THEME: A DUTY TO FIGHT LABOUR
Like so many times before, Philip Vera Cruz, a 60-year-old Filipino farm worker, was picking grapes one hot, late-summer afternoon in the San Joaquin Valley.
But this day in September 1965, was to be like no other. As Vera Cruz stooped and plucked the ripe fruit to a monotonous beat, another man ran up to report that seven miles away, Filipino migrants were sitting down in the grape fields of Delano and vowing not to work again until they got a raise.
“That’s when I stopped picking grapes for the first time in over 20 years,” Vera Cruz recalls. “And I never went back.”
He did not know then that the Delano grape strike launched by Filipino migrants would be the first shot in a bitter five-year war between migrant workers and California’s agricultural industry. Nor did he know that it would eventually lead to the formation of the United Farm Workers and change the face of American labor.
“Philip is truly a pioneer,” says Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center and president of the AFL-CIO’s Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. “He has struggled all his life . . . and has been incredibly courageous in pursuing what he thought was right. His story, like a whole generation of the manong, is a lost chapter in Filipino history and California labor history.” “
“I took it as a duty to fight for the union,” he continues. “I was doing what I had to do. The union helps the workers, and I’m one of them. I wanted to give my fair share.”
Although academics and unionists are now rushing to recognize Vera Cruz and the lost history of his generation, he remains a quiet, profoundly modest man still committed to fighting racism and injustice.