“American labor history has been one of strife and one of bloodshed,” said Manuel Quintero Bersamin, the first Filipino-Mexican mayor of Watsonville and son of a Filipino farm worker.
Bersamin knows this history well and as a part of National Farm Workers Week, hopes to highlight the often forgotten contributions of Filipino farmworkers to California’s labor history and the challenges that faced them along the way.
Cal State Monterey Bay (CSUMB) recognized these contributions on April 25 with “Legacies of Labor and Organizing: Honoring Filipinx History,” a film screening and panel discussion that drew around 30 people to CSUMB’s Otter Student Union.
The event began with “No Dogs,” a short film about Watsonville’s anti-Filipino riots in 1930. The riots started in response to fears of Filipino farmworkers intermarrying with white women and resulted in the death of 22-year-old Fermin Tobera.
In 1933, California enacted an anti-miscegenation law prohibiting marriage between Filipino and white Americans. With few Filipino women in America, the law isolated Filipino men, resulting in a whole generation of migrant Filipino farmworkers with no family except each other – the Manongs.
“They had plans to go back to the Philippines as rich men, but they came [to America] during the Depression so that didn’t happen… it was like them against the world,” Bersamin said.
The Manongs however, proved to be a powerful force in California’s farmworker movement.
The film that followed, “The Delano Manongs: The Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers,” chronicled the origins of the 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike, in which Filipino and Mexican farmworkers withheld their labor in demand of wage increases from grape growers.
Though history books have often placed Cesar Chavez of the primarily Mexican United Farm Workers at the forefront of this movement, the strike was initiated by Filipino Manong Larry Itliong of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.
Despite the significant contributions of Itliong and the Manongs, their stories are seldom told.
“We have to start with telling people about the Manongs. We need to tell people who they are and celebrate them,” said panelist Nickie Ttuhill-Delute from the Delano chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society, a non-profit educational organization focusing on preserving these stories.
“We need to somehow preserve our history and learning about the Delano Grape Strike is one way to do that,” Ttuhill-Delute said.
Also on the panel was Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and principal investigator with “Watsonville is in the Heart,” a community archive and research initiative.
The initiative has partnered with UCSC in hopes of amplifying overlooked Filipino-American experiences in Watsonville and the wider Pajaro Valley by compiling digital archives and oral histories of their experiences.
“The erasure [of Filipino American history] is so massive that we don’t know what we’ve already lost,” Gutierrez said.
Some of these archives are currently being presented at Santa Cruz’s Museum of Art and History in the exhibit, “Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley.” The exhibit will be displayed there until Aug. 4.
I worked along side of these Filipino laborers in the lettuce fields of Watsonville. They taught me a rich heritage and how to live a righteous way. I miss the old timers and their sayings as they would say To believe is to see what is in the bucket.