Larry Itliong: The Filipino Leader Who Started the Grape Strike — and Why You Don't Know His Name
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Post 1 · Larry Itliong: The Filipino Leader Who Started the Grape Strike — and Why You Don't Know His Name
On September 8, 1965, 2,000 mostly Filipino farmworkers walked off the grape fields of Delano, California. Their leader was a Filipino American named Larry Itliong. For decades, that part of the story was left out.
Ask most Americans who led the Delano Grape Strike — the labor uprising that became one of the most important moments in American civil rights history — and they will say Cesar Chavez. His name is on schools, streets, and a federal holiday. His face has appeared on postage stamps and murals from California to New York. The story of the farmworker movement, as most people learned it, is his story.
That story is incomplete.
The Delano Grape Strike did not begin with Cesar Chavez. It began with Filipino farm workers
, on September 8, 1965, when a Filipino American labor organizer named Larry Dulay Itliong led 2,000 Filipino farmworkers off the grape fields. Itliong was 55 years old. He had been organizing Filipino agricultural workers for more than three decades. He had nine fingers — he lost part of one in a fish cannery in Alaska as a young man. He was short, unassuming, and, by every account, completely relentless.
He was also, until recently, almost entirely absent from the history books.
This is his story — and the story of why it was erased, and what it means to bring it back.
Wear the Legacy
The Delano Manongs Collection honors Larry Itliong and the Filipino farmworkers who changed American labor history. Every piece carries their story forward.
Who Was Larry Itliong?
Larry Dulay Itliong was born on October 25, 1913, in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, in the northern Philippines. He was the son of a farmer, and he grew up in a country that had been colonized by Spain for over 300 years and then seized by the United States following the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Philippines was, in every legal and practical sense, an American territory — which meant Filipinos were neither citizens nor fully foreign. They existed in a legal limbo that would shape everything about their lives in America.
Itliong arrived in the United States in 1929, at the age of 15. He was part of a wave of young Filipino men — called Manongs, an Ilocano term of respect for older men — who came to work in the fields, canneries, and kitchens of the American West. They picked asparagus in Stockton, salmon in Alaska, lettuce in the Salinas Valley, and grapes in the San Joaquin Valley. They worked brutal hours for poverty wages. They were barred from owning land in California, prohibited from marrying white women under anti-miscegenation laws, and regularly targeted by anti-Filipino riots that swept through agricultural towns in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
They were indispensable to California's agricultural economy — and invisible in its public life.
Who Were the Manongs?
The Manongs were the first large wave of Filipino immigrants to the continental United States, arriving primarily between 1906 and 1934. Most came from the Ilocos region of northern Luzon. They were young, mostly male, and recruited by labor contractors to fill the backbreaking agricultural and cannery work that white workers refused.
By 1930, there were over 30,000 Filipinos in California alone. They faced systematic racism, legal exclusion, and violence — yet they built communities, organized unions, and laid the foundation for Filipino American life in the United States. The term "Manong" — an Ilocano honorific for elder brother or respected man — became the name for their entire generation.
From almost the moment he arrived, Itliong was organizing. By his early twenties, he was already involved in labor actions in Washington State and Alaska. He understood something that many labor leaders of his era were slow to grasp: that Filipino, Mexican, Japanese, and other agricultural workers shared the same exploiters, the same conditions, and the same need — and that their only power lay in solidarity across ethnic lines.
Over the following three decades, Itliong organized workers up and down the West Coast. He fought for the right to overtime pay, for safe housing, for the basic dignity of a living wage. He was arrested, blacklisted, and threatened. He kept organizing.
AWOC: The Union That Filipino Workers Built
By the early 1960s, Itliong was the director of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) — a union backed by the AFL-CIO that was trying to organize the largely non-union agricultural workforce of California's Central Valley. AWOC's membership was predominantly Filipino. It was one of the few unions in American history built primarily around a non-white immigrant workforce, and it operated in one of the most hostile labor environments in the country.
California's agricultural industry had resisted unionization for generations. Growers wielded enormous political power, used labor contractors to pit ethnic groups against each other, and relied on a constant supply of desperate workers to keep wages rock bottom. The Bracero Program — a guest worker system that brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers to the U.S. under contracts that gave them almost no rights — had been used for years to undercut any attempt at organizing.
When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, something shifted. For the first time in decades, there was no ready supply of captive foreign labor to break a strike. The growers were, briefly, vulnerable.
Itliong saw the window. He moved.
"If we don't strike now, we will never have another chance like this."
— Larry Itliong, to Filipino farmworkers in Delano, September 1965
September 8, 1965: The Strike Begins
On September 8, 1965, at Filipino Hall in Delano — a community gathering place for the Manong generation — Larry Itliong called a meeting of AWOC's Filipino grape workers. The growers had cut wages. Itliong presented the situation plainly: they could accept the cut, or they could walk out.
They voted to strike. That night, the walkout began.
More than 2,000 Filipino farmworkers left the grape fields. They picketed. They held the line. They understood, as Itliong had made clear, that a strike only works if it holds — and that holding it would require not just the Filipinos of AWOC, but the Mexican workers too.
Eight days later, on September 16 — deliberately chosen because it was Mexican Independence Day — Itliong approached Cesar Chavez and his organization, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), and asked them to join. Chavez initially hesitated. The NFWA was newer, less organized, and Chavez felt they weren't ready for a prolonged fight. But the moral weight of the moment — and Itliong's persistence — proved decisive. On September 16, 1965, the NFWA voted to join the strike.
The Delano Grape Strike had formally begun. It would last five years.
The Alliance With Cesar Chavez — and What It Cost Itliong
The partnership between Itliong's AWOC and Chavez's NFWA was, by any measure, one of the most significant interethnic labor alliances in American history. In 1966, the two organizations formally merged to create the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chavez became president. Itliong became assistant director.
It was the right organizational move. Chavez was a gifted strategist and communicator who understood how to build national coalitions, attract media attention, and translate the farmworkers' struggle into a moral cause that resonated with the American public. His partnership with Robert Kennedy, his fasts, his marches — all of it made the UFW a nationally recognized movement rather than a regional labor dispute.
But something was lost in the merger — and Itliong knew it.
As the UFW grew, its public face became overwhelmingly Chicano. The Filipino workers who had started the strike — the Manongs who had been organizing since the 1930s — were increasingly marginalized within the organization they had helped build. Decisions were made without them. Their specific needs as an aging, largely male, immigrant workforce were not always prioritized. The cultural and historical differences between Filipino and Mexican farmworkers were sometimes papered over rather than honored.
In 1971, Larry Itliong resigned from the UFW. He cited the marginalization of Filipino workers within the organization. He was 58 years old, in declining health, and had given his life to the labor movement — and he left feeling that the community he had led into the strike was being left behind in its aftermath.
He died on February 8, 1977, at the age of 63. He was largely unknown outside the Filipino American community.
"We did not fight and sacrifice so that our people would be forgotten. We fought so that all workers — Filipino, Mexican, every one — could stand with dignity."
— Larry Itliong
Honor the Manongs
The Manong generation built this country's agricultural industry and fought for the rights every farmworker has today. The Delano Manongs Collection is our tribute to their legacy.
Why You Don't Know His Name
The erasure of Larry Itliong from the story of the Delano Grape Strike was not a single decision. It was the accumulation of a hundred small choices — by journalists, by historians, by the UFW itself — that consistently centered the Mexican American narrative and left the Filipino American one at the margins.
Some of this was structural. Cesar Chavez was charismatic, media-savvy, and spoke English fluently to journalists who didn't know the Ilocano language or the Manong culture. He was also, frankly, more legible to white American audiences who were more familiar with Mexican American civil rights struggles. The ¡Sí Se Puede! slogan, the image of la causa, the connection to the broader Chicano movement — all of it fit neatly into a narrative arc that American media could follow.
Itliong didn't fit that arc. He was Filipino — a demographic that most Americans couldn't place geographically, let alone historically. He was older, less polished in front of cameras, and represented a community that was itself poorly understood. Filipino American history had no equivalent mainstream visibility to the Chicano movement's cultural presence.
And when the UFW took control of the strike's narrative, it told the story it needed to tell — which was, increasingly, a story about Cesar Chavez.
The result was decades of textbooks, documentaries, and curricula that mentioned Chavez on nearly every page and Itliong in a footnote — or not at all.
How Deeply Was Itliong Erased?
For decades, California's K-12 curriculum made almost no mention of Larry Itliong. His name did not appear in major textbooks covering the farmworker movement. The 2008 film Cesar Chavez featured him as a minor character. The National Mall's memorial to Chavez makes no mention of the Filipino workers who started the strike.
It was not until 2016 that California officially added Larry Itliong to its recommended K-12 history curriculum — more than 50 years after the strike he started. In 2021, the biographical film The Delano Manongs brought his story to a wider audience. The reclamation is still in progress.
The Movement to Restore Larry Itliong's Legacy
The restoration of Larry Itliong's place in history has been driven almost entirely by the Filipino American community — by historians, educators, activists, and ordinary people who grew up never hearing his name and decided that had to change.
1992
Filipino American History Month is established by the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), creating an annual framework for telling stories like Itliong's.
2000s
Filipino American scholars and community organizations begin sustained campaigns to include Itliong in labor history curricula. Dawn Mabalon, historian and cofounder of the Little Manila Foundation, is among the leading voices documenting Manong history.
2009
The U.S. Congress officially recognizes October as Filipino American History Month — providing a national platform for stories that had been kept at the margins.
2011
October 25 — Itliong's birthday — is declared Larry Itliong Day in California. A small but significant step toward formal recognition.
2016
California adds Larry Itliong to its recommended K-12 history curriculum — the single most significant step in mainstream restoration of his legacy. For the first time, California schoolchildren would learn his name alongside Cesar Chavez's.
2016
A California Historical Marker is dedicated in Delano — the first monument focused solely on Itliong's contribution to the farmworker movement.
2018
Schools, parks, and streets begin to be named after Larry Itliong across California and Nevada. Filipino American communities lead the campaigns to put his name on public spaces.
2021
The documentary The Delano Manongs is released, bringing Itliong's story — and those of the farmworkers around him — to a national audience for the first time.
Today
Larry Itliong's name is still not as widely known as it deserves to be. But every year, in October, more Filipino Americans learn it for the first time — and decide to carry it forward.
Why This Story Matters Now
The history of Larry Itliong is not just a Filipino American story. It is a story about whose contributions to American life get remembered — and whose get erased.
Filipino Americans are the second-largest Asian American group in the United States. They have been in this country for over 400 years. They built the shrimping industry in Louisiana, worked the salmon canneries in Alaska, farmed the fields of California, and nursed the sick in hospitals across every state. They fought in World War II and were denied benefits for it. They organized, struck, marched, and were beaten — and then were left out of the story.
This is not ancient history. The pattern of Filipino American contribution followed by Filipino American erasure is one that repeats across generations. Understanding Larry Itliong's story is one way to interrupt that pattern — to say, clearly and out loud, that this community was here, and what it did mattered, and its name deserves to be known.
For the Filipino diaspora — especially those of us who grew up in the United States without this history taught in school — learning about Larry Itliong can feel like something shifting. Like a piece of your own story suddenly clicking into place. Like realizing that the ground you stand on was shaped, in part, by someone who looked like you and who most people have never heard of.
That is why we tell this story. That is why we wear it.
Know Your Roots. Wear Them Out Loud.
At UGAT — meaning "roots" — every design honors the Filipino Americans who shaped this country. The Delano Manongs Collection is our tribute to Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Pete Velasco, and every Manong who stood on the picket line.
His Name Was Larry Itliong
On September 8, 1965, a 55-year-old Filipino man with nine fingers called his people together in a hall in Delano, California, and asked them to risk everything for their dignity. They said yes. They walked out into the fields — and into history.
His name was Larry Dulay Itliong. He started the Grape Strike. He built the alliance that became the UFW. He gave 40 years of his life to American labor. He died largely unknown.
Now you know his name. Say it. Share it. Wear it.
💬 Join the Conversation
Did you learn about Larry Itliong in school? When did you first hear his name — and what did it mean to you? Share your story in the comments. Every time someone learns his name, the erasure shrinks a little more.
📖 Part of the FAHM Series: "Mga Bayani ng Kasaysayan"
This post is part of our Filipino American History Month series exploring the figures and moments that shaped the Filipino American story.Also read:
Know Your Roots
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