Delano, 1965: The Strike Larry Itliong Started

On September eighth, nineteen sixty-five, a Filipino labor organizer named Larry Itliong called his members to a vote in Delano. The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, represented Filipino farmworkers who had been cutting grapes in the Delano vineyards for weeks under wages they had already decided were unacceptable. The vote was to strike. They walked out. Nine days later, on September sixteenth, Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association, whose membership was largely Mexican, joined them. That joining, and the organizational merger that followed in nineteen sixty-six, would create the United Farm Workers and produce the most significant agricultural labor movement in American history. It would also begin the process by which Larry Itliong's name disappeared from the story he started.

Itliong had been working the California agricultural circuit since the nineteen thirties. He was not a newcomer and not a symbol. He was a specific man with a specific organizing history, someone who had spent decades in the fields and the labor halls learning how California agriculture worked and how it could be pressured. He called the sixty-five strike because the conditions in the Delano vineyards had crossed a line his membership would no longer accept, and because he calculated that September, harvest season, was the moment of maximum leverage. He was right. Growers who refused to negotiate faced rotting fruit on the vine.

What the merger did, operationally, was subordinate the largely Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee within a new organization whose public face and majority membership was Mexican. The organizational logic had its own momentum. Chavez was a more recognizable figure to the California mainstream and to the national press. The movement he symbolized, by the time it reached Sacramento on Easter Sunday of nineteen sixty-six, was framed as a Mexican farmworkers' cause. That framing was not false, but it was incomplete. The Filipino workers who had initiated the strike, and who had been working California's fields since the nineteen twenties, had been edited out.

California added Itliong to the public school curriculum in two thousand fifteen. That was fifty years after the walkout. The Cesar Chavez National Monument, which stands on the forty acres in Delano where the United Farm Workers built their headquarters, interprets the strike and the movement that grew from it. How fully Itliong's role is addressed in that interpretation as of today is a question the monument's materials would need to answer directly. What is not a question is who called the strike first.