We Stand on Their Shoulders, Part 1
/LABOR ORGANIZERS
Larry Itliong
Larry Itliong (Source: NBC News)
Born in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, Philippines, Larry Dulay Itliong was only 16 years old when he immigrated to the United States in 1929 where he started working as a farm laborer and in the salmon canneries of Alaska. He eventually settled in Stockton, California. Despite having only a sixth grade education, he was fluent in several Filipino dialects, Spanish, Cantonese and Japanese.
He gave up his dream of becoming an attorney and instead organized and led labor organizations in Alaska and throughout the West Coast. He was so good at recruiting new members to the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) that the union leaders asked him to go to Delano to organize Filipino grape workers. On September 8, 1965, more than 2,000 Filipino farmworkers marched off the vineyards, demanding $1.40 an hour, 25 cents a box and the right to form a union. Then he asked the Mexican farmworkers through Cesar Chavez to join the strike, and after consultation with Dolores Huerta, nearly one thousand National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) workers joined the Filipinos. A year later the AWOC and NFWA merged to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). The Delano Grape strike lasted for five years.
Itliong served as assistant director of the UFW under Cesar Chavez, and in 1970 he was appointed the UFW’s national boycott coordinator. However, in 1971, he resigned from UFW citing disagreements about the governance of the union. He worked towards building a retirement facility known as Agbayani Village for UFW workers. He continued to show his support outside of UFW in the organized labor movement.
Itliong married six times and had seven children. He died in 1977 at the age of 63 in Delano of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In 2013, a documentary entitled, The Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the UFW, was made to highlight the role of Filipinos in the farm labor movement, including Larry Itliong. That same year, the New Haven Unified School District in Union City, California, renamed Alvarado Middle School Itliong-Vera Cruz Middle School in honor of Itliong and labor partner, Philip Vera Cruz, the first school in the United States to be named after Filipino Americans. In 2018, a children’s book, Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong, was published. The Larry Itliong Papers are housed at the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit. The State of California has recognized his birthday, October 25, as Larry Itliong Day.
On October 2, 2021, Brava Theater, supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission and CASH, presented a virtual new musical entitled, Songs from Larry, in honor of Larry Itliong.
Philip Vera Cruz
Philip Vera Cruz (Photo by Minerva Amistoso)
Philip Vera Cruz was born in Saoang, Ilocos Sur, Philippines on December 25, 1904. In 1926, he moved to the United States where he performed a variety of jobs including working in an Alaskan cannery, a restaurant, and a box factory. In 1931, he studied at Gonzaga University and in 1942, he was drafted into the United States Army but was later discharged due to age. He eventually settled in California where he became a farm worker.
Vera Cruz helped found the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which later merged with the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). As UFW’s second vice president, he worked to improve the working conditions of migrant workers.
On September 8, 1965, the farm workers voted to strike against the grape growers. Vera Cruz described the day’s event: .…at the Filipino Hall at 1457 Glenwood St. in Delano, the Filipino members of AWOC held a mass meeting to discuss and decide whether to strike or to accept the reduced wages proposed by the growers. The decision was 'to strike" and it became one of the most significant and famous decisions ever made in the entire history of the farmworkers struggles in California. It was like an incendiary bomb, exploding out the strike message to the workers in the vineyards, telling them to have sit-ins in the labor camps, and set up picket lines at every grower's ranch… It was this strike that eventually made the UFW, the farmworkers movement, and Cesar Chavez famous worldwide.
Vera Cruz resigned from the UFW in 1977. He felt Cesar Chavez did not give Filipinos due credit for their role in starting the labor movement. Chavez also traveled to Manila and met with President Ferdinand Marcos, whom Vera Cruz considered a brutal dictator. He continued to live in the San Joaquin Valley of California where he remained active in union and social justice issues for the rest of his life.
In 1987, Vera Cruz received the Ninoy Aquino Award and traveled to the Philippines for the first time in 50 years to accept it. In 1992, the AFL-CIO’s Asia Pacific American Labor Committee honored Vera Cruz. In 2013, the New Haven Unified School District in Union City, California renamed Alvarado Middle School Itliong-Vera Cruz Middle School in honor of Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong. It was the first school in the United States to be named after Filipino Americans.
Philip Vera Cruz died in 1994 at the age of 89 in Bakersfield, California.
Chris Mensalves, Sr.
Chris Mensalves (Source: Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project)
Born in San Manuel, Pangasinan, Philippines, Chris Delarna Mensalves immigrated to the United States in 1927 for educational opportunities and due to the increasing economic pressures faced by his family. He attended the University of California Los Angeles in the hope of becoming a lawyer. He worked as a “school boy” for his tuition and board and established the Pangasinan Association of Los Angeles. Due to the discrimination and racism he experienced as a Filipino immigrant, he dropped out of college after three years to work on the farms. "I thought I was going to complete my education here. I went to school in LA to be a lawyer. But I finally found out that Filipinos cannot practice law in this country. They cannot even own farms, nothing we can do. I got so disgusted I said, ‘Why am I studying law when I can't practice law in the United States.’ So I quit. I spent three years in college. And then I went to organize people on the farms,” he said.
He became an active union organizer during the 1940s and 1950s in the Pacific Northwest. He was closely associated with other activists like Carlos Bulosan, Ernesto Mangaoang and Philip Vera Cruz. His exposure to Communism and labor activism prepared him to work as the business agent for Local 266 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), which represented Filipino American Alaska cannery workers based in Portland. After the death of his second wife, Margie Leitz, from childbirth in 1947, he served Local 7, based in Seattle, as their publicity director for a year before moving to Stockton to lead efforts in the 1948 Stockton Asparagus Strike. The strike ended up being disastrous, not to mention the subsequent court cases that drained the union members of their financial resources. Local 266 merged with Local 7 to become Local 37 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in what is known as dual unionism. Local 37 would go on to be recognized as "the country's first Filipino-led union” and he served as president of the merged entity from 1949 to 1959.
Mensalves and other leaders of the ILWU Local 7 were arrested and charged for being associated with the Communist Party. He was released under habeas corpus and temporarily settled in Hawaii where he worked as a business agent and staff organizer for the Longshoremen’s Union. He returned to Seattle’s Chinatown and worked with the Cannery Workers Field Labor Union.
Chris Mensalves died on April 11, 1978 from smoke inhalation caused by a fire in his Downtowner Apartments room.
Pablo Manlapit
Pablo Manlapit (Photo courtesy of Filipinas Magazine)
Pablo Manlapit came to Hawaii in 1910 as a migrant worker under contract to work as a sugarcane plantation laborer at Hamakua Mill Company in the Big Island. His family is from Lipa, Batangas. In 1912, he married Annie Kasby, a German American and had four children. After leaving the plantation in 1914, (he lost his job after participating in a strike) he published a local Filipino newspaper, Ang Sandata, and studied law. In 1919, he passed the test for attorneys and was granted a license to practice law. He became one of the few Filipino lawyers in the 1920s and distinguished himself as a spokesman for the Filipino labor movement in Hawaii. He helped organize the Filipino Labor Union in the islands. He was fluent in Spanish, Tagalog, and English.
In October 1919, the Japanese Federation of Labor and the Filipino Labor Union joined forces to challenge the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association for a better working environment. They wanted to increase their salary from $0.72 to $1.25 and have eight-hour workdays. They also wanted breaks for certain working conditions. As latecomers to Hawaii, Filipinos occupied the lowest status among the ethnic groups. On January 19, 1920, some 3,000 of the Filipino Labor Union members in Oahu walked off their jobs. Manlapit led the strike with the Japanese workers and the strike lasted for two months. The plantation owners evicted strikers from their homes and prosecuted the strike’s leaders, including Manlapit.
Manlapit led an eight-month strike of plantation workers on the island of Kauai and was implicated in the violent 1924 strike, known as the Hanapepe Massacre, even if he wasn’t there. Sixteen strikers and four policemen were killed during the confrontation. Because of his great influence, he was arrested with 60 other Filipinos, tried for conspiracy, and sentenced to 2 to 10 years at Oahu Prison. In order to prevent his involvement in future activities, Manlapit was deported to the U.S. mainland. He went to California but returned to Hawaii in 1933 where he again began organizing labor. He was deported to the Philippines in 1935, and this broke up his marriage.
In 1949, Manlapit returned to Hawaii to visit his family. A longshoremen’s strike gripped Hawaii at the time, so the establishment was wary of him. “He was placed under the custody of the Philippine Consulate and was made to sign an agreement that he would not ‘address any meeting’ nor ‘speak on any radio station or attend church mass nor write in any newspaper.’” Manalapit described this treatment “worse than Communist rule.” He never returned to Hawaii again.
In the Philippines, Manlapit served in the government in the pre- and post-WWII years. He began getting involved once more in labor matters and mortgaged his family home to support Filipino workers on strike. As a result, he became poor and homeless.
Pablo Manlapit died on April 15, 1969 in the Philippines.
Calixto “Carl” Damaso
Calixto Damaso (Source: ILWU)
Born in San Felipe, a town in Zambales province of the Philippines, Calixto "Carl" Damaso signed a labor contract to work on Hawaii’s sugar plantations in 1931 when he was just 14 years old.
Damaso, toiled for years as a sugar worker. Although he suspected that only multi-ethnic unionization could succeed, he supported attempts at single-nationality organizing as they emerged between 1934 and 1937. But in those years, Hawaii’s plantation managers ran a closed, essentially feudal, or colonial system. Thus, Damaso was fired and blacklisted—labeled “do not hire” by the planters—for trying to bring a little representation and dignity to Hawaii’s long-suffering agricultural workers. He moved from island to island, unable to find any work.
Ultimately the ILWU brought the kind of multi-ethnic unionism to the Islands that Damaso felt was needed for the long-term success of labor organization. Clearly, his pioneering efforts helped pave the way. Although Damaso himself was blacklisted until 1940, he eventually found work on the Honolulu waterfront. During World War II, he worked in Pearl Harbor and after the war, he worked for Castle and Cooke as a stevedore. He became an ILWU longshore worker in 1946. During the 1949 Hawaii longshore strike he was a picket captain and acted as interpreter for famous labor leader Harry Bridges and other ILWU International officers.
Damaso was elected business agent for the longshore units on Oahu in 1950 and held that position for nearly a decade. From 1960 to 1963 he was Oahu division director. In 1963 he was elected president of ILWU Local 142 and took office in 1964. He served with distinction until his retirement in late 1981.
“When I was in the ILWU I began to realize that my dream had come true. I started from the hard nuts of the laboring group, but now the workers were respected. And they realized that the only way for them to do better was through unity and understanding more about everyone,” Damaso wrote.
Calixto “Carl” Damaso died on January 26, 1990.
Pete Velasco
Peter Velasco (Source: Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)
Peter Gines Velasco was born August 18, 1910 in Asingan, Pangasinan, Philippines. His father was a farm worker, and his mother was a housewife. He attended Pangasinan Academic High School from 1928 to 1931. He came to the U.S. and served in the American Armed Forces in Europe from 1942-45.
Velasco was among the leaders of the 1,500 Filipino Americans involved in touching off the five-year strike and boycott of grapes in Delano, California – the incident that became the impetus for the formation of the United Farm Workers’ (UFW). A member of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), Velasco and his compatriots were joined eight days after their strike began by the Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by Cezar Chavez. After a year of successful cooperation, the two groups merged into the new United Farm Workers, of which Velasco would become a leading and long-lasting member, becoming a member of the executive board in 1971. After the birth of UFW, Velasco took an active role in the national boycott against Gallo wine and iceberg lettuce and was sent to California to organize workers on the central coast, centered in Santa Maria.
He served in a number of positions in the UFW. He worked as the Stockton, California Field Office Director, as the director of the Strike Defense Fund, was a board member of the Farm Workers Credit Union and was a member of the National Executive Board as Third Vice-President since 1973.
He married the former Sister Dolores Ann, who became Dolores Ann Neubauer in 1975, and they spent 20 years together. Velasco remained with the Union until 1988, at which time he retired as a “secretary-treasurer emeritus.” In spite of his retirement, he and his wife remained closely involved with the UFW community, and actively volunteered in the running of the UFW’s La Paz headquarters, with Velasco serving on the board of a number of the UFW’s corporations.
Velasco died in 1995 at the age of 85. His wife lived in the Agbayani Village and succumbed to COVID-19 last September 2020.
Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes
Silme Domingo, left, and Gene Viernes, right (Source: KUOW)
On June 1, 1981 Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, Secretary Treasurer and Dispatcher of the Alaska Cannery Workers Union - Local 37, International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), were gunned down in broad daylight at their Pioneer Square union hall.
Domingo and Viernes had been active union members since their teens, working side by side with their fathers in the Alaska canneries. It was in those canneries that Silme and Gene and many other second-generation Filipino Americans and Asian Pacific Islanders learned that the substandard working and living conditions had remained the same through both generations. However, Domingo and Viernes were also part of a new generation armed with college educations and spurred to activism by the antiwar and ethnic awareness movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. In the early 1970s, under the leadership of Nemesio Domingo, his older brother, Silme, Gene and others formed the Alaska Cannery Workers’ Association (ACWA). The ACWA enabled these young people to file three class action discrimination lawsuits against the Alaska canneries, accusing them of discriminatory practices in employment and housing. Two of those lawsuits were won in federal court in the 1980s resulting in millions of dollars restitution for cannery workers for suffering under discriminatory practices. Domingo and Viernes were elected officers of Local 37 in 1980 with a platform of ridding the union of bribery, vote buying, violence, and intimidation.
Domingo and Viernes were also activists of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP) and leaders in the U.S.-based movement for democracy in the Philippines. Like their predecessors, Chris Mensalvas and Carlos Bulosan, Domingo and Viernes sought to use their union positions to support the workers’ struggle for democracy in the Philippines and, therefore, to fight against the Marcos dictatorship. The ILWU with its long militant history in supporting workers’ struggles in other countries was a friend to the Philippine struggle for democracy. In April 1981, Viernes took his first trip to the Philippines to visit his relatives and to meet with Philippine labor leaders of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), May First Movement. Less than one month later, Domingo and Viernes were murdered as they worked in their offices. At the time of their deaths, the Philippines had been under the dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos since 1972.
Through eight years of organizing and legal work led by the Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes (CJDV), three members of a local gang were found guilty for their roles in the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The CJDV uncovered a murder plot hatched and paid for in Manila and carried out by local gang members. As a result, a civil suit filed in Federal Court found conjugal dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos liable in the murders of Domingo and Viernes and ordered them to pay the families $15 million. Former President of Local 37, Tony Baruso, was put on trial in 1990 and also sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for his role in the murders. The work that the murderers sought to stop was only strengthened by the many people that stepped forward in the wake of Domingo and Viernes’ murders.
AUTHORS
Carlos Bulosan
Carlos Bulosan (Source: Colorado State University)
Born on November 2, 1913, Carlos Sampayan Bulosan spent much of his youth as a farmer in Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines where his impoverished family lived. At the age of 17, he left for America in the hope of improving his economic situation. He never again saw his homeland. He arrived in Seattle, Washington where he was confronted with racism and forced to work low- paying jobs. He started as a farmworker, harvesting grapes and asparagus, and also as a dishwasher with his brother, Lorenzo, in the famous Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. In 1936, Bulosan suffered from tuberculosis and stayed two years in a hospital’s convalescent ward, where he spent his time reading and writing.
Bulosan’s best-known work is America Is In the Heart. He is credited with giving a post-colonial, Asian immigrant perspective to the labor movement in America and revealing the experience of Filipinos in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1970s, his unpublished writings were discovered in a library in the University of Washington, and this led to the republication of America Is In the Heart in 1973. His works describe the experience of growing up poor in rural Philippines, chronicle social and economic conditions created by the American occupation and centuries of Spanish colonialism, and depict the factors that drove his generation to the United States to find a better future. His other novels include The Laughter of My Father and The Cry and the Dedication.
In the 1950, Bulosan was blacklisted during the Second Red Scare because he was a labor organizer and socialist writer. In poor health and unable to find work, his last years were plagued by illness, hardship, and alcoholism. He died in Seattle from malnutrition and an advanced stage of bronchopneumonia in 1956. He was only 43 years old. His obituary reads: “Estate: One typewriter, a twenty-year-old suit, unfinished manuscripts, worn out sock; Finances: Zero. Beneficiary: His people.”
In 2018, the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies Initiative was established at the University of California, Davis, to carry on his legacy of activism through research and advocacy for the Filipino and Filipino American community.
Bienvenido N. Santos
Bienvenido Santos (Source: Bicol Wikipedia)
Bienvenido N. Santos was born and raised in Tondo, Manila although his family roots are originally in Lubao, Pampanga, Philippines. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of the Philippines where he studied creative writing. He was a government pensionado (scholar) to the United States at the University of Illinois for a master’s degree in English. He later studied at Columbia University and Harvard University. He lived in the United States for many years where he was widely known as a pioneering Asian American writer.
During World War II, Santos served with the Philippine government in exile under President Manuel L. Quezon in Washington. D.C. together with playwright Severino Montano and Philippine National Artist Jose Garcia Villa. He returned to the Philippines in 1946 to become a teacher and university administrator but in 1967 returned to the United States. He received a Rockefeller fellowship at the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa where he later taught as a Fulbright exchange professor. Santos also received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a Republic Cultural Heritage Award in Literature as well as several Palanca Awards for his short stories. Scent of Apples won a 1980 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
He became an American citizen in 1976 and a year later, the Marcos regime banned his novel about government corruption, The Praying Man. He went into voluntary exile in the United States. He wrote more than a dozen book about exiles in both of his adopted countries.
Santos received an honorary doctorate degree in humanities and letters from the University of the Philippines, and Bicol University (Legazpi City, Albay) in 1981. He was also a Professor of Creative Writing and Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Wichita State University from 1973 to 1982, at which time the university awarded him an honorary doctorate degree in humane letters. After his retirement, Santos became Visiting Writer and Artist at De La Salle University in Manila; the university honored Santos by renaming its creative writing center after him.
Some of his famous works include: novels The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor (1983), What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco? (1987); short story collections The Day the Dancers Came (1967, 1991), Dwell in the Wilderness (1985); poems Music for One, Come Home, Heroes; and nonfiction Memory’s Fictions: A Personal History (1993), Postscript to a Saintly Life (1994).
Bienvenido N. Santos died at his family home in Legaspi, Philippines in 1996 at the age of 84.
Alex Tizon
Alex Tizon (Source: Daily Emerald/AroundtheO)
Thomas Alexander Asuncion Tizon was born in Manila, Philippines and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1965. His childhood was marked by financial hardship and frequent moves. He earned degrees from the University of Oregon and Stanford University.
In 1997, Tizon and his two colleagues at The Seattle Times won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a five-part series about fraud and mismanagement in the Federal Indian Housing Program. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he and photographer Alan Berner drove from Seattle to Ground Zero in New York City, chronicling their journey with a multi-part series called “Crossing America – Dispatches from a New Nation” which explored the changes brought about by the attacks. In 2002, he and Berner made another trip to Ground Zero, this time taking a southern route, and produced the series, “Crossing America – One Year Later.”
He was Seattle Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2003-2008. He was a Knight International Journalism Fellow based in Manila in 2009 and 2010. His book, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, told his own story as a first-generation immigrant and an Asian male growing up in the United States “to examine cultural mythologies related to race and gender, in particular the western stereotypes of Asian men and women.” The book won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Work-in-Progress Award sponsored by Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.
My Family’s Slave, the last story Tizon wrote, was the cover story of The Atlantic in its June 2017 issue. In it he described how his parents had kept a peasant woman named Eudocia Tomas Pulido as a household slave, even after emigrating to the U.S. from the Philippines. The story sparked significant debate.
Alex Tizon died the day The Atlantic’s editorial staff decided the article, My Family’s Slave, would be on the magazine’s front cover, but before they could tell Tizon of their decision. He was found dead in his home in Eugene, Oregon on March 23, 2017. His death appeared to be the result of natural causes. He was only 57 years old.
Sources: Google and Wikipedia
