Without Larry Itliong, there might be no César Chávez. Without Filipino farmworkers, some experts say, there would be no United Farm Workers union. Although Chávez is regularly credited as instrumental to the rise of the 1960s labor movement, there is more to that history than widely known, local historians told this news organization.
“It’s been hard to raise any critique of César Chávez, frankly. As a Filipino scholar, I’ve been reticent,” said Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, a former UC Davis Asian American Studies chairwoman and founder of the first-of-its-kind Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies. “It always felt like ‘do not touch César Chávez.’ ”
A New York Times investigation revealed decades of predatory sexual behavior against women and girls – including celebrated labor leader Dolores Huerta – by Chávez. Rodriguez said the rush to remove Chávez’s name from holidays and public landmarks should also be a time to reconsider the reality of the farmworker movement and the role the Filipino community played in it.
“There’s been a lot of silencing in the UFW, I think, frankly. Including silencing around our role,” Rodriguez said. “Let’s stop the silence of all of it. Let’s get justice for the victims, and get justice for all of the people who have been silenced.”
UFW spokesman Antonio De Loera-Brust told this news organization in a statement that “the entire labor movement must learn the lessons of the Mexican-Filipino solidarity that founded the UFW: workers are stronger when we are united than when we let ourselves be divided by our race, language, religion or what country we were born in.”
De Loera-Brust said Mexicans and Filipinos “realized that as long as those white growers could play them against each other, nobody would win.”
In 1965, Filipino organizers working in the vineyards of San Joaquin Valley’s led the fight against owners of the era’s booming agribusinesses, who used racial discrimination, low wages and poor working conditions to exploit immigrant labor, according to “Delano Manongs,” a 2014 PBS documentary by Marissa Aroy.
The growers, Rodriguez said, “pitted people against each other,” particularly Filipinos and Mexicans, who lived and worked in separate camps.
The manongs — “older brothers” in Filipino — demanded in Delano on Sept. 8, 1965 that farm owners improve working conditions or they would face overwhelming losses. They put down their tools, raised picket signs and let the growers’ grapes rot on their vines.
“The UFW was born in that moment in unity,” De Loera-Brust said. “We continue that legacy in the UFW today.”
However, Chávez — the man historically given credit for historic change — waited eight days before joining the Filipino laborers, Rodriguez said.
“We were better organizers in the movement well before César Chávez and Dolores Huerta started organizing,” Rodriguez said. But, she added, “there was no winning for the Filipinos without the Mexicans.”
“There would be no UFW without Larry Itliong,” said Rodriguez, who has spent years archiving Filipino American history around the farmworker movement. “You can’t deny decades of organizing in the fields already.”
Around 100,000 Filipinos started immigrating to the U.S. through the mid-1920s and for the next several decades, after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924 halted Chinese and Japanese immigrants from working in America’s fields. White farmers, seeking cheap labor, sought Filipino workers who were exempt from these laws while U.S. military colonization in the Philippines ramped up through the 1940s, according to Rodel Rodis, a Filipino lawyer and former San Francisco State University educator.
Early accounts of Filipino labor efforts can be found in the violent Salinas lettuce strike of 1934, led by the thousands of workers from the Filipino Labor Union. Growers burned labor camps and gathered “vigilante mobs” to attempt to break the strike before the union secured wage increases, according to Howard DeWitt’s 1978 written account of the strike, “The Filipino Labor Union: The Salinas Lettuce Strike of 1934.”
“As soon as Filipinos touched ground, we were organizing,” Rodriguez said. “We find injustice distasteful. We have to act.”
In his 1966 book “Huelga,” author Eugene Nelson said growers started importing Filipino labor as early as 1923, nearly two decades before a mass migration of workers from Mexico under the U.S. government’s “Bracero Program,” which provided temporary labor contracts for millions of migrant workers between 1942 and 1964. Nelson wrote that a grower’s spokesman once told him that Filipinos “proved to be the more disturbing and more dangerous than any other Asiatic group that has ever been brought into this state.”
Among them was Itliong — described by Rodriguez as a cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed, roughneck Filipino immigrant — who had been working in California fields since he was a teenager in the 1930s. Known as “Seven Fingers” after he lost three fingers in a working accident early in his career, Itliong spent decades organizing workers before the formation of the UFW and earned the respect of his Filipino peers, Rodriguez said.
Fresh off a 10-day strike in the Coachella grape vineyards, where Filipino farmworkers won higher wages, Itliong in September 1965 led over 1,000 workers with the Agricultural Worker’s Organizing Committee to the strike lines in Delano. This strike would last five years and become the longest labor strike the country had ever known at the time, Rodriguez said.
But the manongs needed help. Itliong appealed to Chávez and the Mexican workers in the National Farm Workers Association to join them. The striking workers faced armed intimidation, violent confrontations and eviction from labor housing camps by growers who called police to the picket lines, according to Nelson.
But Itliong and the manongs initially faced a cold shoulder from the farm association, which was led by Chávez and Huerta, Rodriguez said.
“The reality is, it did boil down to a hesitation – around whether the Mexicans could be ready to actually join in the same kind of way, in the way that the Filipinos had, and whether they could come together,” Rodriguez said. “The Filipinos were on their own. Eight days.”
Rodis, a longtime scholar of the manongs and farmworker movement, first moved to the Bay Area in 1971 from the Philippines. He said he regularly brought his San Francisco State University students to Delano in the mid-1970s to learn from farmworkers after the end of the grape strikes in July 1970.
He said he learned in conversations with farmworkers at the time that Chávez, convinced his Mexican workers were not ready to strike, wanted to wait three years before joining Filipinos on the picket lines. But Itliong believed Filipinos and Mexicans, who outnumbered the aging manongs, could prevail together.
“Larry said, ‘If we go on strike and you’re not ready to go for three years, I guarantee if you’re ready to go on strike, we’re going to scab out your strike,’ ” Rodis said. “Larry couldn’t wait the three years that César asked them to wait. It was now or never. And that’s what created the UFW.”
Rodis said well-known historical accounts of the labor movement provide “no mention of Larry” and how “he was a pivotal leader.”
Itliong, he said, doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.
“If he didn’t organize and push César, it wouldn’t have happened,” Rodis said.
“He doesn’t get enough credit for the initial work because of the number of Filipinos in relation to the number of Mexicans. He deserves a lot more credit than that,” Rodis said. “The authoritarian style of leadership from César was too much for Larry and he did not have patience for that type of authority. He thought it could be a more collective type of leadership, but that was not César’s style.”
Vera Cruz’s biography details the history of Filipino immigrants and the farmworkers movement. Vera Cruz said he would often have “to bend a little and not say exactly what was on my mind” when he spoke about the UFW or Chávez in public.
“I just couldn’t come out and say in a public forum that I disagreed with César over this or thought some policy of César’s was not fair or democratic,” Vera Cruz said. “As a union officer, I always had to consider the overall integrity of the union, and sometimes this meant tempering my public voice.”
Recalling decades of farmworker history, Rodis said recent news of Chávez’s alleged sexual abuse throughout his organizing years “came as a shock,” since many revered Chávez as “saintly.”
“It’s disappointing because it diminishes everyone who was in the labor movement, everyone who believed in him and supported farmworkers,” Rodis said. “It just feeds the cynicism of so many people and the racism of so many others that will see this and put leaders like him in a negative light.”
