Better to go back to work, he said, and wait for a better time. But the workers weren’t having it. The strike in Arvin had been mostly Mexican pickers who were relatively easy to replace, they said, while they were Zaninovich’s best packers; he wouldn’t risk losing them. And the hot weather had lasted, so the pressure was still on. They decided to keep playing cards.10
The stay-at-home spread. Filipino workers at other companies refused to leave their camps. Despite his doubts, Itliong had little choice but to prepare for a formal strike vote. Hundreds of men came to Filipino Hall on September 8 and voted to strike. Some went on picket duty the next morning, but others, concerned about losing their homes in what might be a relatively long strike, decided to wait it out in the camps. The growers had other ideas and employed a tactic they hadn’t used since the battles of the 1930s: they turned off the gas, water, and electricity. But the strikers were not easily bullied; they continued to sleep in their beds, built outdoor toilets, and cooked their meals on campfires. The growers then busted the stay-at-home by busting up the camps, first using private security guards, who scattered the strikers’ food, moved their belongings out of the bunkhouses, and barred the doors. Later, police evicted the men from company property. Hundreds of Filipinos moved to Delano’s west side, walking the streets, hanging out in the bars and cafés, sleeping at Filipino Hall. The hall, a place usually used for card games, dances, and various patriotic celebrations, was about to become a bivouac in a labor war.
Entering the 1960s, Filipino workers were the main bearers of the limited tradition of conventional unionism in the California fields. In the 1920s, when the national average for production-line factory workers was under $5 a day, they had pushed their average earnings above $6, thanks to their exclusive control over who worked in the asparagus fields, their near monopoly on the difficult skill of cutting asparagus, and their unity in various Filipino-only associations.11 Between the springs of 1932 and 1934, they were the leading ethnic group in ten separate successful strikes, one of which even secured formal recognition of the C&A as the workers’ bargaining agent, one of the few times the Communist-led union forced a grower to sign a contract. Carey McWilliams reported that by 1934, the independent Filipino Labor Union (FLU) had seven locals throughout California with about 2,000 dues-paying members. Its most stable local, in Santa Maria, operated out of a labor temple built with $8,000 from union dues.12 Propelled by a victorious strike in 1934, and working in close cooperation with independent Anglo and Mexican unions, the Santa Maria FLU local signed contracts with the local Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association. Those contracts were strengthened through a successful 1937 strike, and in 1939 they included preferential union hiring, overtime pay, provisions about working conditions, and a joint labor-management grievance board.13
But for all the successes of the FLU, it was not as powerful as the Filipino Agricultural Labor Association, or FALA, which scored its first great victory in a one-day stay-at-home by 5,000 Stockton asparagus cutters in 1939. No one worked that day in 40,000 acres of ready-to-harvest asparagus, and the growers immediately capitulated and signed a collective bargaining agreement. The FALA, whose membership included not only workers but professionals, small businessmen, labor contractors and foremen, followed up that victory with strikes in the Sacramento Delta’s Brussels sprout, tomato, and celery fields, all of which resulted in signed contracts and union recognition. The next year, the power of the union was somewhat diminished as the growers organized a company union with a group of breakaway Filipino contractors, but FALA still had some 7,000 workers under contract in the delta region and nearly 30,000 members in other parts of the state, organized into separate, independent locals. These remarkable achievements, virtually unacknowledged in the conventional chronicles of endless farm worker defeats leading up to the supposedly singular victory of the UFW, continued in force until World War II, when the FLU and FALA memberships were depleted by the entry of so many Filipino farm workers into the U.S. Army. Bracero labor made it difficult to rebuild the two unions, but Filipino workers maintained a level of militancy and organization which made them, since AWOC’s inception in 1960, the strongest contingent of farm workers in the AFL-CIO sponsored union.14
For the Filipino farm workers who launched the stay-at-home in the Zaninovich camp this rich union tradition was the story of their own lives. They had lived it, they had authored it, they were the men who had sometimes lost and often won. They were mostly “Manong,” the first generation of Filipinos who had come to California as young men between 1923 and 1934. The union victories in the thirties were among the great adventures of their youth. Those exploits, well told and therefore well remembered, were part of the sweetness of their bittersweet lives. The internal solidarity and unity in action that had made these triumphs possible were not apart from a daily life that combined hard work and great suffering with an almost unfathomable closeness and mutual affection. The closeness had been forced upon them. The 20,000 souls who had worked together in the California fields since the mid-1920s lived thoroughly segregated lives: restricted to a small variety of jobs; cramped together in labor camps, or in the cheap hotels and rundown apartments of various “little Manilas”; cut off from family life by the fact that few women emigrated from the Philippines and that until 1948 it had been illegal in California for whites or Mexicans to marry Filipinos.* Stranded in small islands of male friends and fellow workers, they learned to take care of each other. They rented rooms together where they shared beds, food, and money. They pooled resources and bought jointly owned cars or an expensive suit of clothes which they would take turns wearing as they posed for pictures to be sent home or when they went out for a night on the town. Some were able to extend their internal solidarity out into the world. The Manong produced a high percentage of radical internationalists, labor union activists, socialists, and Communists. Many others remained quite insular, true only to their shared bachelor society, passing their time working, playing cards, and raising and fighting their beloved roosters. Some, only a few, lived off various scams and con games, often taking advantage of the naiveté of their more trusting brothers. But most of the Manong lived deeply interrelated lives, their fates woven closer and closer together as the years went by, until the 1965 grape strike gave them one last chance to walk together onto the public stage and one last story to tell.
By the time of the strike, however, the Manong did have some company. After World War II, many Filipino veterans became citizens, traveled to Hawaii and the Philippines, got married, had children, and then returned to the U.S. and farm work. When their sons grew old enough, some followed their fathers to California, and joined them in the fields. By 1965, these men were in their early twenties, ready to become the “Huks” of the strike (a reference to the Hukbalahap guerrillas who had fought the Japanese occupation in World War II)—so called for their militancy on the picket lines and their guerrilla actions in the fields.15
Rudy Reyes, who would become a soldier of the early UFW, was part of this minority within a minority, but his story is different from those of his fellow Delano Huks. His dad, an early Manong, joined the Coast Guard well before World War II, met his Filipina wife in Hawaii, and after the war moved his family to Seattle, where he got a job as a draftsman. Reyes, born in 1941, grew up in a prosperous working-class family and got good grades in high school, but instead of going to college he went to the fields. “I wanted to learn, yes, I wanted to learn . . . but not in college. I wanted to learn to be a hobo. I was a reader; I had read Hemingway and Kerouac, and I wanted to hit the road. It wasn’t hard to find hobo life. I went down to the Seattle waterfront and just signed up.”16
Rudy traveled with Native Americans, whites, and blacks on the hobo circuit. They would work for a little while at a small ranch, then move on when they had enough money in their pockets. They worked only when they had to. Otherwise it was stealing fruit and vegetables from the fields, making big pots of soup, hanging out, and telling stories. There was quite a lot of drinking, but not everyone was a drunk. While working in the apples in Yakima, Washington, he linked up with a black man named Billy, who was a little bit older and taught him how to ride the trains. They ran into some of the same people everywhere, and Rudy became a somebody in his own chosen world. “There weren’t many fights,” said Reyes. “Hobos are actually a pretty peaceful bunch.”
But Billy was
