Liberal mythology tells us that farm worker unions hardly existed until the creation of United Farm Workers (UFW) in the ‘60s, and that they appeared with no history of earlier struggles.
That mythology, crediting Cesar Chavez with leading the farmworker movement almost single-handedly, was never true.
Nothing makes this clearer than the radical life and work of Larry Itliong.
A radical template
The great Delano grape strike began on September 8, 1965, when Filipino pickers refused to leave their labor camps and enter the fields. Larry Itliong, head of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), launched the strike — and two weeks later convinced Cesar Chavez and the Mexican workers he led to join them.
Though Chavez would become the more famous face of the movement, it was Itliong who started it.
The strike went on for five years, until California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970. It was a watershed moment for civil and labor rights, drawing support from millions across the country. The strike brought new life to the labor movement and helped immigrants and people of color batter down doors of discrimination.
Itliong, however, was no newcomer to the struggle. Filipinos had been waging labor conflicts for decades. During the 1930s, they formed left-wing unions and mounted huge strikes. According to Oberlin professor Rick Baldoz, “The burgeoning strike activity involving thousands of Filipinos in the mid-1930s occasioned a furious backlash from growers who worked closely with local law enforcement.”
Itliong’s radicalism had deep roots, shaped in part by Carlos Bulosan, author of “America Is in the Heart,” a moving account of life as a Filipino migrant farm worker. Both men were active in the union organized by Filipinos in the salmon canneries along the Alaska coast, forged mostly by single men, recruited from the Philippines to come as laborers in the 1920s. In Alaska, their union fought rampant discrimination and brutal conditions, ultimately forcing the fish companies to sign contracts. It was a template Itliong carried with him to California.
The ‘manongs’
The “manongs” — “older brothers” in Filipino — were the children of colonialism. From 1898 to 1946 the Philippines was a U.S. colony. Even in the most remote islands of the country, children were taught in English, from U.S. textbooks, by missionary teachers from Philadelphia or New Jersey. Students studied the promises of the Declaration of Independence before they knew the names of Jose Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo, and Andres Bonifacio, who led Filipinos in their war for independence against the Spaniards, and later against the Americans.
The manongs were radicalized by the gap between those ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and the harsh reality they encountered in the United States. Some volunteered for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, opposing fascism in the country that was their former colonizer. Many were Communists, believing that fighting for better wages was part of fighting against capitalism and colonialism. As Bulosan wrote, “America is in the hearts of people that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of people building a new world.”
At the height of the 1950s McCarthyite hysteria more than 30 members of the fish cannery union were threatened with deportation to the Philippines, including its officers Ernesto Mangaoang and Chris Mensalvas. Eventually Mangaoang’s deportation case was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court. He argued that he couldn’t be deported as an alien, given that since arriving in Seattle in the 1920s he had been a U.S. “national” — a status granted to Filipinos by virtue of the Philippines being an American colony at the time. Filipinos couldn’t be considered immigrants, but they weren’t equal citizens either.
Organized strikes
Larry Itliong was Ernesto Mangaoang’s protégé and the union dispatcher, sending workers on the boats from Seattle to Alaska every season. After work was over, many Filipinos would return home to California’s Salinas and San Joaquin Valleys, where they worked as farm laborers for the rest of the year.
In the segregated barrios of towns like Stockton and Salinas they formed hometown associations and social clubs, and Itliong used these networks to organize. He led strikes in Stockton’s asparagus fields in 1948 and 1949. At the time, growers kept workers under guard in labor camps, where if they held open meetings, they risked being fired and even beaten. In one story, Itliong sneaked into a camp, crawled under the bunkhouse, and spoke to workers through cracks in the floor.
In the early 1950s Filipino farm workers continued to organize with the National Farm Labor Union, striking the giant DiGiorgio Corporation. In 1959 AWOC, set up by the AFL-CIO, hired Itliong as an organizer. AWOC, together with the United Packinghouse Workers, another leftwing union, then conducted strikes against Imperial Valley’s lettuce harvest. Growers tried to use contract workers, or braceros, from Mexico to break the strike. Yet despite threats many joined, at the cost of deportation.
Finally, in 1965, Itliong led Filipino workers in striking the vineyards of the Coachella Valley. After winning there, the strikers followed the grape harvest north into the San Joaquin Valley. Growers retaliated by evicting Filipino strikers from the labor camps where they lived, forcing them to move into town.
‘Tough leftists’
The timing was crucial. The strike took place the year after civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero program. Once the threat of replacement was removed, strikers built a strategy — especially, the boycott — to force growers to negotiate.
Cesar Chavez’s commitment to non-violence, however, was not universally accepted, especially among Filipino labor veterans. According to historian Dawn Mabalon, “Many of the members of the Filipino union, the AWOC, were veterans of the strikes of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s and were tough leftists, Marxists, and Communists. They met the violence of the growers with their own militancy and carried guns and knives for self-defense. For them the drama of marching behind statues, hunger strikes, turn-the-other-cheek style was alien.”
Despite differences, Filipinos and Mexican workers shared common objectives. The colors of the UFW flag itself reflected this — a black eagle on a red background. The design was drawn from the historic strike flag used by workers in Mexico, where black signified anarchism, and red, socialism. Both cultures also shared the conviction that a picket line meant calling workers out of the fields, that workers’ rights outweighed property rights. These were culturally resonant ideas.
Many Filipino strikers were simultaneously members of the radical cannery workers union and organizers of the United Farm Workers. They saw the strike as the fundamental instrument of working-class power to win better conditions. They could also see the boycott’s power, and for several years during the Delano grape strike, Itliong was the national boycott organizer.
The coalition frays
Eliseo Medina, a farm worker who later became vice-president of Service Employees, one of the country’s largest unions, recalls: “Before the strike began, we lived in different worlds — the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African American world and the Caucasian world. It wasn’t until the union began that we finally began to work together, to know each other and to begin to fight together.”
In the late 1970s the UFW built Agbayani Village, a retirement home for the manongs, for whom labor camps had been their only home for half a century. Young Filipino students and community activists came from all over California and beyond to contribute their labor. Lorraine Agtang, whose father was Filipino and mother was Mexican, was hired to run it. “Everyone just wanted the manongs to know that they were loved,” she said.
But relations between Filipinos and Mexicans deteriorated after the grape strike and the coalition began to fray. In the first UFW table grape contracts, won in 1970, the hiring hall system broke up Filipino crews. These communities of single men had worked together for 30 or 40 years. Accusations of discrimination against Filipinos in hiring halls became widespread.
Relations worsened when Cesar Chavez visited dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and tried to use the Philippine consulate in San Francisco to win over Filipino workers in UFW organizing drives. UFW vice-president Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino, resigned over that issue. Itliong had left earlier. “Differences between the leadership and the rank and file in organizing styles and priorities, philosophies of organizing, and strategy began to pull the coalition apart,” Mabalon said.
Itliong’s legacy
For decades Chavez has remained the face of the farmworker movement. Recent revelations, however, by labor rights activist Dolores Huerta that she was among other women in the movement sexually abused by Chavez, have prompted a reckoning. Streets, schools, murals bearing the labor leader’s name are being changed, painted over.
Still, the contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos who built the movement — long obscured by Cold War anticommunist fervor — remain. “Today,” says Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker leader in Washington State, “farm workers can organize because of what other farm workers like Larry did.”
“Liberal mythology tells us that farm worker unions hardly existed until the creation of United Farm Workers (UFW) in the ‘60s, and that they appeared with no history of earlier struggles. That mythology, crediting Cesar Chavez with leading the farmworker movement almost single-handedly, was never true.” Anyone who knows anything about labor history never thought this was true. A misleading and provocative way to start an article, especially from a respected writer like David Bacon. All due respect to Mr. Itliong, but he and AWOC were under the thumb of the AFL-CIO bosses and attorneys. Cesar and his group joined the wage strike in ‘65 and converted it into a separate entity run by the Mexican and Filipino workers together. The great journalist Dick Meister wrote about all this and how AWOC’s tactics were replaced by more effective methods better suited for the new context of the 1960s.
Amazing fantastic peace of history