Keene, CA

Keene began as Wells, a railroad town founded in 1876 in the Tehachapi foothills. Its post office opened in 1879, closed, and reopened in 1885, but the place's modern identity is tied to Nuestra Senora Reina de La Paz, the former tuberculosis sanatorium that became the United Farm Workers' headquarters and Cesar Chavez's home. The National Chavez Center and Cesar E. Chavez National Monument now preserve that farmworker history in the Kern County landscape. Keene is a small rail settlement with a much larger story attached to it: the movement for farmworker organization, with its headquarters sitting in the hills above the San Joaquin Valley.