twentieth century. Chávez’ leadership brought sustained international attention to the conditions of U.S. farm workers, and secured for them higher wages and a safer working environment. The Cultural Landscape Overview (CLO) of Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz (La Paz), Chávez’ home and the UFW’s refuge in Keene, CA, is a record of this landscape as it exists today. It is a documentation and analysis of the site’s character-defining cultural landscape features, and a tool to be used in future site planning and landscape protection. Jointly sponsored by the National Park Service (NPS) and the César Chávez Foundation, the CLO process at LA Paz provided students the opportunity to learn the importance of cultural landscape analysis and evaluation, while gaining deeper respect for the significance in American history of this great leader, friend, visionary, husband, father, and grandfather. From the week spent in the field, to the detailed recording and understanding of this cultural landscape, students learned not only how to complete a CLO, but – equally importantly – why it is of such value to them and to our nation to highlight, document, and honor the landscape in which César Chávez spent so much of his life. La Paz is a place where he and many others in the farm worker movement lived, planned strategies, ate, sang, talked, worried, smiled, cried and celebrated. It is a national monument and landscape that reminds us daily of the joys and struggles of so many, so that our country could be just that much better, that much more humane, and that much more democratic.

Nuestra Senora Reina de la Paz: Cultural Landscape Overview

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