For decades, American history textbooks sold a single, polished story about the farmworker movement in California. You know the narrative. Cesar Chavez, through sheer force of nonviolent conviction, organized the vineyards, led the marches, and won basic dignity for the people picking America's food.
It makes for a clean history lesson. It's also wildly incomplete.
Cesar Chavez didn't start the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. Filipino farmworkers did. Led by a fierce, cigar-chomping union organizer named Larry Itliong, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) walked off the fields on September 8, 1965, demanding minimum wage. They knew grower tactics. Growers always pitted Mexican and Filipino labor against each other to crush strikes. So Itliong marched over to Chavez's National Farm Workers Association and pushed for unity.
Now, as legacy institutions re-evaluate Chavez following uncomfortable revelations about UFW governance and internal power struggles, Larry's son, Johnny Itliong, is fighting harder than ever to pull his father out of the historical margins.
This isn't just family pride. It's about fixing a broken historical record.
The Fighter with Seven Fingers
To understand why Johnny Itliong fights so hard for his father's memory, you have to understand who Larry Itliong actually was. He wasn't a saint or a media-trained figurehead. He was a pragmatic, tough-as-nails organizer who learned how to build unions in the roughest environments imaginable.
Born in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, in 1913, Larry came to the United States in 1929 at just fifteen years old. He had a sixth-grade education, but he was fluent in multiple Filipino dialects, Spanish, Cantonese, and English. He taught himself law by reading legal textbooks late into the night after grueling shifts in farm fields and Alaskan salmon canneries.
He lost three fingers in an Alaskan cannery accident, earning him the nickname "Seven Fingers" among fellow laborers. It didn't slow him down. By the time he moved to California's Central Valley, he had spent decades organizing workers from Seattle down to the Coachella Valley.
Filipino workers in California—often called the Manongs, an affectionate Ilokano term of respect for older men or elders—were a distinct group. Because of anti-miscegenation laws and racist immigration restrictions like the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, most Manongs were bachelor men who lived, worked, and aged together in community halls and cheap boarding houses. They were tight-knit, disciplined, and deeply loyal to one another.
When Larry Itliong called a strike vote at Filipino Hall in Delano on September 8, 1965, those men answered. They didn't have savings accounts or safety nets. They just had each other.
How the Narrative Got Hijacked
If Filipino workers started the strike, why did Chavez get almost all the credit for the next sixty years?
The answer comes down to strategy, public relations, and political convenience.
When AWOC walked out, Chavez was actually hesitant to join. His group, the NFWA, wasn't fully organized yet and lacked a strike fund. But Itliong recognized that if Mexican workers didn't strike alongside Filipinos, growers would simply hire Mexican strike-breakers to break the lines, as they had done for decades. Itliong pressed Chavez hard until NFWA joined the strike on September 16, Mexican Independence Day.
The two groups merged to form the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chavez became director, and Itliong served as assistant director.
That's where the friction started.
- Different philosophies: Itliong was a seasoned trade unionist focused on contracts, wages, and hard bargaining. Chavez saw the movement through a spiritual, civil rights, and nonviolent movement lens.
- Media preference: The national media in the late 1960s preferred Chavez's charismatic, ascetic profile over Itliong's blunt, cigar-smoking, unapologetic style.
- Demographics: Mexican workers vastly outnumbered Filipino workers in California agriculture, which gave Chavez and his allies dominant sway inside the union structure.
By 1971, Itliong had enough. He resigned from the UFW, warning that the union was prioritizing institutional politics over the immediate needs of aging workers—especially the elderly Filipino Manongs who had no families or retirement support.
After Itliong left, the UFW's promotional machine focused almost exclusively on Chavez. In history books, documentaries, and school curricula across the country, Larry Itliong was reduced to a footnote, if mentioned at all.
Johnny Itliong's Crusade for the Truth
Johnny Itliong grew up watching his father give everything to the labor movement, only to watch history write him out of his own legacy.
"My dad deserves to be remembered for the truth of what he did," Johnny has stated repeatedly at public forums and labor commemorations. He isn't interested in gentle revisionism. He calls out what he sees as deliberate myth-making that elevated one man while erasing an entire community of Filipino pioneers.
The struggle to correct this record has gained real traction in recent years. With public scrutiny turning back toward UFW history, observers are taking a fresh look at the primary sources from 1965.
What do those documents show? They show Larry Itliong's signature on the original strike demands. They show that the strategy of contacting international unions to refuse to unload Delano grapes in urban ports was heavily driven by Itliong's deep ties with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 37.
Without Larry Itliong's early work and union connections, the grape boycott might never have expanded nationwide.
Real Historical Milestones vs Popular Myths
Let's clear up some of the common misunderstandings about what happened in Delano between 1965 and 1970.
Myth: Cesar Chavez started the grape strike on his own.
Fact: Larry Itliong and 1,500 Filipino workers started the strike on September 8, 1965. Chavez's organization voted to join eight days later.Myth: The United Farm Workers was always a unified, harmonious coalition.
Fact: Internal power struggles were constant. Itliong and other Filipino leaders, like Philip Vera Cruz, frequently clashed with Chavez's centralized control.✨ Don't miss: ford focus rs front bumperMyth: Filipino workers disappeared after the merger.
Fact: Filipino organizers built Agbayani Village in Delano—a retirement facility for elderly farmworkers who had nowhere else to go—demonstrating their ongoing commitment to mutual aid long after leaving union leadership.
What Needs to Happen Next
Restoring Larry Itliong's place in labor history isn't going to happen through lip service or token mentions in speeches. If you want to support accurate historical education, here are direct steps you can take today:
- Audit educational materials: If you're an educator, check your social studies curriculum. Ensure Larry Itliong and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee are taught alongside the UFW.
- Visit historical sites: Visit the Filipino Community Hall in Delano, California, and Agbayani Village. Seeing these places grounds the history in real physical spaces built by Manong labor.
- Support primary source archives: Read the collections archived at Wayne State University and regional California historical societies to engage directly with worker oral histories rather than sanitized secondary summaries.
- Share primary history: When discussing California labor or farmworker rights, actively name the Filipino organizers who initiated the movement. Words matter, and repetition changes public memory.
