Essay: United Farm Workers and the Delano Grape Strike

by Jessica Man
November 2025

United States organized labor has had a complex relationship with migrant workers. Some of the earliest unions in the United States held racist, anti-immigrant positions, believing that Asian, Latin and Southern European migrant workers were racially predisposed to lower standards of living, allowing bosses to use them to break strikes and undercut the wages of white Americans. The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, a cobbler’s union in Boston, struck for higher wages in 1870, only to be fired and replaced with young Chinese men.¹ Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor (AFL, later AFL-CIO), wrote a 1902 pamphlet titled Meat vs. Rice, arguing that the Chinese biologically required a lower standard of living than white workers. Instead of holding the bosses to higher standards, American union members blamed immigrant workers, who had no bargaining power, for lowering their quality of life and threatening their employment status.

However, immigrants have also unionized to secure better working conditions, higher wages and anti-discrimination policies. Union actions have also historically worked to bridge the divides of racial enmity. For example, the O’ahu Sugar Strike of 1920 was jointly carried out against exploitative sugarcane plantation owners by the Filipino Labor Union and the Federation of Japanese Labor. Despite enduring the ravages of the influenza epidemic of 1918 and violence from plantation owners, the unions succeeded in negotiating a wage increase through mutual trust and cooperative action, as Filipinos refused to break Japanese strikes and vice versa.²

Grape Strike and Boycott, March 18, 1970. [bumper sticker], 1970, Marion S. Trikosko, retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2016646403/

In the 1960s, grape companies of the Central Valley mostly hired Mexican and Filipino men to pick grapes during the harvest season. The Filipino men were from the “manong” (Ilocano for “older brother”) generation, the first to arrive in the United States after the Spanish-American War resulted in the annexation of the Philippines by the United States in 1898. The United States government actively sought Mexican labor through the Bracero Agreement (1942-1964). This program was instated to facilitate the hiring of millions of Braceros (Spanish for “laborer”) from northern Mexico in order to mitigate agricultural labor shortages during World War II.

Both the Manongs and Braceros arrived at the Delano vineyards to work the harvest in 1965. The Manongs had struck several times earlier that season,4 particularly against grape growers in the Coachella Valley that provided the barest accommodations to itinerant workers and severely underpaid them, especially in comparison to white workers hired in the same positions. In Delano, grape growers offered Filipinos a wage that was 30 cents below the federal minimum wage, and refused to provide adequate meal support, health care, sufficient housing or workplace safety protections.⁵

The Filipino workers, who were getting older and felt they had nothing left to lose by protesting their exploitation,⁶ called on the Filipino-led AFL-CIO Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to commit to a strike in Delano until the companies agreed to raise the hourly wage to $1.40 and compensate workers with an additional $0.25 for every box of grapes picked.⁷ Under the service of organizers such as Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, the AWOC voted to strike and extended an invitation to the Mexican-led National Farm Workers of America (NFWA) to participate, in part to prevent the company from using Mexican workers to break the strike as in the past.⁸ The recently created NFWA joined the strike and refused to scab for the grape growers. The two parties soon merged their organizations to form the United Farm Workers.

When the strike began, Filipino farmworkers participated in a “walk-off,” abandoning the vineyards and refusing to complete contracted work until they received the higher wages AWOC demanded from the growers.¹³ As negotiations went on, companies hired scabs to break the strikes and complete the harvest, but the UFW used union networks to gather resources, funds and personnel to help participants last through the next five years.¹⁴ The strike was inherently tied to the Civil Rights Movement and used its successful nonviolent tactics of boycotting and picketing to put financial pressure on the companies, raise class consciousness amongst workers and prevent scabs from accessing the fields. The farmworkers also recognized that their cause was tied up in issues of racial, social, economic, and political justice, including the formation of the Chicano Movement, which tied Mexican American identity to anti-imperial and anti-capitalist politics, and other global liberation movements. In this context, Chicanos referred to the strike as “la causa” (“the cause”) to represent the plight of Mexican farmworkers across the country.¹⁵

The strike received massive news coverage. Footage of thousands of farmworkers chanting “¡Huelga!” (“Strike!”) and picketing the fields was broadcast nationwide. Communities of Mexicans and Latinos supported the strikes with targeted boycotts of DiGiorgio Fruit Growers and Schenley Industries, the main employers in Delano,¹⁶ decorating everything from posters to banners to buttons with boycott slogans, including the legendary “Uvas No” (“No Grapes”). Through worker marches, speeches, theatrical productions, physical nonviolent resistance, picketing, boycotting and other forms of collective action, UFW forced 36 grape growers to sit at the negotiating table and agree to fair terms on contracts. By the end of the strike in 1970, UFW workers were not only paid better wages, but were guaranteed a higher standard of workplace safety and occasionally given pensions and vacation time, depending on the terms of each company’s contract.¹⁷

The Manongs join the picket line during the 1973 Grape Strike, 1973, Armington Family, retrieved from Welga Archive, Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, https://welgadigitalarchive.omeka.net/items/show/126

Just as the O’ahu Sugar Strike could not have succeeded without the cooperation of Japanese and Filipino plantation workers, the Delano Grape Strike could not have succeeded without the cooperation of AWOC and NFWA. Both Filipino and Chicano members sat on the founding committee and were crucial in organizing pickets and boycotts across the country. They also framed the strike as part of a greater liberation movement that included racial equity, social justice, anti-assimilation and in some cases, women’s liberation. However, although the UFW continues to advocate for Mexican farmworkers today, the Filipino cause fell by the wayside. As members of a much smaller minority group, the voices and needs of the Manongs went unheard, leading to the departure of Itliong and other Filipino leaders after the end of the strike.¹⁸

The legacy of unionized labor in immigrant communities remains complex and multifaceted. White supremacists have used the power of the union to advocate for immigration bans. Unions led by immigrants have created incredible bonds and accrued massive amounts of bargaining power for disempowered groups previously in conflict. Although not every strike or negotiation is successful, unions that promote trust and solidarity amongst their members and build alliances between their communities can withstand previously unimaginable hardships and continue working toward creating a better world.

This essay is sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Region Program, coordinated by Waynesburg University.

Jessica Man is a PhD candidate in history at the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. Her research interests include Asian American regional histories, Asian American religious life, race and ethnicity in pop culture and critical refugee studies.

1. Anthony W. Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town, 2008
2. Masayo Umezawa Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy: The Oahu Sugar Strike of 1920, 1999
3. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, 1986
4. PBS, Delano Manongs, 2014
5. National Park Service, “The Road to Sacramento: Marching for Justice in the Fields” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/workers-united-the-delano-grape-strike-and-boycott.htm
6. PBS, Delano Manongs
7. National Park Service, “The Road to Sacramento: Marching for Justice in the Fields”
8. Ibid.
9. Jacques M. Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa, 2007, pg. 151
10. Patricia Brown, “Forgotten Hero of Labor Fight; His Son’s Lonely Quest,” The New York Times, Oct, 18, 2012
11. Levy, pg. 3
12. Levy, pg. 314
13. Inga Kim, “The 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike and Boycott,” United Farm Workers, March 7, 2017. https://ufw.org/1965-1970-delano-grape-strike-boycott/
14. Levy, pg. 315
15. Levy, pg. 175
16. Levy, pg. 202
17. Irving J. Cohen, “La Huelga! Delano and After.” Monthly Labor Review 91, no. 6 (1968): 13–16.
18. PBS, Delano Manongs, 2014