Author: Paula Mejia / Source: Atlas Obscura
In 1965, the grape pickers in California’s Central Valley, incensed by decades of discrimination, shoddy pay, and poor working conditions, snapped. The farmers, many of them immigrants, went on strike in the city of Delano, California.
The movement gained support from unions (including the United Auto Workers), activists, and church groups, and evolved from marches into a nationwide boycott of table grapes. Years of work led to the creation of United Farm Workers, an agricultural labor organization that helped farmers negotiate for benefits and better wages.To many, the name Cesar Chavez rings familiar as a leader of this revolutionary movement. It was a huge coup for farmers, immigrants, and minority groups within the United States, and brought visibility to their struggles, particularly for Chicanos. Chavez has been honored with street names, profiles in textbooks, and a memorial that Barack Obama visited during his presidency. But what has been immortalized in history as Chavez’s victory was the effort of many people who also led that fight, and who rarely get their due. That includes Dolores Huerta, a Chicana labor leader, and scores of Filipino Americans, particularly the labor organizer and migrant farm worker Larry Itliong.
In fact, it was through Itliong’s efforts that the highly-publicized Delano Grape Strike happened at all. For years, the Filipino and Mexican migrant workers had been both kept apart and pitted against each other by the growers, who often responded to collective demands by evicting workers or disrupting life in their camps.
(The great irony is that many of these farmers had taught the growers about harvesting grapes in the first place.) In the early 1960s, each of these groups had been mobilizing on their own. But one day in September 1965, farmers gathered in the Filipino Community Hall and voted to go on strike against the growers. Itliong eventually approached Chavez, and asked him to join forces for the strike. Itliong also co-founded the United Farm Workers the following year, and helped lead the organization as an Assistant Director. So it’s strange that he’s not mentioned in the same breath as Chavez.Itliong’s own story has hid in plain sight from many Filipino Americans, too. “The crazy thing is that we had to go away to college to find out about Larry Itliong,” says Gayle Romasanta, a writer and publisher who grew up in Stockton, where Itliong resided. Romasanta, who is a descendant of agricultural workers, was dismayed when her eldest child came home one day with a list of potential historical figures to write a report about. “And there was nobody for her to really identify with, or people of color period,” she says. In searching for an alternative, she thought of Itliong, but came up short on information. “I was really surprised there’s no book written about him,” she says. “There’s actually no nonfiction book about Filipino American history, which blew my mind. And we’re the oldest Asian-American group in the United States—we’ve been here the longest.”
Romasanta, who had written the children’s book Beautiful Eyes, called up Dawn Mabalon, a historian, San Francisco State University professor, and old friend, who happened to be working on a biography of Itliong. “So I approached her and said,…
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