Half a century after the 1965 grape strike, Cesar Chavez is the most familiar face of the farmworker movement, says KQED in a story by Lisa Morehouse that calls attention to the pivotal role of Filipino-Americans, led by Larry Itliong, who actually started the strike in Delano, in the Central Valley. Itliong, head of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, appealed to Chavez and other organizers of the National Farm Workers Association, “and two weeks later the much more sizable group of Mexican workers joined the strike,” Morehouse says. “Soon, the two unions came together to form what would become United Farm Workers, with Larry Itliong assistant director under Chavez. It was a historic interracial union.”
The story was produced in partnership with FERN.
History professor Dawn Mabalon, at San Francisco State U, says Filipino farmworkers and labor organizers began fighting for better working conditions in the 1920s and won a key victory in 1939 in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. In the months before the grape strike began in Delano, Filipinos won a $1.40-an-hour wage from growers in the Coachella Valley. Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation to to recognize Larry Itliong Day and to require public schools to teach about the Delano strike.