With the bombshell revelations of sexual abuse involving United Farm Workers Leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, stories about the role Filipino Farmworker's Leaders have started to resurface, things that are supposed to be common knowledge but aren't.
Good Out Of The Bad
Granted Spanish speaking people in the West Coast claim that Filipino farmworkers leaders have always been taught in higher education. Okay, except not everyone went to UC or live in Delano.
Huerta, Chavez
Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla and other Mexican-American farmworker leaders are household names. They are well known and celebrated as leaders of the UFW (United Farm Workers of America) Union.
But what about Larry Itliong? Philip Vera Cruz? Peter Gines Velasco?
These are just three Filipino-Americans and there are more.
Yes, if you took Asian studies in UC Berkeley, you would.
The sad truth is that despite their leading roles, these Filipino leaders were marginalized within the union, and their contributions were largely omitted from mainstream history books.
Larry Dulay Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Peter Gines Velasco
Larry, Philip, Pete
Modesto "Larry" Itliong was a master communicator who spoke nearly 10 languages (including Philippine languages Tagalog and Ilocano, Japanese, and Spanish), which allowed him to bridge ethnic divides of the diverse farmers in California. He resigned from the UFW in 1971, feeling the union was neglecting the specific needs of aging Filipino workers.
He was a militant organizer who led the walkout of over 1,500 Filipino workers on September 8, 1965. He approached Chavez to join the strike, recognizing that unity between the two largest farm groups (Filipino and Mexican workers) was the only way to prevent growers from using one group as strikebreakers against the other. And the rest is history and so is Larry.
Philip Vera Cruz: A co-founder and the longtime second vice president of the UFW. He was a radical intellectual who later resigned from the union in 1977 due to political disagreements with Chavez, who did an unthinkable act and knew it will make Vera Cruz terribly offended. And yet Chavez did it anyway.
[Vera Cruz was outraged that Chavez accepted an award from a regime that had declared martial law and suppressed labor rights in his homeland. He also criticized the UFW's "Viva la Raza" rhetoric, arguing it was ethnocentric and made Filipinos outsiders in a movement they started.]
Peter Gines Velasco: A third key Filipino leader alongside Itliong and Vera Cruz, Velasco was a founding member of the UFW and served as its secretary-treasurer. Velasco was the logistical engine. He organized the massive food caravans that kept strikers fed for five years.
These are just three Filipinos and there are more, more unsung heroes and not to mention the thousands of Filipino "manongs" who together all had a hand in American farmworkers today having rights and privileges because of their sacrifices in the 1960s.
We can add a lot more about these unsung heroes of the farmworkers union in the West Coast but it will not be enough to give them justice.
Watch this video instead if you want to learn about things not taught about in school or generally not spoken around in America.
The truth is out there. And they do come out, eventually.