The Manongs Called the Strike: Delano, September 8, 1965

The evening of Tuesday, September 7, 1965. Filipino Community Hall, 1457 Glenwood Street, Delano, California. The men in the room are in their fifties and sixties, most of them. They have been in the United States since the 1920s. They have been picking crops since then, following the harvest season by season up and down the Pacific Coast, living in labor camps owned by the growers they worked for, unable under California anti-miscegenation law to marry white women, unable until 1946 to become citizens of the country whose fields they had spent their lives tending. They are the manongs, the elder Filipino men of California agriculture, and tonight they are done waiting.

Larry Itliong is in the room. He is fifty-one years old and has been organizing farmworkers since 1930. Three fingers of one hand are missing, lost in a salmon cannery in Alaska or, depending on who tells the story, jumping trains during the Depression years. Either way, seven fingers. "Seven Fingers" is the name he answers to on the crews. Philip Vera Cruz is in the room, born Christmas Day 1905 in the Philippines, arrived Seattle 1926, in the fields ever since. Pete Velasco is in the room. Andy Imutan is in the room. Ben Gines is in the room. They are members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, the AFL-CIO's farmworker organizing arm, AWOC for short, and they are meeting to vote on whether to strike the Delano-area table grape harvest the next morning.

The vote is unanimous.

Cesar Chavez is not in this room. He will not vote to join this strike for eight more days.

The manongs: thirty-five years on the picket line before Delano

The American labor movement has treated the Delano Grape Strike as a beginning. For the manongs in that hall on Glenwood Street, it was a culmination.

Filipino migration to California agriculture began in earnest in the 1920s. The Philippines was a U.S. colonial possession until 1946, which made Filipinos U.S. nationals but not citizens, entitled to travel freely within American territory but barred from naturalization, barred from owning land in California under the Alien Land Law, and barred from marrying white women under anti-miscegenation statutes that would remain on the books until 1948. The effect was to create what scholars of the community call a bachelor society, tens of thousands of single men cycling through the bunkhouses of coastal agriculture with no legal path to the domestic stability that might have grounded them somewhere else. Their community was the crew, the labor hall, the Filipino gambling house on the edge of town. Their solidarity was forged in those conditions. Carlos Bulosan named the violence and the endurance in his 1946 memoir America Is in the Heart, the book that put the Filipino migrant experience on the record in terms that the mainstream American narrative spent the next forty years ignoring.

The strikes did not wait for Bulosan's book. In 1930, a nineteen-year-old Larry Itliong walked a picket line in a lettuce strike near Monroe, Washington, his first. That same year he helped organize the Alaska Cannery Workers Union, which later became Local 7 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America. In 1936, roughly 800 Filipino field hands struck the Salinas lettuce growers when the growers cut wages from 40 cents an hour to 30 cents. Grower-backed vigilantes surrounded the Filipino labor camp, set it on fire, and drove the workers out of the Salinas Valley at gunpoint. The workers lost. The lesson was held.

Itliong came back. 1948 asparagus strike in California. 1956, he founds the Filipino Farm Labor Union in Stockton, the heart of California's Filipino agricultural community. 1959, the AFL-CIO charters the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and asks Itliong to organize for it. The AFL-CIO did not expect AWOC to amount to much. Itliong organized anyway.

Philip Vera Cruz joined AWOC in the mid-1960s. He called his union card "probably the most important and expensive $2 I ever spent in my life." He was sixty years old.

These men were not newcomers to the idea of a union. They were veterans of a thirty-five-year war in California agriculture that the mainstream telling of the farmworker movement declines to mention because it predates the story's chosen hero by decades.

Coachella: the fight they had already won

Four months before Delano, the manongs had already been on strike once in the 1965 grape harvest.

In May 1965, AWOC Filipino workers in the Coachella Valley, at the southern end of the grape season, went on strike when they discovered what was on their paystubs. Growers were paying Filipino crews $1.25 an hour. They were paying bracero workers, employed under the federal bracero guest-worker program in its final months of operation, $1.40 an hour for identical work. The Filipino crews struck. After about ten days, the growers conceded the wage. No contract, no recognition, but every Filipino crew in Coachella went home at $1.40.

Then the harvest moved north, as it does every year, following the grape season up the San Joaquin Valley to Delano, which sits in Kern County at the southern end of the valley, about 150 miles from Coachella. The same Filipino crews followed their same growers north. They arrived in Delano believing they had settled this question. The growers in Delano offered them $1.25 again.

That is what put the manongs in Filipino Community Hall the night of September 7, 1965. Not an abstract principle. A broken agreement.

"The growers were very successful in dividing us"

September 8, 1965. Before sunrise, roughly a thousand Filipino AWOC members walk off ten Delano-area vineyards. Within days the number grows past two thousand. The demands are specific: $1.40 an hour, 25 cents a box, union recognition. The farmworkers are still excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which means they have no legal right to organize, no mandatory bargaining, and no protection from retaliation. They walk out anyway.

The growers' first response is immediate and deliberate. They begin evicting Filipino workers from the company-owned labor camps where most of the manongs have lived for years. Men in their fifties and sixties sleep in their cars. They sleep on the floor of Filipino Community Hall. They sleep in the back rooms of Chinese-owned groceries in Delano. They have nowhere else to go because the growers own the ground under their beds.

The growers' second response is the move they always make. They recruit Mexican workers to cross the AWOC picket line and pick the grapes the Filipinos abandoned. This is not improvised. Andy Imutan, one of the AWOC organizers, described what life in the labor camps had been like for years before the strike: "There was no unity between the Mexicans and the Filipinos. The growers were very successful in dividing us and creating conflict."

Filipino farmworkers had broken Mexican strikes for growers in the 1930s. Mexican farmworkers had broken Filipino strikes in the 1940s and 1950s. The growers had spent three decades maintaining that division as deliberately as they maintained their irrigation systems, because it kept wages down and unions out. Itliong understood this exactly. So he did the thing the growers were betting he would not do.

He called the National Farm Workers Association and asked them to join.

The NFWA was a Mexican American farmworkers' organization co-founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. It was not yet a union, formally speaking, but a mutual-benefit association with several thousand members in the Delano area. On September 16, 1965, Mexican Independence Day, more than 1,200 NFWA members assembled at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano and voted to walk out alongside AWOC.

That is the moment most tellings of the Delano Grape Strike begin. Eight days after the AWOC walkout.

For nearly a year after the September 16 vote, the two organizations ran parallel strikes. Parallel pickets, parallel strike committees, parallel relief funds. They did not merge. But they struck the same growers, at the same vineyards, on the same mornings, and the growers could not pit one group against the other anymore. The thing that had kept wages low and unions out of the fields for three decades was gone the moment Itliong extended the invitation and Chavez accepted it.

Schenley, the boycott, and a Senator from New York

The strike widened in ways the growers had not anticipated.

In December 1965, the NFWA called a national consumer boycott of Schenley Industries, a New York liquor conglomerate that owned roughly five thousand acres of Delano table grapes as a sideline to its main business. The boycott was the grape strike's most effective weapon and Dolores Huerta built its operational spine. Boycott captains fanned out across American cities, organizing pickets at liquor stores and grocery chains, calling on unions in New York, Chicago, and Detroit to honor the line. The boycott reached into church basements and union halls and college campuses. It reached people who had never heard of Delano.

On March 16, 1966, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor held a field hearing at Delano High School auditorium. More than a thousand farmworkers packed the hall. Kern County Sheriff Leroy Galyen testified that he had arrested 44 peaceful strikers on charges of unlawful assembly. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, sitting on the subcommittee, asked Galyen to read the Constitution of the United States over the lunch break. The room laughed. The press picked it up. Kennedy had chosen a side, and the Delano strike had national political cover.

On April 6, 1966, Schenley Industries signed a recognition agreement with the NFWA. It was the first union contract in American history between a grower and a farmworker union. Chavez testified to the Senate that same month about farmworkers' exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act: "The whole system of occupational discrimination must be killed just like the discrimination against people of color is being challenged in Washington."

In August 1966, AWOC and the NFWA merged into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, UFWOC. Chavez became director. Itliong became assistant director. Two organizations, merged on paper, still working out what it meant in practice.

In early 1968, as the strike entered its fourth year, Chavez fasted for 25 days in Delano. The fast was his, personal and religious and tactically aimed at keeping a restive membership nonviolent. It was also the moment the national press fully settled on Chavez as the face of the movement, a designation that had no room on its face for a Filipino bachelor with seven fingers who had been on strike since 1930. "Si, se puede" belongs to the record, too: Dolores Huerta coined the phrase, not Chavez, during his 1972 Arizona fast. The attribution has been wrong for fifty years.

On July 29, 1970, at the Forty Acres hall on the edge of Delano, twenty-six grape growers led by Giumarra Vineyards signed UFW contracts. The strike, almost five years after the manongs walked off at dawn on September 8, 1965, was over. The Filipino workers who had called it were still there. And the thing that was about to happen to them was already in motion.

What the strike won, and who got written out

Name what the contracts actually meant. For the workers covered under them: a roughly 40 percent wage increase, the end of unilateral grower control over housing and hiring at the covered vineyards, a grievance procedure, and a consumer boycott template that labor has used as a model ever since. These are concrete things that made concrete differences in the lives of farmworkers in the covered fields.

Name also what the contracts did not reach. Farmworkers remained excluded from the National Labor Relations Act. They remain excluded today. The H-2A visa program, established in 1986 and expanded dramatically since, has put bracero-style migrant labor back in American fields under a new name, with the same structural effect on wages and organizing that the bracero program had before the manongs started striking in Coachella in May 1965.

Inside the merged union, the Filipino leadership's position eroded steadily. Itliong, as assistant director, found himself overruled, bypassed, and handed ceremonial tasks by a union whose public culture had become Mexican American in a way that did not leave room for a Filipino bachelor in his late fifties who had been on strike lines since Herbert Hoover was president. The union's rallies drove the "Viva la Causa" frame. The movement's iconography centered Chavez. The manongs, who had put everyone else in the strike, were treated as elders to be honored at the head table and then moved aside.

On January 22, 1971, Itliong wrote a letter, now held in the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, about the failure of Filipino leadership inside the UFW to move the majority toward recognizing "the unrecognized hard work of pioneering civil rights for our people." On October 15, 1971, he resigned. He did not leave quietly. He wrote that the union had stopped serving the farmworkers whose cause had built it. He went home to Delano. He organized the manongs at the Agbayani retirement village, a housing project for aging Filipino bachelors the UFW eventually built at the Forty Acres. He died February 8, 1977, of Lou Gehrig's disease, sixty-three years old, three weeks before Chavez flew to the Philippines to accept an award from Ferdinand Marcos.

Philip Vera Cruz, by 1977 the union's highest-ranking Filipino officer and its vice president, attended a meeting at which the Marcos award was discussed. He resigned. He called it "the final blow." He spent the rest of his life writing his memoir and trying to get the story of the manongs into the record before the record closed around Chavez entirely. He died June 12, 1994.

Pete Velasco, who had been in the room on September 7, 1965, when the vote was unanimous, stayed in the union longer than the others. He remained largely invisible in the histories that were written.

The record that the record didn't keep

On March 18, 2026, the New York Times published a five-year investigation by Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes documenting sexual abuse allegations against Cesar Chavez. Two women, daughters of UFW organizers, said Chavez had abused them beginning when they were twelve and thirteen years old. DNA evidence indicated at least four children fathered outside his marriage. On the same day, Dolores Huerta, who had co-founded the NFWA with Chavez in 1962 and had spent six decades as the most prominent figure of the farmworker movement after Chavez himself, published a statement on Medium. She alleged two separate sexual assaults by Chavez in the 1960s, two pregnancies carried to term, children raised by other families. Her explanation for the six decades of silence was direct: "I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for. I have kept this secret long enough."

The UFW Foundation canceled all Cesar Chavez Day activities. Los Angeles renamed its holiday Farm Workers Day.

The allegations do not erase what the strike won. They do not erase the contracts, the boycott, the march to Sacramento, the fast, the forty years of organizing that followed. They do, however, settle one question that the standard telling of the Delano Grape Strike had been leaving open for sixty years: the movement was never one man's movement. The people who had always known that were the manongs the movement's most famous face marginalized, and the woman who co-founded the union with him and then spent six decades telling no one what he had done to her.

The strike was the manongs'. The contracts were the manongs'. The credit, for most of sixty years, went somewhere else.

Glenwood Street

The standard account of the Delano Grape Strike opens with a charismatic organizer, a fast, a boycott, a celebrity senator, and eventually a contract. None of those things are invented. The problem is what the standard account starts with, because when you start with Chavez, you erase Filipino Community Hall at 1457 Glenwood Street. You erase the unanimous vote on the night of September 7. You erase the seven-fingered man who called the strike and then spent the last decade of his life watching the union he built fold him out of its own story.

Larry Itliong died in Delano in February 1977. He was sixty-three years old. He did not live to see his name on a highway or a middle school. He did not live to see the history books correct themselves.

Philip Vera Cruz lived long enough to write his memoir. He died in 1994. Pete Velasco, who had been in the room on September 7 when the vote was unanimous, stayed in the union longer than the others and remained largely absent from the accounts that followed.

Farmworkers are still excluded from the National Labor Relations Act. The H-2A visa program has put bracero-style migrant labor back in American fields under a new name. The playbook is unchanged: segregate the workforce by nationality, set one group's wage against another's, let the most vulnerable crew drag the rest toward the bottom. The manongs refused that arrangement in September 1965 and made the offer that broke it. Walk with us, because the growers are writing the same paycheck for all of us. That answer, on the Delano picket line in September 1965, is still the answer.

The people who have to give it are still the workers.

Every September 8, Filipino Americans gather at the hall on Glenwood Street. They read the names. They know whose strike it was.

Sources

The factual spine rests on three National Park Service records: the NPS histories of Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, and the NPS Delano strike narrative. Itliong's biography draws primarily from the NPS biographical record and the Larry Itliong Wikipedia entry, which cites Mabalon's Little Manila Is in the Heart (Duke University Press, 2013) and Matt Garcia's From the Jaws of Victory (University of California Press, 2012) as its scholarly anchors. The Vera Cruz material, including the union card quote and the 1977 Marcos-award resignation, comes from the NPS record and from Craig Scharlin and Lilia Villanueva's Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement (University of Washington Press, 1992/2000). The Coachella wage disparity is from Farm2People; Andy Imutan's quote on grower-engineered division is from the Zinn Education Project. The 1936 Salinas burning comes from the CSU Monterey Bay Central Coast Routes and Roots account. The March 1966 RFK-Galyen exchange is from KVPR's Central Valley Roots reconstruction and the NPS Delano High School auditorium designation. Key dates for Schenley, the 1966 merger, and the 1970 contracts are from the UFW's own chronology and History.com. Itliong's January 1971 letter is cited from the Larry Itliong Collection finding aid at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University; the piece paraphrases rather than directly quotes. The post-1970 Filipino marginalization draws on Garcia's From the Jaws of Victory as the authoritative critical account. The 2026 allegations against Chavez are sourced from the New York Times investigation by Fernandez and Hurtes (March 18, 2026), CNN's institutional-response reporting, PBS NewsHour's coverage of Huerta's statement, and Huerta's own Medium statement (March 18, 2026); Huerta's silence-breaking quote is verbatim from PBS NewsHour. The full source list is in the frontmatter above.