Good piece in the
Sacramento Bee by Steve Magagnini
On Oct. 2, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into
law AB123 requiring public schools to teach their students about the
contributions of Filipino Americans to the state’s fields of plenty and the
farmworkers movement that transformed American labor.
Many Californians don’t know that Cesar
Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers movement were inspired by
Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz and other Filipino farmworkers who led the
Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) and started the Delano grape
workers strike of 1965. “The students of California need to learn that the
sacrifices made by both Filipino and Latino workers benefited all California,”
Huerta said.
Much of that history is detailed in
“Little Manila Is In The Heart,” a new book by Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, an
associate professor of history at San Francisco State University and a daughter
of Stockton’s once-vibrant Little Manila District – for half a century the apex
of Filipino life in America. Little Manila – like Sacramento’s Japantown and
Chinatown – was wiped out by urban redevelopment in the 1950s and ’60s. But its
legacy lives on in California’s fields and levees, said Mabalon, 41.
What do Californians need to know about
Filipino Americans?
They built the Central Valley with their
bare hands in asparagus, tomatoes, celery, peaches, tomatoes and grapes.
Filipino and Mexican immigrants and their families turned California into the
seventh-largest economy in the world. There are still Filipinos working in the
fields and sorting asparagus with Mexican immigrants. The first seven Filipinos
– called Indios by the Spaniards – arrived on a Spanish galleon that landed
around Morro Bay on Oct. 18, 1587.
More;
smagagnini@sacbee.com
No comments:
Post a Comment