Larry, Dolores, César & The Power of a Multiracial Movement
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: El Malcriado, Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain / Wikimedia Commons, Harold Filan / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Are We Still Living in a Civil Rights Era?
This week’s focus: Historical and Racial Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history, race, and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1400 words, an estimated 5-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re exploring the Civil Rights Movement — specifically asking, as we did in last week’s newsletter: Are We Still in a Civil Rights Era?
Our goal isn’t just to revisit familiar names and events, but to expand our understanding of the movement’s timeline, legacy, and how engaging with this history can deepen our civic awareness, and maybe even reshape what it means to be patriotic.
Last week, in Reconstruction as a Mirror for Today, we explored the period after the Civil War, when many Black Americans, despite facing violence and intimidation, sought and gained political power. We considered the idea that Reconstruction could be seen as a foundation for the later Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s — or perhaps as part of a Long Civil Rights Movement that spans centuries, including our lives today.
This week, we’re turning to multiracial alliances — and how they’ve always been a part of U.S. history.
When we think of the Civil Rights Movement, many often picture figures like Dr. King or marches that took place in the South.
But in the agricultural fields of California, another movement was taking root — one led by Filipino and Mexican farmworkers demanding not just fair wages, but dignity, racial justice, and basic human rights.
The United Farm Workers (UFW) — an organization born of multiracial solidarity primarily between Mexican American, or Chicano/a and Filipino/a American workers — became a powerful force in the broader campaign for Civil Rights. This movement reminds us that agency and advocacy can grow across time and place, across racial and cultural lines, challenging the more common idea that Civil Rights was limited to a short decade, or a simplified Black-White paradigm.
Keep reading as we outline facts you likely weren’t taught about this essential part of history, including the names of the people who cultivated a national movement, literally from the ground up.
The First Strike: A Close-Up of Larry Itliong
Larry Itliong participated in his first strike when he was just 15 years old. In 1930, in the lettuce fields of Washington state, he and nearly 1,500 fellow workers walked off the job, demanding fair wages and safer working conditions. This early act of defiance marked the beginning of a lifelong commitment to labor rights.
Born in the Philippines in 1913, Itliong immigrated to the United States as a young teenager. He dreamed of continuing his education, but instead found himself in a country where racial discrimination shaped so many aspects of his life — socially, economically, and legally.
As described by the National Park Service: “Although Filipinos were technically American nationals, they faced legal and social discrimination. Anti-miscegenation laws prevented Filipinos (who were overwhelmingly young men) from marrying white women. Police raided Filipino dancehalls and violent mobs targeted Filipino communities. The only work available to most Filipinos was low-paid agricultural, cannery, and domestic work. Itliong’s experience of racism and economic injustice gave rise to a lifetime of activism.”
Over the following decades, Itliong continued organizing mostly Filipino farmworkers along the west coast — in the grape and beet fields of California, the asparagus and lettuce harvests of Washington, and the salmon canneries of Alaska. It was in one of those canning factories where Itliong would suffer an accident that cost him three of his fingers. Despite this injury, he kept working, and kept organizing.
Racial discrimination was an unjust constant.
Farmworkers endured physically demanding, exploitative working conditions, and were excluded from federal minimum wage protections.
Filipino farmworkers, including Itliong, were forced to live in racially segregated labor camps, excluded from most mainstream labor unions.
Even though the Philippines was a U.S. colony at the time (from 1898-1946), Filipinos were denied U.S. citizenship, barred from owning land, and targeted by exclusionary immigration laws, such as the Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934), which reclassified Filipinos as “aliens,” and limited immigration from the Philippines to just 50 people per year.
So, by the time the Delano Grape Strike ignited in the 1960s, Larry Itliong wasn’t just ready, he had been preparing for this moment his entire adult life.
Enter Dolores Huerta & César Chávez
While Larry Itliong spent decades organizing mostly Filipino workers along the West Coast, Dolores Huerta had been mobilizing Mexican American communities across California’s Central Valley.
A former school teacher, Huerta saw firsthand how poverty and racism shaped her students' families. In 1962, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chávez, a Mexican American, or Chicano, labor leader. They had known each other since the 1950s through their grassroots efforts to combat racial discrimination and promote civic engagement and voter registration.
Chávez and Huerta eventually joined the grape strike initiated by Itliong in 1965, bridging together thousands of farmworkers and forming the United Farm Workers in 1966.
They demanded sustainable wages — since farmworkers were getting paid below federal minimum wage — and safer, more humane working conditions. Farmworkers had to endure toxic pesticides, 10-12 hour days in extreme heat often exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and lack of access to clean water, toilets, or handwashing stations. Housing was also substandard.
So when Itliong, Huerta, Chávez and thousands of others struck, establishing the Delano Grape Strike from 1965-1970, it wasn't just about wages — it was about survival, health, and basic human rights. They built what NPR called “the most significant campaign in modern labor history.”
Guts, Dignity, & The Echo of Influence
This wasn’t the first multiracial alliance in U.S. history — it wasn’t even the first time different racial groups struck together on agricultural fields.
For example, historian Elizabeth E. Sine notes that the 1930 lettuce strike in Imperial Valley, California included Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Punjabi, Black American, Puerto Rican, and White farmworkers, and that multiracial alliances have been “anathema to the divide-and-conquer leaders of agribusiness.”
The Delano Grape Strike created a well-known united front among a class of workers who had long been exploited and historically divided. It launched a nationwide consumer boycott of grapes — engaging millions of U.S. Americans who refused to buy the crop.
What arguably made this movement so powerful was its foundation in nonviolence — a strategy successfully utilized by leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. This idea was brought to the U.S. by organizers like Bayard Rustin, who studied the nonviolent civil disobedience methods of global icon Mahatma Gandhi. We echo each other: seeds of nonviolence had been planted generations before and would continue to be wielded as a powerful tool for humane change.
Successful slogans helped galvanize support, such as Huerta’s famous line, “¡Sí se puede!.,” or “Yes, we can!” — later adopted by President Barack Obama. The media was also leveraged, as it had been done to document protests and violence in the South, with Chávez leading a nearly 300-mile march from Delano, California to the state capital.
As a result of such strategies, the UFW fortified itself as a powerful labor union. In 1970, over two dozen union contracts were signed with grape growers, and in 1975, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed — forging farmworker’s rights to organize, a “first in U.S. history.”
While the movement did not erase all inequalities of the agricultural or larger society, learning about the UFW and the people behind it highlights several essential lessons.
Multiracial alliances have been vital throughout history, including what we call Civil Rights. Division is not a given, we can work across lines of race, ethnicity, culture, and language.
Movements and people are often inspired by those who came before them. Learning history may not only be interesting, it can be inspiring and even life-changing as it provides a blueprint for action, for our own lives — especially if we too feel like we are living in a time or place marked by social and legal inequality. Each generation can draw strength from the past, and leave an imprint for the future.
Representation is more than symbolic, it can nourish our sense of self. Filipino American Roger Gadiano, who gives tours in Delano, California, including where Larry Itliong first declared the grape strike in September 1965, reflects on Itliong’s legacy: "We're a part of a big history, which is bold. We took a step that no one would take… He gave our people some dignity. He gave his guts.”
Next week, we’ll continue exploring Civil Rights, including the “era of firsts” and how to engage young people in meaningful conversations about justice, history, and change.
Stay tuned!
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