The Filipino Labor Union and the Lettuce Strike That Changed Everything

In the summer of nineteen thirty-four, the lettuce fields you are passing through were the site of one of the most consequential agricultural labor actions in American history, though you would not know it from the highway signs.

Filipino workers had been arriving in the Salinas Valley since the nineteen twenties, recruited as low-wage agricultural labor following the American colonial occupation of the Philippines. In nineteen thirty-three, workers formed the Filipino Labor Union. In August of nineteen thirty-four, approximately seven thousand workers walked out of the Salinas Valley lettuce fields. Three thousand of them were Filipino members of the union. They were striking for a wage of forty cents an hour and for formal recognition as a legitimate labor organization.

They won. Both demands. Forty cents an hour and recognition. For agricultural workers in California in nineteen thirty-four, this was not a small victory. It was, briefly, proof that the system could be moved.

Within weeks, vigilante gangs, organized and encouraged by the growers, burned the Filipino labor camps and drove the organizers out of the valley at gunpoint. The nineteen thirty-six follow-up strike, called after growers cut wages back to thirty cents, was broken the same way. Arson and armed expulsion.

The names of the individual organizers who built the Filipino Labor Union and led the nineteen thirty-four action are not well preserved in mainstream historical sources; that gap in the record is part of what erasure looks like from the inside. What is preserved is the organizing vocabulary: the insistence on formal union recognition, the willingness to strike for specific wage floors, the understanding that agricultural labor had collective power.

It is important to say what winning meant in this context, and then what it cost. Winning the nineteen thirty-four strike meant that several thousand workers spent twenty-seven days without wages in an industry that employed them seasonally, in a period of national economic depression, against employers who had the weight of state and local law behind them. They held long enough to extract real concessions. Then vigilantes with torches and guns undid the victory by force in the weeks that followed.

The workers came back. The valley needed labor; the workers needed wages. This is the structure that made agricultural strikes so difficult to sustain: the same economic desperation that motivated the strike also made strikers vulnerable to the threat of permanent replacement. The nineteen thirty-six strike was broken the same way the first one was. The workers came back again.

Thirty years later, when Cesar Chavez was in Delano organizing grape pickers, he was working from a template. The template came from here.