Remembering Coachella 60 years ago

They were the Filipino grape pickers who 60 years ago called a strike against vineyard owners that spread north to Delano and helped spark the national farm-labor movement.

Sixty years ago today, a group led by Larry Itliong called the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) AFL-CIO, decided to strike on May 3, 1965 in the Coachella Valley. Fed up with working for $1.25 per hour or $1.10 per box, the strikers, mostly Filipino and many in their 50s and 60s, wanted a 15-cent-per-hour wage increase, to match the $1.40 per hour paid to former braceros. By the end, nearly 1,000 workers joined the strike. They got their raise, but there was no contract between them and the growers. After the success in Coachella, many of the same Filipinos moved north to Delano, where the grape-picking season begins in September.

"They set the stage for everything," said Paul Chavez, son of the late Cesar Chavez, founder of what became the United Farm Workers. "Nobody showed the kind of conviction these men did."

Yet their story is fading into history's background and is rarely remembered during national observances.

Read more from the story I reported for The Press-Enterprise in 2005 about this underreported part of history: https://www.leezeltanglao.com/coachella-1965-strike

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