Photo by Marc Tarlock/Flickr (Creative Commons)
A mural commemorating the late labor leader Philip Vera Cruz, who worked alongside Cesar Chavez, May 2010
For those closely related to the farm labor movement of the 1960s and 70s, the story of Asian American farm workers and the extent to which these workers were involved in the movement is fairly common knowledge. But for many others familiar with the legacy of labor and civil rights leader César Chávez, whose birthday was celebrated yesterday as a state holiday, the story of the Filipino laborers who worked side by side with him is a piece of near-forgotten history.
The Filipino American culture website BakitWhy.com featured a film trailer yesterday for a documentary titled “The Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the UFW” that tells the story of United Farm Workers of America leaders Larry Itliong, Phillip Vera Cruz, Pete Velasco, and Andy Imutan, all of whom were instrumental to the farm labor movement.
On its website, the UFW recognizes the Filipino workers and the union they initially belonged to, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which spearheaded the landmark 1965 Delano grape strike. Shortly before that strike, AWOC had led a walkout of Filipino and Mexican grape harvest workers in the Coachella Valley, where growers employed guest workers from Mexico. From the site:
When Coachella grape growers attempted to pay the local workers less than the imported workers, the Filipinos, many of whom were AWOC members, refused to work.
Coachella grapes, grown in southernmost California, ripen first in the state. Getting the grapes picked and to market quickly is crucial to the Coachella growers’ profits. After ten days the growers decided to pay everyone $1.25 per hour, including Chicanos who had joined the Filipinos. Once more, however, no union contract was signed.
At the end of summer the grapes were ripening in the fields around Delano, a farm town north of Bakersfield. Many of the farmworkers from the successful Coachella action had come up to Delano, trailing the grape harvest. Farmworkers demanded $1.25 per hour, and when they didn’t receive it, on September 8 nine farms were struck, organized by AWOC’s Larry Itliong.
