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A decade after the death of Cesar Chavez, the union he founded seeks to preserve his legacy of justice for farm workers
Cesar Chavez was buried here at La Paz 10 years ago.
Two hours out of Los Angeles, La Paz is the United Farm Workers central headquarters. The administrative center is a steel, expandable Butler building on 200-acres of rough, sandy paths, rock, tough grass, shrubs and some trees, acreage pockmarked still by a few tumbledown buildings from its 1930s heyday as a tuberculosis sanitarium.
The unincorporated hamlet of Keene is beyond Mojave (home of "the 25 cent cup of coffee" and the "$29 a night" motel), strip mall to truckers and the nearby Edwards Air Force Base. Keene, population 130, is reached by heading up out of the Mojave Desert and into the 7,000-foot Tehachapi range, snow in the wooded hollows, fine horses in lush mountain meadows, then dropping rapidly a couple of thousand feet down toward Bakersfield - "Trucks, use low gears," warn the signs-35 miles away.
Off the highway, a cracked concrete mountain road leads east Keene Eats, and the post office that closes for lunch, to La Paz. A few UFW families, such as president Arturo Rodriguez, live in modest homes on the land.
It's a tranquil spot. Chavez named it for Our Lady, Queen of Peace.
If alive today, Chavez would be 76. As it was, as a son of parents who lived into their 90s, Chavez's death "took us completely by surprise," said Rodriguez. "We didn't anticipate it. We didn't prepare for it - in the sense there had been no discussion as to what would happen when that day came."
Then 43, Rodriguez, B.A. St. Mary's, San Antonio, MSW University of Michigan, stepped into the shoes of the cultural icon who had mentored him for two decades. Chavez was Rodriguez's father-in-law. The young graduate first met Chavez, who was the founder of the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta, in 1973, after organizing boycott campaigns in Detroit Rodriguez married Linda Chavez the following year. She died in 2000 of ter a long illness. The couple had three children.
"After Cesar's death on April 23,1993," he said, "we...