Larry Itliong

Larry Itliong called the Delano grape strike in September 1965, a week before the Mexican-American union joined it, and the strike is usually remembered as if it had begun with the people who came second. He arrived from the Philippines at fifteen in 1929, worked the migrant circuit from Alaskan salmon canneries to Washington apples to California asparagus, lost three fingers in a cannery and was called Seven Fingers afterwards. He had been organising since the 1930s, when Filipino labourers were barred from citizenship, from owning land and from marrying white women, and when the men who had come as bachelors were growing old in labour camps. As leader of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee he took the Filipino crews out of the Delano vineyards over wages, then went to Cesar Chavez and asked his National Farm Workers Association to join rather than take the work, which is the decision that made the strike hold - growers had broken every previous one by setting the two communities against each other. The two unions merged in 1966 as the United Farm Workers with Itliong as assistant director. He resigned in 1971, unhappy that Filipino members had become a minority within a union whose culture and leadership were Mexican-American, and spent his last years building Agbayani Village, a retirement home in Delano for the old bachelor labourers who had no families to go to. California made his birthday a day of recognition in 2015, and a Los Angeles middle school was renamed for him and Chavez together. He had also led a strike in the Alaskan canneries and helped found a cannery workers union in the 1940s. The Filipino labourers of his generation are known in Filipino American history as the manong generation. He died of Lou Gehrig s disease in 1977. Agbayani Village is still standing.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history