With the Day formerly known as Cesar Chavez Day just around the corner, and all the hand-wringing and virtue-signaling by public officials about how we must now delete the man from history, it seems an appropriate time to remind folks that farmworker organizing has a long and radical history that precedes both Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW), that unions and movements are far more than their leaders, and that what we think know about these leaders is often biased and corrupted through hagiography and movement propaganda.
Let’s start with the origin of the UFW, which many people mistakenly believe was the sole creation of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and that it was a primarily a Mexican and Chicano union. In reality, the UFW was created in August, 1966, when Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) merged with the largely Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), led by Larry Itliong. The collaboration of these two unions grew out of the 5-year-long Delano Grape Strike which, again, people tend to associate with Chavez and the UFW, but which was actually started by Itliong and the AWOC.
Who Was Larry Itliong?
Modesto “Larry” Itliong was born in the Philippines in 1913, when it was a territory of the U.S., seized from Spain during the Spanish-American War. He immigrated to the U.S. mainland in 1929 at the age of 15, in the first large wave of Filipino immigration to the continental United States that occurred between 1906 and 1934. Itliong lived much of his life in the Little Manila community of Stockton, California. He had wanted to become a lawyer, but poverty and violent racism prevented him from pursuing the education required. At the time, Filipinos were barred from owning land in the U.S. and from marrying white women under the anti-miscegenation laws, and were regularly attacked by racist mobs.
Itliong began working in California’s Central Valley, where he joined his first strike in 1930, at the age of 16. Soon after, he began organizing his fellow workers. In 1956, he founded the Filipino Farm Labor Union, in Stockton. He spoke several Filipino languages, as well as Spanish, Cantonese, and Japanese, which was useful in organizing the muti-lingual, multi-cultural farmworkers. In addition to organizing in California, he also organized cannery and agricultural unions in Washington, Montana, South Dakota, and Alaska, where he lost three fingers in a cannery accident, earning him the nickname “Seven Fingers.”
On September 7, 1965 Itliong, who now had nearly 3 decades of labor organizing experience, traveled to Delano, California and convinced the grape workers at Filipino Hall to vote for a strike. The next day, the Delano Grape Strike began, with over 2,000 Filipino farm laborers walking off the job, demanding $1.40 an hour, 25 cents a box, and the right to form a union.
Itliong led the strike, along with Philip Cera Cruz, Benjamin Gines and Pete Velasco. Historically, the growers would pit workers of different nationalities against each other, and use Mexican workers, specifically, as scabs to break strikes by the militant Filipino workers. This time, however, Itliong contacted Cesar Chavez and asked him to get the Mexican workers to support the strike.
Initially, Chavez didn’t believe his members were ready to go on strike. But when he, and Dolores Huerta, brought the proposal to their 1,000 members, they voted unanimously to join AWOC on the picket line. The following year, AWOC and NFWA merged to form the UFW.
Itliong served as assistant director of the UFW under Chavez’s leadership. However, as the nascent union grew, with the charismatic and media-savvy Chavez leading press conferences, fasts and marches, its public face became overwhelmingly Chicano. Consequently, the Filipino workers who had started the strike, who had been organizing in the Central Valley since the 1930s, were increasingly marginalized within their union. Leadership often excluded them from decision-making, and their needs as an aging, largely male, immigrant workforce were not always prioritized. In 1971, Itliong resigned from the UFW over these issues and because of Chavez's autocratic leadership.
Some have argued that the ¡Sí Se Puede! slogan, the imagery of la causa (e.g., the UFW black eagle logo), the connection to the broader Chicano movement, all served to create a narrative that was far more tangible and palatable to the mainstream press, and the white public, than one that included Filipino workers, language and culture, a demographic that was much less well known to white Americans. This, no doubt, contributed to the erasure of Itliong and Filipino workers from the history of the farm labor movement. California K-12 textbooks failed to mention Itliong, or Filipino farmworkers until 2016, fifty years after the strike that began with Filipino workers, also contributing to their erasure from history.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #farmworkers #ufw #immigration #filipino #mexican #larryitliong #cesarchavez #doloreshuerta #organizing #strike #racism
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