This is the memory palace, I'm Nate DeMoeu, a postcard from the road between Parlier and Fresno,

California, March 24, 1966.

Someone had swept the floor.

Someone had collected the soda cans from the picnic the night before.

And someone had tied up the trash bags and asked their host where they keep their bins and took

them out back. And then they all knelt for mass. And then they marched.

As they had every day since they left Delano, for 12, 15 miles a day,

onward to Sacramento, beneath the banners of the United States, in Mexico,

in the Virgin of Guadalupe, in the United Farm Workers, the Black Thunderbird on White on Red,

drawn so simply anyone could draw it, printed on a sign that they could wave while they walked.

There were 77 marchers when they left Delano. One man, a great picker, a striker,

a well-guised hill like the rest of them had gotten the flu and he had gone home.

He didn't want to go home. There were a few hundred now. On this their eighth day,

on a 300 mile journey up the backbone of California's Central Valley to its state capital.

To demand the right to organize field workers as a union, to demand a $1.40 an hour,

to demand nothing short of human dignity. That's how Deloas Huerta, in Caesar Chavez,

in Luis Valdez, had framed it. In their plan of Delano, their declaration of purpose,

read aloud every night in every farm town on the road, encoded to the reporters who followed

them on foot, and a pack alongside the agents from the FBI. Were there to look for subversives,

but who only found citizens? Marching up the 99, in the service roads through budding orchards

and tilt tomato fields, they were marching because Chavez admired Martin Luther King,

and the men and women who marched with him from Salma to Montgomery.

...