Delano Grape Strike
Filipino farm workers walked out of the Delano vineyards in California on 8 September 1965, and the strike that followed ran for five years. The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong and composed largely of manong — Filipino men who had come in the 1920s and 1930s, been barred from marrying white women, and grown old in the fields — struck over wages after growers refused to match the rate paid to imported braceros. They asked the mostly Mexican-American National Farm Workers Association to join rather than be used to break the strike. César Chávez put it to a vote at a meeting in Delano on 16 September, Mexican Independence Day, and the members voted to strike. The two organisations merged in 1966 as the United Farm Workers. Farm workers had been deliberately excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, so they had no protected right to organise and no remedy against dismissal or eviction from grower-owned housing. The strike therefore could not be won in the fields. Chávez took it to the consumer: a boycott first of one brand, then of all California table grapes, carried by volunteers to cities across North America and Europe, supported by dockworkers who refused to load the fruit. He fasted for twenty-five days in 1968 to hold the movement to non-violence, and Robert Kennedy came to Delano to break the fast with him. An estimated seventeen million Americans stopped buying grapes. The growers signed in July 1970. California passed the first law in the country giving farm workers collective bargaining rights five years later. Itliong's part in beginning it was largely written out of the story for decades and has been recovered since.
- Year: 1965 CE
- Category: Social
