September 7, 2026
Seven Fingers on Glenwood Street
On September 7, 1965, Larry Itliong called a vote at Filipino Community Hall in Delano. He had been striking since he was a teenager: lettuce in Washington, salmon canneries in Alaska, asparagus in California. The vote was unanimous, and the next morning roughly a thousand Filipino farmworkers walked out. The long-form drops Tuesday. This companion tells you whose room it was.
The room was at 1457 Glenwood Street in Delano, California. Filipino Community Hall. The date was September 7, 1965, and the vote was unanimous.
The man who called it was Larry Itliong, and if you know the name of the Delano Grape Strike at all, it is probably not his.
Itliong left the Philippines at 15, in 1929, and arrived in the United States at the beginning of the Great Depression. His first strike was a lettuce action in the fields near Monroe, Washington, in 1930. He was 16. That same year he helped found the Alaska Cannery Workers Union. Over the following three decades he worked the canneries, the asparagus fields, the strawberry farms, and the labor camps of the Pacific Coast, organizing wherever he went. By 1956 he had founded the Filipino Farm Labor Union in Stockton. By 1959 the AFL-CIO had asked him to organize for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, the AWOC.
In the camps he worked in several Filipino languages, in Spanish, and in enough Cantonese and Japanese to move through crews of cannery workers who shared none of the others.
He also, at some point in those cannery years, lost three fingers in an accident. The nickname was Seven Fingers.
In the spring of 1965, AWOC struck grape growers in Coachella Valley. The grievance was simple: growers were paying Filipino workers $1.25 an hour while paying braceros, under the expiring guest-worker program, $1.40. The growers conceded the wage. They signed nothing. When harvest season moved north to Delano and the same growers tried the same math, Itliong had seen enough.
On September 7, sitting in Filipino Community Hall with Philip Vera Cruz, Pete Velasco, Andy Imutan, Ben Gines, and the rest of the Delano AWOC local, Itliong called the vote. Vera Cruz later said that joining AWOC had been "probably the most important and expensive $2 I ever spent in my life." The vote that night was unanimous.
The next morning, roughly a thousand Filipino farmworkers walked out of the Delano-area vineyards. Within the week, more than 2,000 were on strike. The growers' first move was to evict the workers from company-owned labor camps. Many slept in their cars. Many slept at Filipino Hall.
Growers also tried to use the divide between Filipino and Mexican workers as a weapon. Andy Imutan put it plainly: "There was no unity between the Mexicans and the Filipinos. The growers were very successful in dividing us and creating conflict." Within two weeks, the National Farm Workers Association voted to join the strike. That joint action became what history remembers. The name that attached to it, in most of the accounts that followed, was not Itliong's.
He resigned from the merged union in October 1971, citing the failure to develop Filipino leadership within the organization. He died in Delano on February 8, 1977, at 63, of Lou Gehrig's disease.
The vote on September 7 was unanimous. That is where the strike started, in a room on Glenwood Street, called by a man who had been fighting since he was 16.
The long-form drops Tuesday, September 8. Itliong's name is in it.
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