Reclaiming Farmworkers History

I’ve started work on a campaign at PWC that I am proud to be part of. It is focused on the effort to reclaim and uplift the true history of the American farmworkers movement, particularly the Filipino leadership and AAPI coalition that was systematically erased from the record.

Most Americans associate the 1965 Delano Grape Strike with Cesar Chavez. In truth it wasn’t him that started it. The strike was started on September 8, 1965 by Filipino farmworkers lef by Larry Itliong through the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association joined a week later. The two organizations eventually merged to form the United Farm Workers. Over the decades, Chavez became the public face of the movement while Itliong and the Filipino manongs who started it were pushed to the margins of the story.

The recent New York Times reporting, "Power and Abuse in the United Farm Workers," on abuses within the UFW under Chavez's later leadership has forced a broader public reckoning. Johnny Itliong, Larry's son, has been working for years to correct the historical record. What was a quiet Filipino labor history effort is now part of a larger conversation about who the American labor movement remembers, and who it forgets.

One central piece of the campaign is a proposal to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day, a shift from honoring a single figure to honoring the collective movement of Filipino, Chicano, and Latino workers who built it together.

My role is specifically to re-tell the story through the newsletter and site: larryitliongforum.org and document the campaign's progress in a video series. I’ll be covering the leaders of this mission, our allies, the hurdles of getting street, park and school names changed.

As a Filipino-Swiss immigrant to the US, telling the entire story of this movement matters a lot for me as I know the power of having a history has on a person.

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