Filipino and Mexican American farmworkers revisit 1965 strike after abuse claims

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Filipino Americans are navigating how to commemorate a chapter in U.S. labor history as communities and governments respond to recent allegations that César Chavez sexually abused young women and girls. In the days around César Chavez Day, several Filipino groups canceled planned marches, and some states and local governments moved to rename the holiday to Farmworkers Day, according to reporting shared with the public this week.

In California, César Chavez Day remained a recognized state holiday, and state and some local government offices closed for the day. Other communities shifted the focus away from Chavez’s name, with advocates calling for a celebration that highlights farmworker organizing led by Filipino and Chicano workers instead of centering a single figure.

Advocates also said the renaming discussions should treat the abuse allegations and survivors as part of the public reckoning, not as a side issue. Dillon Delvo, executive director of Little Manila Rising, said organizers “really need to kind of center this trauma of women and sexual abuse,” adding that “It’s definitely what the discussion needs to be.”

The debate has brought renewed attention to how Filipino and Mexican American farmworkers joined forces in 1965 to strike against California grape growers. The narrative commonly taught in schools and displayed in monuments often links Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong closely with Chavez, but community members and educators said that has sometimes obscured other organizers and the women who sustained meetings and organizing.

The reporting described how Filipino migration to U.S. farms took shape over decades, including a period when many Filipinos studied English and were authorized to immigrate to the United States during U.S. colonial rule over the Philippines from 1898 to 1946. From the 1920s to the 1960s, tens of thousands of Filipinos joined agricultural work, the story said, often facing discrimination such as lower wages, substandard housing and poor working conditions, with limited opportunities for women to immigrate and anti-miscegenation laws restricting marriage outside their race.

By the 1960s, Filipino farmworkers had formed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to plan labor strikes, with Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz leading efforts. The committee voted on Sept. 8, 1965, to strike in Delano, demanding to be paid at least the federal minimum wage, and organizers later joined forces with the group associated with Chavez and Dolores Huerta, which became part of the United Farm Workers, the reporting said.

Dennis Arguelles, Southern California director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said Chavez was hesitant to strike and that the National Farm Workers Association was not ready to take on powerful agribusiness interests. He also said those business structures were effective in pitting different ethnicities against each other to break strikes, a dynamic that community members have pointed to when describing why Filipino organizing mattered to the strike’s beginning.

Some advocates said the moment offers an opening to correct who gets credited in labor history—and particularly who appears in the story’s emotional and political center. Delvo said, “There always seems to be a need to be like a main character,” and argued that “the problem is that is not what a union is about.” Vernadette Gonzalez, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said educators should highlight “unsung heroes” from Filipino farmworkers, including women who supported meetings while raising families and preparing food.

The article also described how creative work has already tried to rebalance credit. “Larry the Musical: An American Journey,” a musical about the Filipino farmworkers movement, references Chavez only once, in a scene when Itliong calls him, and its producers said they centered the story on women in the community as people who keep Itliong and the broader community accountable and who pass on knowledge to the next generation.

In local government action this week, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors took steps to rename César Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day, according to the reporting. It also quoted Itliong’s 60-year-old son, Johnny, saying Chavez had tried to “erase the history” of how the Delano strike began, and it noted some discussion of honoring the Sept. 8 date to highlight the striking Filipino workers.