Farm worker movement backs bill for schools to teach Filipino Americans’ key role in farm labor struggles
California school districts would provide instruction on the Filipino Americans’ contributions to the farm labor movement under a bill unanimously approved by the Senate Education Committee with support from the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation. Assembly Bill 123, by Assemblymember Rob Bonta (D-Oakland), was passed on a 9-0 vote Wednesday, June 19. It will next be heard in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Testifying on behalf of the farm worker movement for AB 123 at the June 19 hearing were Marc Grossman, Cesar Chavez’s longtime press secretary and personal aide, and Lorraine Agtang, one of the last surviving Filipino American grape strikers, members of the largely Filipino American Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), who walked out of Giumarra vineyards on Sept. 8, 1965, thus sparking the 1965-1970 Delano grape strike and boycott.
“Many times I heard Cesar make it clear that it was Filipino American grape workers belonging to AWOC who walked out of the vineyards in 1965, and then asked Cesar’s mostly Latino union to join their picket lines,” Grossman told committee members. “Cesar knew the Delano strike would not have firmly established the UFW as the nation’s first successful farm worker union were it not for the heroism of the Filipino American strikers.
“It’s time more people knew about the Filipino American farm workers’ contributions,” Grossman continued. “It’s also a timely lesson of cooperation and solidarity given today’s racial tensions.”
Lorraine Agtang was 13 when the grape strike began and her family was evicted from the farm labor camp where they lived outside Delano.” She was later the first manager of the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village, a beautiful 58-unit home on the farm worker movement’s “Forty Acres” complex outside Delano for elderly and displaced Filipino American farm workers who had no families or places to live in part because of California’s racist anti-mesegenation law that forbade them from marrying outside their race.
“We can never forget the legacy of those courageous Filipino workers who started the grape strike and helped begin an historic farm worker movement that has now lasted for more than 50 years,” testified Agtang, who has been a UFW activist for decades.
Assemblymember Bonta, who is Filipino American, lived with his parents when they worked during the 1970s with Cesar Chavez at the farm worker movement’s Tehachapi Mountain headquarters at La Paz in Keene, now the National Chavez Center and the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument.