The Seaside History Project joins with the Filipino community to honor the United Farm Workers founder on Monday, the 81st anniversary of his birth. The event, Speaking History: Voices from Seaside’s Labor Movement, runs from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Community Center at Soper Field in Seaside.

While the farm labor movement is most commonly linked to Mexican-Americans, Chavez represented many Filipino-Americans and workers of other races and ethnicities. They came together to challenge labor practices that were discriminatory and that left so many desperately poor and working in dangerous conditions without even adequate bathroom facilities much less housing or health care.

Chavez was an intellectual who had an extensive library on economics, history, politics and literature. He drew on the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi, and utilized the methods of nonviolent resistance. The methods were seriously tested in the labor actions of the 1970s in confrontations with growers and other labor organizations that sided with growers.

Chavez drew support from the civil rights movement, from the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and locally, from people such as Mel Mason, Charlie Mae Knight, Bill Monning and many others who joined Mexican-Americans and Filipino-Americans on the picket lines.

In order to fully understand and appreciate the work of Chavez, we must remember the forward-thinking Filipino workers in the Salinas Valley who initiated the movement that Chavez would later champion.

The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 made Filipinos aliens in this country, although they had contributed to the enormous agricultural development in the West, in Hawaii and California especially, since the early 1920s. They were called "manongs," which in Tagalog means aging single men. They could not become citizens or marry Americans.

Filipinos in Monterey County, in particular, experienced serious discrimination in housing and employment. There were attacks on both the Watsonville and Monterey Fil-Am clubs as a response to young Filipino men dating white women.

Filipinos responded by organizing unions and becoming pioneers in civil rights. Filipino leaders Pete Velasco and Philip Vera Cruz marched side by side with Cesar Chavez and with African-Americans during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s labor and civil rights actions in the spirit of Bayanihan. According to two scholars of American labor history, Craig Scharlin and Lilia Villanueva, in their 1998 analysis, "The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement," Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee held a mass meeting in September 1965 in Delano to decide whether to strike or accept 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 farmworker struggles in California," Scharlin and Villanueva wrote. "It was like an incendiary bomb, exploding out the strike message to the workers in the vineyards, telling them to have sit-ins in the labor camps, and set up picket lines at every grower’s ranch … It was this strike that eventually made the UFW the farmworkers movement, and Cesar Chavez famous worldwide."

Carol Lynn McKibben is director of the Seaside History Project