Which was quite a sacrifice, given how much I loved them. But I was willing to forgo the pleasure of my favorite fruit’s company because a man I admired told me to. His name was César Chávez, a legendary Mexican American labor leader who, we believed, had single-handedly organized the 1965 farmworkers strike in Delano, California, giving birth to the United Farm Workers and the infamous grape boycott that followed.
All of which ultimately brought the powerful growers to their knees, forever improving working conditions on farms in California and positively impacting them worldwide.
For years thereafter, the name of César Chávez echoed through the halls and bounced off the mountaintops of my home state. To Californians, in fact, it was roughly synonymous with that of Martin Luther King.
Until last month.
That’s when the New York Times published an expose’ alleging that Chávez, who died in 1993, had spent years sexually assaulting and raping women and girls, some as young as 12. The charges gained credence when his long-time co-leader, Delores Huerta, now 95, revealed that he had raped her twice, both resulting in pregnancies she had hidden before putting the babies up for adoption.
The reaction was swift and terrible: civic leaders removed the name of Chávez from school curriculums, took down his statues, painted over his murals, canceled his celebrations, renamed streets and plazas, and rechristened the annual “César Chávez Day” as an innocuous “Farmworkers Day.”
“It’s a profound change in our understanding and reading of Latino political history,” Republican strategist Mike Madrid told the Boston Globe. “This should never have been about one person. He was not a demigod.”
Enter Larry Itliong.
Born in San Nicholas, Philippines, Itliong emigrated to the United States in 1923 at the tender age of 15. Dreaming of becoming an attorney, he quickly abandoned that hope in the face of harsh reality and, like many other members of the so-called “Manong Generation,” started working as a migrant farm laborer. Unlike most, however, he possessed leadership qualities that quickly thrust him into the forefront of a then-burgeoning farm workers’ movement.
And so it came to pass that in 1965 Itliong led more than 2,000 members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, a group representing Filipino laborers in the grape vineyards of Delano, in what was to become that earthshattering strike. Chávez and his Mexican workers, it turns out, got involved only later and reluctantly after Itliong invited them to join. Then immediately seized the limelight, eventually garnering the garlands.
“There’s been a lot of silencing,” Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, former chair of Asian American Studies at UC Davis and Fil Am founder of the university’s Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, told the East Bay Times. “Including silencing around our role.”
She attributes that to Chávez being “well-spoken and media savvy,” while Itliong was “rough around the edges,” and spoke English with a heavy accent. “I think it was much harder for him to garner the same kind of media attention that César could,” Rodriquez said.
Nonetheless, the Filipino labor organizer served under Chávez as assistant director of the newly formed United Farm Workers until 1971 when he resigned due to several disagreements with union leaders, including what he perceived as their lack of attention to the needs of aging Filipinos.
And six years later died, relatively forgotten, at the age of 63.
Ah, but now the sudden collapse of Chávez’ legacy has inspired a serious re-examination of Itliong’s. It began in 2018 with the publication of an illustrated children’s book called Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong, co-authored by Gayle Romasanta and Dawn Bohulano Mabalon. Subsequent years saw a handful of other books recounting the labor leader’s life. Then, in 2024, the children’s book premiered as “Larry the Musical: An American Journey” at San Francisco’s Brava Theater.
To which I say bravo!
Perhaps California has found its new icon.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
