Californians this week are honoring the influential Filipino American labor rights leader Larry Itliong, whose legacy as a father of West Coast labor organizing continues amid recent strikes in the auto, entertainment, hotel and health care industries.
Several celebrations across California — from a solidarity march in Poplar on Saturday to a new exhibit at the Filipino American National History Society Museum in Stockton — are paying tribute to Itliong, who played a major role in founding the United Farm Workers union and orchestrated one of the most influential strikes in the state’s history.
The events coincide with California’s Larry Itliong Day on Oct. 25 — the late activist’s birthday — which was first designated by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015. But as the Filipino American community and others look back on the organizer’s achievements, many say that Itliong’s work remains relevant as ever given a nationwide labor reckoning that has been felt particularly in California.
“He employed strategies and deployed strategies that a lot of people still use today,” said James Zarsadiaz, an associate professor of history at the University of San Francisco and director of its Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program.
Itliong, who was born in the Philippines in 1913 and immigrated to the West Coast when he was 15, rose to prominence among “manongs,” or the early generation of Filipino immigrant men who were often relegated to agricultural labor. While Itliong began his organizing efforts shortly after he arrived in America, participating in walkouts and fighting for fair labor contracts, he was best known for the Delano grape strike of 1965. Itliong, along with fellow labor organizers Philip Vera Cruz, Pete Velasco and Andy Imutan, led thousands of Filipino farmworkers in a strike against Coachella Valley grape growers, demanding a salary of $1.40 an hour and 25 cents per box, up from an average of 90 cents an hour and 10 cents per basket that they…
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