The Delano Grape Strike: Where the UFW Began

Twenty miles north of Bakersfield, the community of Delano sits in the middle of the table grape vineyards that spread across Kern County's northern edge. On September eighth, nineteen sixty-five, a Filipino agricultural workers union called the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by organizer Larry Itliong, walked off the grape harvest at the DiGiorgio ranch and other operations around Delano. They had been in the fields for years, longer than most history books acknowledge, organizing in the specific conditions of Filipino bachelor communities whose members could not own land or bring families under the immigration laws of the era.

About a week after the Filipino strikers walked out, Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association, the predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American union he had co-founded with Dolores Huerta in sixty-two, voted to join the strike. The joint action that followed became the Delano Grape Strike. It lasted five years.

The strike did not win quickly. The growers in Kern County had the law enforcement resources of Kern County on their side, and those resources were used. Strikers were arrested. Injunctions were issued. The economic pressure on farmworker families who had no strike fund adequate for a prolonged campaign was severe. What turned it was the consumer boycott. Chavez understood, and communicated to the broader labor movement and eventually to the public, that a strike that could not be won in the fields might be won in the supermarkets. The national grape boycott began in nineteen sixty-seven and built into an organized network of labor and faith communities in cities across the United States that made buying California grapes a political act.

In nineteen seventy, the major Kern County grape growers signed contracts with the United Farm Workers. The contracts established minimum wages, pesticide protections, and basic labor rights that had never been formally recognized in California agriculture. Itliong's role in initiating the strike was systematically underrepresented in the public record for decades. California added Larry Itliong Day to the school calendar in twenty-twenty, fifty-five years after he walked off the Delano harvest. The correction came late.

The Cesar Chavez National Monument is in Keene, in the Tehachapi Mountains east of Bakersfield, on the land where the UFW had its headquarters. It is the only national monument in California dedicated to a labor organizer.