New California history texts will include Chicano history and diversity

Dolores Huerta 

By Stephen Magagnini, Sac Bee.

"After 10 years, thousands of public comments and contentious debates, the California Department of Education has rewritten the history curriculum for California’s more than 6.2 million public school students.

The new History-Social Science Framework for grades K-12 was adopted by the state school board on July 14. It reflects the struggles and progress of LGBT Americans in the United States and California. It also contains more detail on Latino history, along with the role Filipinos played in both World War II and the United Farm Workers movement."


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article92446782.html#storylink=cpy

If you are willing to serve as a reviewer to see that the new textbooks meet the new requirements, apply here. 

2017 History–Social Science Adoption

The application for reviewers for the 2017 History­–Social Science Adoption is now live on the CDE Web site at http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/im/, under the tab “Reviewer Info.” as a reviewer. Applications will be accepted through October 19, 2016.

The Radical Roots of the Great Delano Grape Strike

 David Bacon
September 20, 2015
http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-radical-roots-of-great-grape-strike_20.html

This is an expanded version of an article in the Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle:  http://sfchron.cl/1QHt9Jt




Larry Itliong.  Photo:  Bob Fitch Photo Archive © Stanford University Libraries


Fifty years ago the great grape strike started in Delano, when Filipino pickers walked out of the fields on September 8, 1965.  Mexican workers joined them two weeks later.  The strike went on for five years, until all California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970.

The strike was a watershed struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by millions of people across the country.  It helped breathe new life into the labor movement, opening doors for immigrants and people of color.  Beyond the fields, Chicano and Asian American communities were inspired to demand rights, and many activists in those communities became organizers and leaders themselves.

California's politics have changed profoundly in 50 years.  Delano's mayor today is a Filipino.  That would have been unthinkable in 1965, when growers treated the town as a plantation.

The Grape Strike That Transformed a Nation: 50 years Later

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.


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article34268826.html#storylink=cpy

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.”

Strategic Racism and the Contested Legacy of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta

 On March 31, Eleven  states will hold holidays celebrating  labor and Latino leader Cesar Chavez.   A new film Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time,  starring  Michael Peña   as Cesar Chavez and  Rosario Dawson  as Dolores Huerta opens in cities across the country on April 4, 2014.  Here is a trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkfMrqAmD0

There is a film review by Randy Shaw in the post below.

Let us be clear.  Chavez was religious, but he was not a saint. Neither were the growers, the Teamster collaborators, nor corporate agribusiness saints.  Celebrations should not be about hero worship or uncritical praise, nor should we ignore the present oppression of farm workers in the U.S. 

What Chavez and Huerta did  accomplish along with Philip Vera Cruz ,  Marshall Ganz, LeRoy Chatfield, Gil Padilla and  hundreds of others was to   organize in California the first successful farm worker union against overwhelming odds.

With Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, and others Chávez and Huerta  deliberately created a multiracial union; Mexican,  Mexican American, Filipino, African-American, Dominican, Puerto Rican and Arab workers, among others, have been part of the UFW.  This cross-racial organizing  was necessary in order to combat the  prior divisions and exploitations of workers based upon race and language. Dividing the workers on racial and  language lines, as well as immigration status  always left the corporations the winners.

Each of the prior attempts to organize a  farm worker union  had been  destroyed by racism and corporate power. Chávez chose to build a union that incorporated the strategies of social movements and community organizing.  They allied the union   with churches, students,  and organized labor.  The successful creation of the UFW changed the nature of labor organizing  in the Southwest  and contributed significantly to the growth  of Latino politics in the U.S.

Little Manilla, Filipino history

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