Steve Magagnini, The Sacramento Bee
 |
| Philip Vera Cruz |
On Sept. 8, 1965, Lorraine
Agtang, her family and other Filipino grape pickers walked out of their fields
to protest a cut in their pay from $1.40 to $1.25 an hour. Twelve days later,
labor organizer Cesar Chavez and more than 1,200 Mexican workers joined the
strike that led to the first United Farm Workers contracts with growers in
1970.
Sacramento State professor
emeritus Duane Campbell, who worked for the UFW from 1972 to 1980, said the
strike “totally changed labor politics and Latino politics.” Inspired by the
events of that September and the impact of the international table grape
boycott that followed, thousands of people of different races and ethnicities
devoted their lives to activism and nonviolent protest.
“It was a training ground
for organizers who spread to hundreds of different fields – a large number of
Latino legislators worked with the UFW,” Campbell said. “The strike and boycott
awakened Latinos, ‘the sleeping giant of California politics,’ triggering the
Chicano movement and the creation of Sacramento State bilingual education department.”
UFW spokesman Marc
Grossman said those who can trace their political activism to the grape strike
include the late Joe Serna, who went on the become mayor of Sacramento, and the
late artist and activist José Montoya, founder of the art collective the Royal
Chicano Air Force. Alex Edillor, who helped organize the weekend’s
commemorations, called the strike “one of the most significant social justice
movements in American history” and praised the courage of the Filipino
farmworkers, many in their 50s then, who were brave enough to launch the strike
before Chavez and their Mexican colleagues were ready.
When Agtang saw Filipinos
on the picket lines, she said, “that affected my life story – I knew the
Filipinos were hard-working people not bent on civil disobedience, but it was
pretty amazing when I learned they were standing up for what they wanted.”
For more history: www.MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org
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