Philip Vera Cruz: The Other Forgotten Farmworker Who Helped Build the UFW

2 days ago
15 min read

UGAT CLOTHING · HISTORY · Filipino American History Month Series

Post 10 · Philip Vera Cruz: The Other Forgotten Farmworker Who Helped Build the UFW

You may have heard of Larry Itliong. But there was another Filipino leader standing at his side on September 8, 1965 — a man named Philip Vera Cruz who served as the United Farm Workers' second vice president for twelve years, built the retirement village that housed aging Manongs with nowhere else to go, and then resigned when Cesar Chavez chose a dictator's invitation over the dignity of Filipino workers. He is even less known than Itliong. His story completes the picture — and shows that what happened to the Filipino farmworkers wasn't accidental.

There is a school in the New Haven Unified School District in California — renamed in 2013 — called Itliong-Vera Cruz Middle School. It is the first school in the United States named after Filipino Americans. The two names on that building belong to the two Filipino leaders who made the Delano Grape Strike possible: Larry Itliong, who called the vote on September 8, 1965, and Philip Vera Cruz, who was in that room, who cast that vote, and who spent the next twelve years holding the United Farm Workers to the multiracial, internationalist vision that had made the movement possible in the first place.

Most people who know the Delano story know Itliong's name now. Fewer know Vera Cruz's. And almost no one knows the specific, devastating moment that ended his time in the UFW — and what it revealed about who the movement had become.

This is his story.

From Ilocos Sur to a Box Factory in Seattle: Philip Vera Cruz's Journey to California

Philip Villamin Vera Cruz was born on December 25, 1904, in Saoang, San Juan, Ilocos Sur — a province in the northern Philippines whose men would supply a disproportionate share of the Manong generation that came to America in the 1920s and 1930s. His father was ill. The family was poor. His siblings needed education. And like hundreds of thousands of young Filipino men of his generation, he made a calculation that a lot of first sons in desperate circumstances make: he would go where the wages were, work as hard as he needed to work, and send money home.

He arrived in the United States in 1926, at age 21. He was not, at this point, a labor organizer or a civil rights figure. He was a young man trying to survive and to support people who depended on him. What followed was two decades of itinerant labor that reads almost like a map of Filipino American working life in that era.

Philip Vera Cruz — A Life in Labor Before Delano

🎣 Alaska: Salmon canneries — the same Alaskero circuit that defined Filipino working life in the Pacific Northwest (see our Alaskeros post)

📦 Seattle: Box factory

🍽 Spokane: Busboy and restaurant worker

🌾 North Dakota: Beet harvester

🏨 Minneapolis: Hotel worker

📚 Spokane, briefly: Student at Gonzaga University — dream of education repeatedly deferred by financial necessity

🍇 San Joaquin Valley, California: Agricultural laborer — grapes, lettuce, asparagus — working ten-hour days for roughly 70 cents an hour in labor camps with no healthcare, no collective bargaining rights, and no protections under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which explicitly excluded farmworkers

⚔️ World War II: Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, stationed at San Luis Obispo, discharged due to age (he was nearly 40), assigned to farm labor to support wartime food production

Throughout all of this — the canneries, the box factory, the beet fields, the hotel kitchens — Vera Cruz was developing a political consciousness that he would later describe as the product of accumulated experience rather than any single revelation. He saw how workers were pitted against each other. He saw how ethnic divisions were used to keep wages low and solidarity impossible. He saw how the legal system excluded the people who needed it most. And by the time he settled permanently in California's San Joaquin Valley after the war, he was ready to do something about it.

Delano Manongs Collection

Philip Vera Cruz spent fifty years as a farmworker, busboy, cannery worker, and box factory hand before he became a union vice president. The Delano Manongs Collection honors every Filipino in that generation who worked their way into history.

Shop Delano Manongs →

Delano Manongs Hoodie

Delano Manongs Tee

Delano Manongs Crewneck

Damay: The Mutual Aid System That Made Organizing Possible

Before the formal union structures, before the strike votes and the picket lines, Filipino farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley had built something remarkable from almost nothing. They called it damay.

Damay is a Filipino concept of communal care — of pooling what you have so that no one in the community faces crisis alone. In practical terms, it meant that Filipino workers contributed to a common fund from their wages, which was used to cover rent, medical emergencies, and basic needs for any member who needed it. In a world where farmworkers had no union protections, no healthcare, and no government safety net, damay was survival infrastructure.

Philip Vera Cruz understood that damay was also organizing infrastructure. The informal networks it created — the trust, the obligation, the habit of collective action — were the foundation on which a labor union could be built. He spent years in the 1950s cultivating those networks, serving as president of the Delano local of the National Farm Laborers Union (affiliated with the AFL-CIO), building relationships across ethnic lines — Filipino, Mexican, Black — and developing the "strong labor consciousness," as he later called it, that the Manong generation had accumulated through decades of exploitation and resistance.

By 1959, when the AFL-CIO established the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), Vera Cruz was positioned to be one of its most effective organizers in Delano. He joined AWOC alongside Larry Itliong, Benjamin Gines, and Pete Velasco. Together, they built the predominantly Filipino union that would make September 8, 1965 possible.

September 8, 1965: The Room Where It Happened

Philip Vera Cruz was in Filipino Hall at 1457 Glenwood Street in Delano on the evening of September 8, 1965 — the same night that Larry Itliong called the mass meeting of AWOC's Filipino members. He described it later in his own words, with characteristic precision and emotional restraint:

"On September 8, 1965, at the Filipino Hall at 1457 Glenwood St. in Delano, the Filipino members of AWOC held a mass meeting to discuss and decide whether to strike or to accept the reduced wages proposed by the growers. The decision was 'to strike' and it became one of the most significant and famous decisions ever made in the entire history of the farmworkers struggles in California. It was like an incendiary bomb, exploding out the strike message to the workers in the vineyards... It was this strike that eventually made the UFW, the farmworkers movement, and Cesar Chavez famous worldwide."

— Philip Vera Cruz, from his oral memoir, recorded 1976

Notice what he did not say in that description: his own name. He described the decision, the context, the historical significance — and placed himself offstage. That quality of self-effacement, of caring more about the movement than about personal credit, is one of the things that made Vera Cruz both essential to the farmworker cause and largely invisible to the history that followed it.

The 1,500 Filipino farmworkers who walked out of the grape fields on September 8 made the Delano Grape Strike possible. The strike that they began, and that Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association joined eight days later, lasted five years, became a national movement, and ended in historic union contracts signed on July 29, 1970 — raising wages from $1.10 to $1.80 an hour and securing collective bargaining rights for 10,000 farmworkers for the first time in California's history.

In the new union that emerged from the merger of AWOC and NFWA — the United Farm Workers (UFW), officially launched in 1966 — Philip Vera Cruz became the organization's second vice president in 1971. He was 67 years old. He was the highest-ranking Filipino American in the UFW's history.

Two Filipino Leaders, Side by Side

The story of the Filipino farmworker movement cannot be told with one name. It requires at least two. Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz were contemporaries, collaborators, and friends — and their complementary roles illuminate different aspects of what the Manong generation contributed.

Larry Itliong (1913–1977)

Born in Pangasinan. Arrived in the U.S. at 15. Organized workers from the asparagus fields of Stockton to the salmon canneries of Alaska. Directed AWOC. Called the September 8 vote. Resigned from UFW in 1971, citing marginalization of Filipino workers. Died at 63.

Philip Vera Cruz (1904–1994)

Born in Ilocos Sur. Arrived in the U.S. at 21. Worked across the country for two decades before settling in Delano. Built damay networks among aging Manongs. Voted to strike September 8. Served as UFW vice president for 12 years. Built Agbayani Village. Resigned in 1977 over Chavez's visit to Marcos. Died at 89.

Itliong was the fire — the organizer who saw windows and moved. Vera Cruz was the foundation — the patient builder who stayed, held the line, and ensured the aging Filipino farmworkers who had built the union were not simply discarded when the movement became more Mexican than Filipino.

What they shared was a commitment that outlasted the gratitude of the institution they had built. Both resigned from the UFW eventually. Both cited the same pattern of erasure. And the fact that both of them are now having to be rediscovered — that their names require active campaigns to add to school curricula and history books — is not a coincidence. It is the same pattern, repeated.

Agbayani Village: A Home for the Men History Left Behind

Among Philip Vera Cruz's most tangible legacies is something that stood at the intersection of his labor organizing and his deep care for the specific, urgent needs of the Manong generation: the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village in Delano, California.

The Manongs who had built the California agricultural industry in the 1920s and 1930s were, by the 1970s, old men. Most had come as single young men. Many had never married — anti-miscegenation laws had barred them from marrying white women, and the ratio of Filipino men to Filipino women in California had been roughly forty to one. They had no pensions, no social security substantial enough to live on, no families nearby to care for them. Many were simply aging out of the labor force with nowhere to go.

The retirement village was named after Paulo Agbayani — a Filipino farmworker who died of a heart attack while picketing on the front lines of the grape strike in 1967. His death on the picket line at an advanced age was, in Vera Cruz's view, a symbol of everything the union owed these men: not just a strike victory, but a place to rest when the fighting was over.

Vera Cruz chaired the committee that planned and built Agbayani Village. Construction began in 1973, with hundreds of volunteers and activists from across California coming to build it. It opened in June 1974. The last Manong to live there — Fred Abad — passed away in 1997. The village stands today as one of the few physical monuments in the United States to the Filipino farmworker generation.

"The movement must go beyond its leaders."

— Philip Vera Cruz, on the importance of collective action over individual heroism

1977: The Final Blow — and Why Vera Cruz Had to Leave

For twelve years, Philip Vera Cruz had stayed in the UFW even as the concerns of Filipino farmworkers were steadily marginalized. The new hiring hall system disadvantaged the Filipino workers who had built up seniority in AWOC. The cultural face of the movement became more exclusively Chicano — Vera Cruz later described hearing Mexican members chant "Viva la Raza" in ways that made Filipino workers feel excluded from the very union they had helped found. One by one, the veteran Filipino organizers left. Eventually, only Vera Cruz and Pete Velasco remained in the UFW leadership.

He stayed because he believed in the cause. He believed that the farmworker movement had to be multiracial, internationalist, and committed to the most marginalized workers — and he was willing to be uncomfortable, to be in the minority, to be outvoted, as long as that vision was alive somewhere in the institution.

In the summer of 1977, Ferdinand Marcos — the dictator of the Philippines, who had declared martial law in 1972, who had suspended civil rights, banned strikes, arrested labor leaders, and imprisoned critics — invited Cesar Chavez to the Philippines to receive an award for improving the conditions of Filipino migrant workers in America.

Chavez accepted.

From Vera Cruz's perspective, this was not just a political misstep. It was a moral betrayal of everything the farmworker movement claimed to stand for. The same principles that justified fighting California grape growers — that workers had rights, that labor organizing was legitimate, that power should not be used to suppress the dignity of working people — were being violated by Marcos's government every day. Filipino union leaders in Manila were being imprisoned for the same activities that made Chavez a hero in America.

Vera Cruz raised his objections inside the UFW. He was overruled. Chavez went to the Philippines. He spent three days as Marcos's guest, praised the Philippine government's record on agricultural workers, and returned to California.

On August 26, 1977, Philip Vera Cruz stood before the UFW's national convention and announced his resignation. He described Chavez's visit to Marcos as "the final blow." He was 72 years old. He had been a farmworker in America for fifty-one years.

Why the Marcos Visit Was Unforgivable to Vera Cruz

🏛 Martial law declared: September 23, 1972. Marcos suspended the Philippine constitution, dissolved Congress, and ruled by decree.

🚫 Strikes banned: All labor strikes were prohibited under martial law — the exact right the UFW had been built to defend.

⛓ Labor leaders imprisoned: Filipino union organizers, journalists, and political critics were arrested, jailed, and in some cases killed without due process.

🎖 The award: Marcos invited Chavez to receive recognition for "improving conditions for Filipino workers in America" — while simultaneously suppressing the rights of workers in the Philippines.

🔴 Vera Cruz's argument: The UFW was simultaneously condemning the Nicaraguan dictatorship at the same 1977 national convention while praising Marcos. The inconsistency was not just hypocritical — it specifically abandoned Filipino workers to a dictatorship in their country of origin.

🤝 Connection to Domingo and Viernes: Four years later, the same Marcos regime that Chavez had visited ordered the assassination of Filipino labor leaders Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes in Seattle. Vera Cruz's warnings about Marcos were not abstract.

After the UFW: Teaching the Next Generation Until the End

Philip Vera Cruz did not retire from activism when he resigned from the UFW. He was 72. He had another seventeen years of advocacy ahead of him.

He settled in Bakersfield, California, and spent those years doing something that may have been his most important contribution after the Delano years: telling the story. He spoke at universities, in community centers, at labor organizations and Asian American studies programs. He talked to young Filipino Americans who had never heard of the Manong generation, who didn't know that Filipinos had started the grape strike, who didn't know that a retirement village in Delano had been built for the men who had given their lives to the fields.

In 1976, he gave the oral history interviews that would become the book Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement — published by the University of Washington Press, still in print, and now a foundational text in Filipino American and Asian American labor history.

In 1987, he received the Ninoy M. Aquino Award — the first time he had returned to the Philippines in fifty years. In 1992, he was honored by the AFL-CIO's Asia Pacific American Labor Alliance at its founding convention as an "Asian Pacific American Labor Pioneer."

Philip Vera Cruz died on June 12, 1994, in Bakersfield, California. He was 89 years old. He had been in the United States for 68 years. He had never stopped working for the movement, and the movement had never adequately recognized what he had done.

1995

The first mural honoring Vera Cruz and other Filipino American farmworkers is completed in Los Angeles' Historic Filipinotown — one year after his death.

2013

California Assembly Bill 123, authored by Assemblymember Rob Bonta, is signed into law — requiring Filipino American farmworker history to be included in K-12 curricula. The same year, Alvarado Middle School in the New Haven Unified School District is renamed Itliong-Vera Cruz Middle School — the first school in the United States named after Filipino Americans.

2008

The Forty Acres — the original UFW headquarters in Delano, site of the Agbayani Village and of Vera Cruz's twelve years of work — is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Today

His book remains in print. His name is on a school. His village still stands. And his warning about what happens when a movement abandons its multiracial foundations — in favor of a single charismatic leader, a single ethnic identity, a single national narrative — remains among the most important lessons the labor movement never fully learned.

The Pattern Is Not Accidental

The erasure of Philip Vera Cruz from the standard history of the farmworker movement is not a coincidence — and it is not simply the result of being less photogenic than Cesar Chavez, or less eloquent in English, or less available to the cameras that followed the movement.

It is a pattern. It is the same pattern that erased Larry Itliong. The same pattern that left the Sakadas of Hawaii in footnotes for generations. The same pattern that built nursing schools in the Philippines in 1907 and then forgot to credit Filipino nurses for the healthcare system their labor sustained. The same pattern that put Antonio Miranda Rodriguez's name on the founding party of Los Angeles and left it off the plaque.

When movements become successful, they develop narratives. Those narratives center charismatic figures. They simplify complex coalitions into a single heroic story. And in that simplification, the people who don't fit the dominant narrative — who are the wrong ethnicity, the wrong age, the wrong kind of quiet — get pushed out of the frame.

Vera Cruz understood this clearly, and he named it. In his oral memoir, he described hearing "Viva la Raza" chanted at UFW meetings in ways that made Filipino workers feel they were guests in their own movement. He described the shift from a union that said "an injury to one is an injury to all" to one that was increasingly centered on a single cultural identity and a single leader's vision.

His resignation in 1977 was not bitterness or ego. It was principle. He had spent his life building coalitions across ethnic and generational lines because he believed that was the only way workers could win against the consolidated power of capital. When the union he had helped build abandoned that principle — by choosing a dictator's hospitality over solidarity with Filipino labor — he could not stay.

He left. And then he spent seventeen more years telling the story, so that it wouldn't be lost entirely.

"If somebody is moved by this story to do something to help others, to make a sacrifice, to use their intellect for the good of the people, not only people in this country will be affected, but also those in the Philippines."

— Philip Vera Cruz, from his oral history, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, 1976

The Manongs Who Built the Movement

Philip Vera Cruz spent 51 years as a farmworker in America. He helped start the strike that became the UFW. He built a village for the men who had nowhere to go. He resigned when his principles required it. And he spent the rest of his life making sure the next generation knew the story. The Delano Manongs Collection is for every Filipino who carries that legacy forward.

Shop Delano Manongs →

Bayani Collection

Makibaka Collection

Filipino American History Collection

His Name Was Philip Vera Cruz

He was born on Christmas Day, 1904, in a small province in northern Philippines, to a sick father and a family that needed him to leave. He arrived in America at 21 and spent the next five decades working in every kind of difficult job this country had for a young Filipino man who was ambitious, educated enough to know what was unjust, and refused to accept it.

He was in the room on September 8, 1965. He voted to strike. He worked for twelve years inside a union that often marginalized the community that had founded it — because he believed in the cause enough to stay. He built a village for the old men who had given their lives to the fields and had nowhere to go. And when the union finally crossed a line he couldn't accept, he stood before its national convention and said so — clearly, on the record, at age 72 — and walked out.

Then he spent another seventeen years telling the story to anyone who would listen, because he understood that if the next generation didn't know the history, the erasure would be complete.

There is a school with his name on it now. There is a book with his words in it, still in print. There is a village in Delano that the Manongs called home because he fought to build it.

Now there is this post. Say his name. Share it. The story only survives if we carry it.

💬 Join the Conversation

Had you heard of Philip Vera Cruz before reading this? Do you have family from Ilocos Sur, from the San Joaquin Valley, from the farmworker generation? Share your connection in the comments. And if you've read his oral memoir — Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History — tell us what stayed with you.