![]() ![]() “I’m a short Filipino,” Vera Cruz says bluntly in his newly published personal memoir, “but it was just as hard for me to bend over as a big white guy.”įor Filipino farm workers, life in Delano, about 25 miles north of Bakersfield, was no immigrants’ dream. The growers had a popular saying, Vera Cruz recalls: that Filipinos made good farm workers because they were built close to the ground. Army, Vera Cruz came to the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.įor farmers in California, the Filipinos may have seemed the ideal “stoop labor.” They were young, single men who, because of restrictive immigration laws against Asians, could not bring their families here and could be housed in labor camps. In the spring of 1943, after a brief stint in the U.S. If I had my own family here, how could I support my family back home?” Then, he turns subdued: “I never even got married. (But) my brother and sister and all my brother’s six kids went to college.” “It took me my whole life to bring literacy to my family,” he says proudly. So he dropped out and went back to working in restaurants full-time. But the $2.50 a week he earned as a houseboy wasn’t enough to support his family back home. Laid off that same winter, the migrant worker began a lifetime of travels: busing tables at a Chicago restaurant, canning fish in Alaska, hoeing beets in North Dakota, picking grapes in the San Joaquin Valley.īy 1931, Vera Cruz had enrolled at Gonzaga University in Spokane. He wound up cutting boards at a box factory in Cosmopolis, Wash. Twenty-two-year-old Philip Villamin Vera Cruz left the Philippines in 1926, dreaming of going to college and becoming a lawyer. All those years, I was fighting for equality and justice, but I never got there. “The principle of justice is just a theory,” he says carefully. Strands of thick gray hair hang gracefully on his forehead, over the deep grooves that age and sun have left on his face. ![]() Vera Cruz is dressed in a well-worn, button-down white shirt, his pockets stuffed with pens and reading glasses as if he’s about to head into a union meeting. His story, like a whole generation of the manong, is a lost chapter in Filipino history and California labor history.” and has been incredibly courageous in pursuing what he thought was right. “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. But he represents a vital link to the past as one of the last living members of the manong: single Filipino men who came to America in the early 1900s to work in the fields, factories and canneries up and down the West Coast. Until recently, the 87-year-old labor leader had been largely forgotten. These days, Vera Cruz, who became the highest-ranking Filipino in the UFW, spends his time growing grapes in the back yard of his home here. Nor did he know that it would eventually lead to the formation of the United Farm Workers and change the face of American labor. 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. ![]()
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