LARRY ITLIONG AND THE GREAT DELANO GRAPE STRIKE

LARRY ITLIONG AND THE GREAT DELANO GRAPE STRIKE
By David Bacon
American Community Media, 4-8-26
https://americancommunitymedia.org/immigration/larry-itliong-and-the-great-delano-grape-strike/



COACHELLA, CA - Although Filipino workers were a large and important part of the farm labor workforce in the Coachella Valley from the 1920s to the 1970s, very few grape workers come from the Philippines today. Francisco and Maria Tapec, Filipino grape pickers. 

Liberal mythology tells us that farm worker unions hardly existed until the creation of United Farm Workers in the '60s, and that they appeared with no history of earlier struggles. That mythology credited Cesar Chavez with leading the farmworker movement almost single-handedly.  Now today, three decades after his death, he stands accused of abusing and even raping women in the farmworker movement.  

The mythology was never true, however.  The movement built by farmworkers to challenge poverty, exploitation and racial injustice was never the work of just one man.  Nothing makes this clearer than the radical life of Larry Itliong.  



POPLAR, CA - Annie Domingo came from Laoag, in Ilocos Norte province of the Philippines, 45 years ago, when she was 15 years old.

A Radical Template

The great Delano grape strike started on September 8, 1965, when Filipino pickers stayed in their labor camps, and refused to go into the fields. Mexican workers joined them two weeks later. Larry Itliong, who at the time headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, not only shared the strike's leadership with Cesar Chavez, actually started it.

The strike went on for five years, until all California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970. It was a watershed struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by millions of people across the country. The strike brought new life to the labor movement and helped immigrants and people of color batter down doors of discrimination. 

By 1965, however, Itliong had been part of labor conflicts waged by Filipinos for years.  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." 

Larry Itliong, photo by Bob Fitch, used with permission.

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 on the Alaska coast. These were mostly single men, recruited from the Philippines to come as laborers in the 1920s. In Alaska, their union fought to end rampant discrimination and terrible conditions, and forced the fish companies to sign contracts. 

The "manongs"

Known as "manongs," - "older brothers" in Tagalog - these men were the children of colonialism. From 1898 to 1946 the Philippines was a U.S. colony.  Even in the most remote islands, 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 because they compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the Filipinos' own quest for freedom, with the harsh reality they found 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, to change the system. 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." 

COACHELLA, CA - Although Filipino workers were a large and important part of the farm labor workforce in the Coachella Valley from the 1920s to the 1970s, very few grape workers come from the Philippines today. Maria Tapec, a Filipina grape picker. 

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, given that he'd been a U.S. "national" since he arrived in Seattle in the 1920s. "National" was a status given Filipinos because the Philippines was a U.S. 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. Itliong used these networks to organize Filipinos when they went to work in the fields, including 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. 

POPLAR, CA - Reginaldo and Gloria Lacambacal are Filipino immigrants who came to the U.S. from Laoag in the Philippines in the 1970s, and worked as farmworkers for many years. They live in Poplar, a farm worker town, where the temperature rises to 115 degrees in the mid-afternoon. The varicose veins in his legs are evidence of a lifetime spent picking grapes in the San Joaquin Valley.

In the early 1950s Filipino farm workers continued to organize with the National Farm Labor Union, striking the giant DiGiorgio Corporation.  In 1959 the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, set up by the AFL-CIO, hired Itliong as an organizer.   AWOC, together with the United Packinghouse Workers, another leftwing union, then struck the Imperial Valley lettuce harvest. Growers tried to use contract workers, or braceros, from Mexico to break the strike.  Yet despite threats many joined, and were deported.

Finally, in 1965, led by Itliong, Filipino workers struck the vineyards in the Coachella Valley.  After winning there, the strikers moved with the grape harvest into the San Joaquin Valley.   Growers kicked the Filipino strikers out of 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 to force growers to negotiate, especially the boycott. 

Non-violence, as urged by Cesar Chavez, was not universally accepted, however, especially by 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." 

POPLAR, CA - The Lacambacal family are Filipino farmworkers who originally came from Paniqui, in the Tarlac province of the Philippines. They live in a home in Poplar that they built as part of the Self Help program. Lhiann with her grandparents Reginaldo and his wife, Gloria, who came from the Philippines 20 years ago.

Despite differences, the culture of the manongs often shared a common sense of rights with the radicals among the Mexicans.  The colors of the UFW flag itself reflected this - a black eagle on a red background - were taken from the historic strike flag used by workers in Mexico - black for anarchism and red for socialism.  The idea that a picket line should try to keep strikebreakers from working, even at the extent of going into a field to call people to join, was another shared idea.  In the working class culture of both Mexico and the Philippines, workers rights have a much greater prominence over property rights. 

Many Filipino strikers were members of the radical cannery workers union when the grape strike began, at the same time they were organizing the United Farm Workers. Their political philosophy saw the strike as the fundamental weapon to win better conditions.  Nevertheless, 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 one of the country's largest unions, the Service Employees, remembers: "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." 

DELANO, CA - Filipino immigrant workers at the rally at a rally at the "Forty Acres," the historic home of the United Farm Workers, organized to encourage workers at VBZ, a large Delano table grape grower, to vote for the union in an election held the following day.

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 had deteriorated after the grape strike. In the first UFW table grape contracts, won in 1970, the hiring hall system broke up the Filipino crews.  These communities of single men had worked together for 30 or 40 years. Further accusations of discrimination against Filipinos in hiring halls became widespread. 

DELANO, CA - Fred Abad, the last manong to live at Agbayani Village, died in 1997. He stands with UFW Vice-President Pete Velasco in front of the dining room.

Relations grew even more difficult when Cesar Chavez visited dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and tried to use the Philippine consul 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 even 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

Cold War fear of communism has obscured the contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos. Yet thousands of people learned the skill of organizing in the grape strike and its aftermath. One of them, Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker leader in Washington State, says, "Today farm workers can organize because of what other farm workers like Larry did."  Itliong spent a lifetime organizing workers in radical fights against growers. The ideas of his generation of Filipino radicals, kept alive through the worst years of the Cold War, helped lead a rebirth of farm labor organizing.  It is still going on today. 

POPLAR, CA - Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, marches with members of the Itliong family as they celebrate Larry Itiong Day at the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar, a farm worker town in the San Joaquin Valley.  A day in honor of his birth was declared by the California state legislature.