The Manong Generation: How Filipino Farmworkers Became the Forgotten Founders of the United Farm Workers Movement

 

Made by: Fabricio Acosta Huaman

Hello and welcome back to the blog!

So far, our conversations here have ranged from religion and media stereotypes to the role of the Asian diaspora in shaping the American tech industry. Today we turn to a chapter of Asian American history that rarely makes it into textbooks, even though it helped lay the groundwork for one of the most influential labor movements in U.S. history: the story of the Filipino American farmworkers known as the "manong generation."

Who Were the Manongs?

The term manong comes from Ilocano, a language spoken in the northern Philippines, and translates roughly as "older brother" a term of respect used for elder male relatives and community members. It came to describe a specific generation of Filipino migrants, mostly young, single men, who arrived in the United States between roughly 1906 and 1934, drawn by the promise of work and opportunity (Welga Digital Archive, n.d.).

This migration was made possible by a peculiar legal status. After the Spanish-American War, the Philippines became a U.S. territory, and Filipinos were classified as U.S. "nationals" rather than foreign aliens. Unlike immigrants from China or Japan, who were barred by exclusion laws, Filipinos could travel relatively freely to the U.S. mainland and Hawai'i. As a result, thousands of young men left rural provinces such as Ilocos Norte to work the sugarcane fields of Hawai'i, the salmon canneries of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, and eventually the agricultural valleys of California (Welga Digital Archive, n.d.).

What awaited them, however, was rarely the American Dream they had been promised.

Life on the Margins

The manongs entered a labor system built on cheap, mobile, and disposable workers. They followed the harvest seasons up and down the West Coast, picking asparagus, lettuce, and grapes for wages that were consistently lower than those paid to white laborers. Living conditions in labor camps were often described as crowded, unsanitary, and isolating (Buenaventura, 1998).

Beyond the fields, Filipino men faced a wall of legal and social exclusion. California's anti-miscegenation laws, originally written to prevent marriages between white and Black Americans, were expanded in 1880 to include "Mongolians" a category that local courts later applied to Filipinos as well (Volpp, 2000). This meant that Filipino men were legally barred from marrying white women in California, even as the demographic makeup of their communities overwhelmingly male, due to immigration patterns that discouraged family migration made it nearly impossible to marry within their own community in the U.S.

In response, many manongs turned to taxi dance halls, where, for the price of a dance, they could spend a few minutes in the company of a woman without violating the letter of the law (Positively Filipino, 2013). Housing discrimination was blunt and explicit: hotel and boarding house signs in towns like Stockton openly read "Positively No Filipinos Allowed" (Buenaventura, 1998). Anti-Filipino violence was not uncommon either; in 1927, a mob in Toppenish, Washington, forcibly drove Filipino workers out of town (Buenaventura, 1998).

In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act officially the Philippine Independence Act set a ten-year path toward Philippine independence, but it also reclassified Filipinos as aliens for immigration purposes, drastically restricting further migration from the islands (U.S. National Park Service, n.d.-a). For the manongs already in the country, this meant a community largely frozen in place: aging, predominantly male, and with little legal pathway to reunite with families left behind.

From Isolation to Organization

Faced with exploitation and exclusion, Filipino workers did not remain passive. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, they organized strikes across California's agricultural regions, including a 1948 strike by Filipino members of the National Farm Labor Union in Byron, California, which spread throughout the Stockton area (Welga Digital Archive, n.d.). These early efforts rarely won lasting victories, but they built a culture of organizing that would prove decisive decades later.

That culture found its clearest expression in the figure of Larry Itliong. Born in 1913 in San Nicolas, Philippines, Itliong arrived in the United States in 1929 at the age of fifteen, hoping to study law. Discrimination and poverty redirected him instead into a life of farm labor canneries in Alaska, fields in California and, eventually, into union organizing (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.).

By the 1960s, Itliong was a leader of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), an AFL-CIO affiliate representing largely Filipino farmworkers. In May 1965, Itliong led a successful ten-day strike against grape growers in the Coachella Valley, winning a wage increase (U.S. National Park Service, n.d.-b). That early victory set the stage for something much larger.

The Delano Grape Strike and the Birth of the UFW

When the harvest moved north to Delano in September 1965, growers attempted to cut wages once again. On September 7, Itliong called a meeting at Filipino Hall, where more than 1,500 Filipino farmworkers voted unanimously to strike. The walkout began the next day, September 8, 1965 the start of what would become known as the Delano Grape Strike (Zinn Education Project, 2025).

Itliong understood that a strike led only by Filipino workers, who numbered in the low thousands, could be broken if growers simply replaced them with other laborers a tactic that had defeated earlier strikes. He approached Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, leaders of the mostly Mexican American National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), and
convinced them to join the walkout. A week after the Filipino-led strike began, the NFWA joined in, and the two organizations fought side by side for the next five years (History.com, 2025).

The Delano Grape Strike became a five-year campaign of strikes, marches, and a nationwide grape boycott that drew international attention to the conditions of farmworkers. In 1966, AWOC and the NFWA formally merged to create the United Farm Workers (UFW), with Chavez as director and Itliong as assistant director (U.S. National Park Service, n.d.-b). The strike finally ended in 1970 with contracts guaranteeing better pay and benefits, and it later helped pave the way for California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first law in the country to grant farmworkers collective bargaining rights (History.com, 2025).

A Legacy Rewritten; and Reclaimed

Despite this history, the public memory of the farmworker movement has overwhelmingly centered on Cesar Chavez, who today is honored with a national monument, a postage stamp, and state holidays in his name (History.com, 2025). Itliong, along with fellow Filipino organizers such as Philip Vera Cruz  who would go on to serve as the UFW's second vice president faded from the popular narrative for decades (U.S. National Park Service, n.d.-a).

This erasure mirrors a broader pattern we have touched on elsewhere in this blog: the way Asian American contributions to American history are often folded into, or eclipsed by, narratives centered on other groups, even when those contributions were foundational rather than peripheral. The "model minority" image of Asian Americans as quiet, apolitical, and economically successful sits uneasily alongside the reality of Itliong's "radical" reputation historians note that Filipino workers were often considered more militant than their Mexican American counterparts in the early days of the strike (History.com, 2025).

In recent years, that imbalance has begun to shift. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom proclaimed October 25 Itliong's birthday as "Larry Itliong Day," and organizations like the Filipino American National Historical Society have worked to ensure his story, and that of the manong generation more broadly, is taught alongside that of Chavez and Huerta (Berkeley Food Institute, 2022).

Why This Story Matters

The manong generation's story is, in many ways, a story about the price of invisibility legal invisibility as "nationals" who were neither full citizens nor protected aliens, social invisibility as men barred from forming families, and historical invisibility as organizers whose role was minimized in the telling of a movement they helped build. It is also a story about how marginalized communities, even when divided by language, ethnicity, and circumstance, have found ways to build solidarity across those lines when it mattered most.

For a blog dedicated to unpacking Asian heritage in the United States, the manongs offer a powerful reminder: some of the most consequential chapters of that heritage were written not in boardrooms or temples, but in the vineyards of California, by men whose names many Americans still do not know.

References

Berkeley Food Institute. (2022, October 25). Celebrating Larry Itliong. https://food.berkeley.edu/from-the-field/celebrating-larry-itliong/

Buenaventura, R. S. (1998). San Diego's manongs of the 1920s and '30s. Filipino American National Historical Society Journal, 5, 30–31. https://doi.org/10.1353/fil.1998.a908182

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Larry Itliong. Britannica Kids. Retrieved June 14, 2026, from https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Larry-Itliong/634196

History.com. (2025, May 28). How Cesar Chavez joined Larry Itliong to demand farm workers' rights. https://www.history.com/articles/chavez-itliong-delano-grape-strike

Positively Filipino. (2013, October 2). When Hilario met Sally: The fight against anti-miscegenation laws. https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/when-hilario-met-sally-the-fight-against-anti-miscegenation-laws

U.S. National Park Service. (n.d.-a). Philip Vera Cruz. Retrieved June 14, 2026, from https://www.nps.gov/people/philip-vera-cruz.htm

U.S. National Park Service. (n.d.-b). Larry Itliong. Retrieved June 14, 2026, from https://www.nps.gov/people/larry-itliong.htm

Volpp, L. (2000). American mestizo: Filipinos and antimiscegenation laws in California. UC Davis Law Review, 33, 795–835.

Welga Digital Archive, Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies. (n.d.). Filipino immigration and the manong generation. Retrieved June 14, 2026, from https://welgadigitalarchive.omeka.net/exhibits/show/agbayani-village/filipino-immigration-and-the-m

Zinn Education Project. (2025, October 2). Sept. 8, 1965: Delano Grape Strike began. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/delano-grape-strike/