La Paz, César Chávez's California Mountain Compound, Preserved as National Monument

The rocking chair still faces the wooden desk. Bookshelves line the walls. A yoga mat, according to a New York Times investigation, once lay on the floor of the same room where César Chávez allegedly abused women and girls who had come to see the man they regarded as a hero. Today that office is on public display, described by the National Parks Conservation Association as "carefully preserved" in the exhibit hall of the César E. Chávez National Monument.

That friction is inseparable from La Paz itself. The 187-acre compound perched against the Tehachapi Mountains foothills in the rural Kern County town of Keene sits about a two-plus-hour drive northeast of Los Angeles. The National Park Service manages the site, which contains 26 historic buildings and the graves of Chávez and his wife, Helen Fabela Chávez, in the César Chávez Memorial Garden.

Before it was any of this, it was a tuberculosis sanitarium. The Stony Brook Sanitorium was built in 1929 in a mountain clearing and sat shuttered for years until 1971, when movie producer Edward Lewis, a wealthy union supporter, bought the complex and quickly transferred it to the nonprofit National Farm Workers Service Center, which has since merged with the César Chávez Foundation. The appeal for Chávez was practical, not architectural. His union headquarters in Delano had become a flashpoint as tensions between the United Farm Workers and powerful growers turned increasingly volatile. He wanted to move his family, union officials, and volunteers somewhere remote and defensible. The Tehachapi foothills provided that.

By 1972, La Paz was the official headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America. From those 26 buildings spread across the old sanitarium grounds, the UFW ran the machinery of one of the most consequential labor campaigns in American history. Organizers mapped a national lettuce boycott and coordinated the push for the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first law in the United States to grant agricultural labor unions organizing and collective bargaining rights. Chávez's supporters celebrated at La Paz when the bill passed. In the 1980s, grape boycotts and pesticide protests were orchestrated from the same site. In 1988, to protest pesticide use in grape production, Chávez conducted his third and longest fast, going 36 days on only water at Forty Acres in Delano, an effort continued by American celebrities and activists after he ended it.

Chávez died in his sleep in 1993 while in Arizona organizing farmworkers. His body was returned to La Paz for burial. Paul Chávez, his son, recalled that his father had envisioned the compound as a place "for individuals and groups to gather to work for social justice and civil rights, to learn the skills to organize and do 'extraordinary things.'" A retreat and conference center, developed through a comprehensive master plan, opened at La Paz in 2010. President Barack Obama signed the proclamation creating the César E. Chávez National Monument on October 8, 2012, under the authority of the Antiquities Act. The property was simultaneously designated a National Historic Landmark.

Walk through the exhibit hall today and the physical record of those years is intact. Chávez's office anchors the display: wooden desk, rocking chair, bookshelves. An adjacent room preserves the site of his final fast, with a bed covered by a colorful blanket, a crucifix on the wall, and a table with flowers. Outside, a statue of Chávez shows him holding books and extending his left hand.

Those same spaces are now at the center of a reckoning over how the monument interprets his life. A New York Times investigation alleged Chávez sexually abused multiple women, including two who said they were children at the time. Ana Murguia alleged the abuse began when she was 13; she described walking a dirt trail to Chávez's office, down a long corridor in a rundown building, after he called her house and asked to see her. She had looked up to him as "a hero." Debra Rojas alleged she was first assaulted at 12 and later raped at 15. The Times also reported an account of Chávez locking the door during a phone call, bringing a woman onto the yoga mat in his office, then telling her afterward: "Don't tell anyone. They'd get jealous." The allegations emerged more than 30 years after Chávez's death.

The National Parks Conservation Association noted that the preserved office, the same room accusers identified in their accounts, is now accessible to visitors in the monument's exhibit hall. The NPS manages the site collaboratively with the National Chavez Center. Neither organization has publicly stated whether or how the exhibit addresses the allegations and their implications for the movement Chávez built, room by room, from a shuttered sanitarium in the Kern County mountains.