Eulogy by UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez at the Memorial Service for Andy Imutan

 
If you ask people, “Who began the Delano grape strike?” almost everyone will answer Cesar Chavez and his mostly Latino farm workers union. Those of us in the farm worker movement today always point out they would be wrong.

Andy Imutan was the last remaining leader of a largely Filipino American farm workers union that made history in 1965 by beginning the Delano grape strike and helping to forge the first successful farm workers union in American history. It was the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, primarily composed of Filipino American farm workers, that first walked out on strike against Delano-area grape growers on September 8, 1965, a date that will live in the history of the American labor movement.

For generations, growers broke farm worker strikes by pitting one group or race of workers against another. They’d use the Filipinos to break the Latinos’ strikes and vice versa.

But in 1965, leaders of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee such as Andy Imutan, Larry Itliong, Pete Velasco and Philip Vera Cruz took a bold step. They reached across the racial divide to join forces with the mostly Latino members of the National Farm Workers Association, the union led by Cesar Chavez.

Cesar thought it would be many years before his three-year old union ready for a major field walkout. But when the Filipinos asked him to join their vineyard picketlines, he also knew he couldn’t refuse. Cesar’s union voted to join the strike on Mexican Independence Day, September 16, 1965, and his members joined the picketlines four days later.

Andy Imutan quickly became an important leader of what became known around the world as the Delano grape strike.

Organizing farm workers today is still tough duty. Thanks to the UFW’s efforts, we have some good laws protecting farm workers, although they are not enforced. Today, we also have the confidence of having nearly 50 years of experience organizing farm workers.

But back when Andy and Cesar and Larry and Pete and their colleagues first went out on strike around Delano, the only law they knew was the law of the jungle. They were literally struggling against history.

For 80 years before them, every strike had been broken and every union had been rushed, often through ruthless violence. All the experts said organizing farm workers was impossible.

But in the process or taking on the impossible—the mighty power of one of California’s richest industries—Andy Imutan also heroically stood up for the rights of Filipino American farm workers who tragically endured much racism and discrimination. Most of them were imported from the Philippines as young single men during the 1920s and ‘30s. Filipino women were not allowed in and California’s bigoted antimiscegnation laws outlawed marriage to women outside their race. Most of these Filipino workers spent their lives in farm labor camps from which the growers evicted them after the Delano strike started in 1965. Unable to marry, most didn’t have families or a decent place to live.  

Andy, Cesar and most leaders of both unions insisted that strikers from different races walk the same picketlines and share the same union hall and strike kitchen. Andy joined Cesar on the farm workers’ landmark 300-mile march from Delano to the state Capitol in Sacramento in 1966, which placed the farm workers’ plight squarely before the conscience of the American people. When the two unions merged later that year to form the United Farm Workers of America, Andy served as a union vice president.

When grape strikers were sent out to organize the table grape boycott across North America, Andy was assigned to lead the boycott in Baltimore and other major East Coast cities. They had no experience organizing boycotts. In fact, this was the first time the boycott was even used in a major labor-management dispute. For three years they worked night and day organizing, telling the strikers’ stories and asking labor unions, clergy, students and all manor of consumers not to buy California table grapes.

Do you know why the grape boycotters in Baltimore reduced the consumption of table grapes more than any other city? It was because Andy Imutan worked with individual produce managers in each supermarket. He got every manager to order one less box per week.

Andy figured it out. None of the managers ever got fired; he never asked them to stop all the grapes. He just convinced one manager to order one less box at each store time after time after time.

Is there a better example of Cesar’s organizing rule that each person has something important to offer and that you organize people one-by-one-by-one?

Millions of Americans boycotted grapes, convincing grape growers to sign their first-ever union contracts in 1970.

Andy left the UFW in the 1970s to continue working on behalf of the Filipino American community. But Andy spent the rest of his life as a loyal ally of the farm workers’ cause and as a close personal friend of Cesar, the UFW and Chavez family. As late as five or six years ago, Andy joined the UFW in helping to organize some Filipino workers who are still working in the table grapes around Delano.

Andy, Cesar and the farm worker movement also decided to build the Paulo Agbayani Village, a 58-unit adobe-brick retirement home for elderly and displaced Filipino American farm workers that opened at the Forty Acres in 1974. It was named for a Filipino grape striker who died on the picketline.

During this season of the year, literally hundreds of communities across the country are honoring Cesar Chavez with countless events and commemorations that grow each year. His birthday on March 31 is now an official holiday in 10 states.

But when he was alive, Cesar was always embarrassed by the personal recognition because he knew there were so many Cesar Chavezes. He knew there were so many other men and women in the farm worker movement who courageously made tremendous sacrifices and endured untold hardship.
    
One of those unsung heroes was Andy Imutan. Now that Cesar and Larry and Pete and Andy are gone, it is our duty to make sure that the memories and contributions of brave farm labor pioneers such as Andy Imutan are not lost to history.

Mabuhay Andy Imutan!