Larry Itliong and the Asparagus Strikes

Larry Itliong arrived in the United States from the Philippines in nineteen twenty-nine, fifteen years old and without a word of English. He spent years moving through the labor circuits of the Pacific Northwest and California, cutting asparagus in the delta fields around Stockton, canning salmon in Alaska, picking hops in Washington. The work was seasonal and the pay was low and the contractors who stood between the fields and the workers took a cut that made the low pay lower.

Stockton was the center of the Filipino farm-labor world because Stockton was the center of asparagus country. The delta peat fields produced asparagus on a commercial scale that nowhere else in California could match, and Filipino workers had become the primary labor force in those fields by the nineteen thirties and forties. El Dorado Street, in the Little Manila district, was where they came back between seasons, to the pool halls, the restaurants, the barbershops, the remittance offices sending money home.

Itliong organized. In nineteen forty-eight he participated in an asparagus strike alongside Philip Vera Cruz and other Filipino workers. In nineteen fifty-six he founded the Filipino Farm Labor Union in Stockton. The union was small and its gains were limited. The asparagus growers had options.

What changed was nineteen sixty-five. In September of that year, Itliong led Filipino agricultural workers out of the Delano grape fields on a strike that would eventually merge with the Mexican-led effort organized by Cesar Chavez. The United Farm Workers union that emerged from that merger traces its roots to a strike vote taken in Delano, led by a man who had been cutting asparagus in the delta since the age of fifteen.