The Forty Acres: Five Years, Three Hundred Miles

The name comes from the size of the property. Forty acres of flat, dusty ground in Delano, California, purchased by the National Farm Workers Association in the mid-nineteen sixties to serve as the union's first permanent headquarters. What happened on that acreage in the five years between nineteen sixty-five and nineteen seventy is a compressed version of one of the most consequential labor campaigns in American history.

The nineteen sixty-five Delano Grape Strike was organized here. The nineteen sixty-six three-hundred-mile march to Sacramento departed from here on March seventeenth with sixty-seven marchers and arrived at the state capitol on Easter Sunday, April tenth, with a crowd estimated at ten thousand. The choice of Easter Sunday was not accidental. It was a deliberate act of political theology: a labor march reframed as a religious pilgrimage, aimed at a Catholic agricultural working class that the California labor movement had never successfully reached. Before the march arrived in Sacramento, the Schenley Industries wine company signed a union recognition agreement, the first time a major California agricultural company had recognized a farmworkers union. The march had worked before it finished.

In nineteen sixty-eight, Cesar Chavez fasted for twenty-five days at the Forty Acres to recommit the movement to nonviolence, a fast that drew national attention and reinforced the moral framing that had made the boycott effective.

Dolores Huerta co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers in nineteen sixty-two, alongside Chavez. She negotiated the first major union contracts, coined the phrase that would become a slogan for movements far beyond this valley, and did the organizational work that the marching and the fasting depended on. Her name is not on the monument. The Forty Acres is now a National Historic Landmark, designated in two thousand eight. The forty acres are still there. The story they carry belongs to more people than any one name can hold.