Larry Itliong

Larry Itliong was born in Pangasinan province in the Philippines and left for the United States at fifteen with six years of schooling, planning to become a lawyer. Instead he joined the migrant circuit of Filipino men who followed the harvests up the Pacific coast: lettuce in Washington, asparagus in California, salmon in the Alaska canneries, where he lost three fingers in an accident. He joined his first strike in 1930 and never stopped organising, learning several languages along the way and reading law in his spare time.

By 1965 he was an organiser for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, a union affiliated to the AFL-CIO. That spring the Filipino grape pickers he led won a pay rise in the Coachella Valley. When they moved north to Delano the growers refused to pay the same rate. On 8 September, at the Filipino Community Hall, the workers voted to strike. Itliong knew that the growers would bring in Mexican workers to replace them, and went to César Chávez, whose National Farm Workers Association was mostly Mexican and not ready to strike. Chávez put it to his members, and on 16 September they joined. The two unions merged the following year, with Itliong as assistant director.

The strike and grape boycott lasted five years and won contracts in 1970. Itliong resigned in 1971, saying the Filipino members had been sidelined and that decisions were made by a circle around Chávez. He spent his last years building a retirement village for the ageing, mostly single Filipino workers who had nowhere else to go, and died in 1977 of motor neurone disease.