Dolores Huerta's Death, and the Filipino Farmworkers Who Struck First
Dolores Huerta died on October 28 at 96, and the tributes have been pouring in ever since — for good reason. She spent six decades organizing farmworkers, co-founded the United Farm Workers, coined the labor movement's defining slogan, “¡Sí se puede!,” and kept working well into her nineties. Nearly every obituary calls her one of the two people who built the modern farmworker movement, alongside César Chávez. That's true. It's also only half the story.
The movement that made Huerta famous didn't start with her union, and it didn't start with Chávez's either. On September 8, 1965, more than 1,500 Filipino farmworkers walked off the grape fields around Delano, California, refusing to pick another vine until their wages matched what growers had just promised — and failed to pay — in nearby Coachella. They were organized under the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong, a labor organizer born in Pangasinan who'd spent three decades working canneries, farms, and docks up and down the West Coast before this strike made his name.
A week later, on September 16, Chávez's National Farmworkers Association voted to join them. It wasn't a given. Itliong had to convince a hesitant Chávez that the strike needed Mexican workers too, because growers could too easily bring in replacement labor if only one group walked out. Once both unions struck together, the Delano grape strike became the five-year fight that reshaped American agricultural labor: boycotts that spread to grocery stores nationwide, a 300-mile march to Sacramento, and finally, in 1970, the first union contracts in the history of California agriculture.
In 1966, Itliong's AWOC and Chávez's NFWA formally merged into the United Farm Workers. Chávez became director, Itliong became assistant director, and Huerta — who had already proven herself as the union's chief negotiator and its most relentless organizer — became one of its founding leaders. She spent the following decades building the UFW's political power, lobbying for the landmark California laws that gave farmworkers collective bargaining rights for the first time in the country's history.
What gets left out of most of that story is what happened to the people who started it. Philip Vera Cruz, another AWOC leader, served as the UFW's second vice president for over a decade, helping shape the union through some of its most consequential years, before resigning in 1977 over disagreements about its direction. Itliong himself had already stepped down in 1971. The two men helped build the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village in Delano in 1974, housing for the aging Filipino manongs — many of them lifelong bachelors, barred for decades by law from bringing wives from the Philippines or marrying outside their race — who had no family to grow old with. Today, Chávez has a federal holiday in California. Itliong has a single day named for him, and most Americans have never heard of him at all.
None of this diminishes what Huerta built or what her death means for the labor movement. It's a reason to tell the full story, not a smaller one. Honoring her properly means honoring the fact that Filipino workers struck first, that a Filipino organizer talked Chávez into the fight, and that the union Huerta spent her life building would not exist in the form it did without them. Say her name. Say theirs too — Itliong, Vera Cruz, Ben Gines, and the more than 1,500 manongs who walked out of Delano's fields eleven days before anyone else did.
That's the history behind our Delano Manongs design — not a slogan, but a record, so the names don't get written out again.
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