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Larry Itliong

1913–1977 · 64 years Specialist

Lost three fingers in a cannery, then organized the workers anyway

Larry Itliong was born October 25, 1913, in San Nicolas, in the Philippines' Pangasinan province, and arrived alone in the United States in 1929 at fifteen, part of the first big wave of Filipino manongs recruited to work West Coast farms and canneries. He lost three fingers on his right hand in an Alaskan salmon cannery accident while still young, and workers took to calling him 'Seven Fingers,' a nickname that stuck through decades of organizing. He joined his first strike in 1930 and spent the next thirty-five years moving between Alaska, Washington and California, building and leading Filipino farm and cannery unions long before anyone outside the fields had heard the word 'Delano.'

By 1965 Itliong led the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, made up mostly of Filipino grape pickers. On September 8, 1965, AWOC voted to strike the Delano-area grape growers over stagnant wages; a week later Cesar Chavez's Mexican-American National Farm Workers Association voted to join. The two organizations merged the following August into the United Farm Workers, with Chavez as director and Itliong as his assistant director, and the combined strike and grape boycott ran five years before growers signed contracts in 1970. Itliong had spent three decades organizing before Chavez was a name in the fields, and the strike vote that started it all was his committee's, not Chavez's -- a sequence the union's own early telling of its history did not always keep straight.

Itliong distrusted the merger even as he voted for it, afraid that a union increasingly built around Chavez and a Mexican-American majority would treat Filipino members as junior partners in a fight Filipinos had started. That fear proved accurate. Younger Filipino organizers found themselves sidelined from union leadership through the late 1960s, and the aging manongs who had struck in 1965 -- many unmarried, without children to house them in old age -- had no retirement security once field work became impossible. Itliong resigned as assistant director in 1971, citing exactly that neglect, and spent his last years pushing, mostly without success, for a retirement home built for Filipino farmworkers who had given their working lives to a movement that ended up carrying somebody else's name.

Itliong died of complications from Lou Gehrig's disease on February 8, 1977, in Delano, at sixty-three. For decades afterward, textbooks and even the United Farm Workers' own institutional memory credited Chavez alone with starting the movement Itliong's committee had actually voted to launch. That began changing only in the 2010s: California made October 25, Itliong's birthday, a state day of recognition in 2015, and a Delano-area school district renamed a school for him and fellow organizer Philip Vera Cruz in 2017, among the first public schools in the country named for Filipino Americans. The correction is still in progress; the strike's founding date is now more often taught as September 8, not the 16th.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Larry Itliong's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Filipino Farm Labor Union other
Founded in Stockton, California 1956
Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee other
Mostly-Filipino farmworker union he led into the Delano strike 1965
Delano grape strike other
Voted by AWOC on September 8, 1965; joined by the NFWA a week later 1965
United Farm Workers company
Merger of AWOC and NFWA; served as assistant director under Cesar Chavez 1966

Life in brief

with age at each point

October 25, 1913 aged 0 Born in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, Philippines
1929 aged ~16 Immigrates to the United States alone at fifteen
1930 aged ~17 Joins his first labor strike and loses three fingers in an Alaska cannery accident The accident earned him the nickname 'Seven Fingers.'
1956 aged ~43 Founds the Filipino Farm Labor Union in Stockton
September 8, 1965 aged 51 Leads AWOC's vote to strike Delano-area grape growers The National Farm Workers Association joined the strike a week later.
August 22, 1966 aged 52 AWOC and the NFWA merge into the United Farm Workers
1971 aged ~58 Resigns as UFW assistant director, citing the union's neglect of aging Filipino members
February 8, 1977 aged 63 Dies of Lou Gehrig's disease in Delano, California