American farm labor pioneer Andy Imutan
United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez and Cesar Chavez Foundation President Paul F. Chavez issued the following statement from the movement’s La Paz, Keene, Calif. Headquarters.
All of us in the farm worker movement and the Chavez family were deeply saddened to learn of the passing on Feb. 2 in the Philippines of Andy Imutan, the last remaining leader of a largely Filipino American farm workers union that made history in 1965 by beginning the Delano grape strike and sparking creation of the first successful farm workers union in American history. Andy reached across racial barriers to join forces with members of the mostly Latino farm workers’ union led by Cesar Chavez who joined the grape walkouts. Andy was a key leader of the strike and of the merged union that became the United Farm Workers of America.
After winning a modest wage increase and improved working conditions in Southern California’s Coachella Valley in spring 1965, Filipino American farm workers, under the leadership of their union, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, walked out on strike against Central Valley table and wine grape growers around Delano on September 8, 1965. Then Andy and fellow AWOC leaders Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz and Pete Velasco took a bold step: They asked Cesar Chavez, leader of the National Farm Workers Association, to join them on the picketlines. For generations, growers broke strikes and defeated unions by pitting one race against another, using Filipinos to break Latinos’ strikes and vice versa. Although Cesar thought it would be years before his nascent NFWA would be ready for a major field action, he felt his union had no choice but to join with AWOC, which it did on September 20, 1965.
Andy heroically championed Filipino American strikers whose plight was especially tragic. Most were imported from the Philippines as young single men in the 1920s and ‘30s. Filipino women were not allowed and California’s racist antimiscegnation laws forbade marriage to women outside their race. The Filipino workers spent their lives in farm labor camps from which most were evicted when the Delano strike started in 1965. Unable to marry, most didn’t have families or a decent place to live.
Andy, Cesar and most AWOC and NFWA leaders insisted that strikers from both races participate on 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, placing the farm workers’ plight squarely before the conscience of the American people. The two unions merged later that year to form the UFW and Andy served as a union vice president. When grape strikers were dispatched to organize the table grape boycott across North America, Andy led the boycott in Baltimore and other major East Coast cities. Millions of Americans boycotted grapes, convincing grape growers to sign their first union contracts in 1970.
Even after he left the UFW in the 1970s to continue his work with the Filipino American community, Andy spent the rest of his life as a staunch ally of the farm workers cause and a close friend of Cesar, the UFW and Chavez family. Andy helped the UFW organize Filipino American farm workers as late as 2006, and lobbied then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on behalf of union legislation to make it easier for farm workers to join unions.
Andy, Cesar and the farm worker movement decided to build the Paulo Agbayani Village, a 58-unit adobe-brick retirement home for elderly and displaced Filipino American farm workers that opened in 1974 at “Forty Ares,” the movement’s complex near Delano. It was named for a Filipino striker who died on the picketline. Forty Acres was also where Andy worked when it was the UFW’s headquarters in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Ironically, on Feb. 21, 2011, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar joined 800 farm worker and union veterans plus school children and community members in dedicating Forty Acres as a National Historic Landmark, the highest honor the U.S. government can bestow on a place. The first historic site Secretary Salazar joined us in touring at the Forty Acres was the Agbayani Village, where he met with Filipino American activists.
On that sunny winter day outside Delano, Secretary Salazar declared that the Forty Acres “helped define 20th Century American history.” Giants of the farm worker movement who included Andy Imutan shaped that history.
Mabuhay* Andy Imutan!
(*Tagalog word for “long live”)