The Delano Grape Strike Started With the Filipinos: Five Years That Built the UFW

Larry Itliong called the strike. Cesar Chavez’s union joined it eight days later. On September 8, 1965, Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) walked out of Delano-area vineyards demanding a raise from $1.25 to $1.40 an hour. Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the Mexican American group he had built with Dolores Huerta since 1962, voted to join on September 16. Textbooks and t-shirts alike tend to skip that order of events. The dates don’t.

The walkout, September 8, 1965

AWOC’s Filipino members gathered at the Filipino Community Hall on Glenwood Street in Delano and voted to strike. The National Park Service puts the walkout at over 800 workers hitting ten grape vineyards; other accounts put the same walkout at more than a thousand. What the sources agree on is the demand: a raise to $1.40 an hour and 25 cents a box, up from $1.25 an hour and 10 cents a box, matching a raise Filipino AWOC members had already won that year in the Coachella Valley, where an earlier harvest deadline had given growers a reason to give in. Delano’s growers refused the same raise, and Itliong called the vote that turned the refusal into a strike.

Itliong had spent three decades in American labor before Delano. He immigrated from Pangasinan in the Philippines in 1929 at fifteen, worked salmon canneries in Alaska and fields up and down the West Coast, and by 1959 was organizing for AWOC. Philip Vera Cruz, who had arrived from Ilocos Sur in 1926, organized alongside him and went on to serve as the merged union’s vice president for twelve years. Both men belonged to what Filipino American history calls the manong generation: laborers who had immigrated as young men under immigration rules that all but guaranteed they would grow old without wives or children in the country where they had worked their whole lives. That fact becomes load-bearing later in this story.

The NFWA joins, September 16

Eight days after the walkout, the NFWA met at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in Delano, on Mexican Independence Day, to vote on joining a strike its own membership had not called. The organization had a treasury of $70. Chavez and the NFWA voted to join anyway, turning a Filipino-led work stoppage into a strike across two farmworker communities that had rarely organized together before.

The march that made it national

On March 17, 1966, Chavez led roughly 75 marchers out of Delano on a 280-mile walk to the state capitol, timed to arrive on Easter Sunday. Fifty-seven of them, the originales, made every mile. Four days before the march reached Sacramento, word came that Schenley Industries had agreed to recognize the union, and on April 10 the marchers arrived to 8,000 supporters and an announcement of that recognition. Schenley signed the formal contract on June 21, 1966: a 35 cent hourly raise, a union hiring hall, and the first agreement a California grower had ever signed with a farmworkers’ union.

Dolores Huerta negotiated the Schenley contract herself. Two months later, on August 22, 1966, AWOC and the NFWA merged into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Chavez became director. Itliong, the man who had called the original strike, became assistant director.

Five years, ending July 29, 1970

The merged union kept the boycott running against growers who had not followed Schenley’s lead, carrying picket lines to supermarkets far outside California. Huerta ran the effort as the boycott’s East Coast director, working out of New York City to pull in other unions, religious groups, and ordinary shoppers who had never met a farmworker. California’s largest table grape grower, Giumarra Vineyards Corporation, held out the longest and drew the sharpest end of the boycott. By late summer 1967, with the union’s pressure cutting into sales, Giumarra had persuaded other Delano-area growers to let him ship his grapes under their labels instead of his own. The union answered in January 1968 by extending the boycott to every table grape grower in the state, not just the ones it could still name on a box. In 1967, a Filipino UFWOC member named Paulo Agbayani died of a heart attack on the picket line outside the Perelli-Minetti winery, one of the strike’s few recorded deaths.

On July 29, 1970, John Giumarra signed. Twenty-six Delano-area growers signed with him that day, covering roughly 10,000 workers and about 75 percent of California’s table grape acreage. Not quite five years after the Filipino Hall vote, the strike that started with AWOC ended with the growers who had held out longest, at the same table.

What happened to the man who called it

Itliong resigned from the union in 1971, at odds with its leadership over both style and substance, including how much say Filipino members had in a union whose public face had become almost entirely Chavez. Before he left, he drew up plans for a retirement home: a place for the aging Filipino strikers who, evicted from the labor camps once they went on strike, had nowhere to grow old. Built largely by volunteer labor between 1972 and 1974 and named for the man who died on the picket line, Agbayani Village opened in Delano in 1974, for men who had spent their working lives in bunkhouses and had no family to retire to. The property it sits on, Forty Acres, became a National Historic Landmark in 2008.

Popular memory did the same thing to Itliong’s name that it had done to the picket line order: it dropped him. The strike that made Cesar Chavez a national figure is, in most retellings, his story alone. That held until June 30, 2015, when Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 7, requiring California to proclaim October 25, Itliong’s birthday, as Larry Itliong Day and encouraging schools to hold exercises about his life and contributions. Every October 25 since, the governor’s office has issued a proclamation using his name. The strike he called did not wait for one: it started September 8, 1965, eight days before anyone else joined in.