'Manong' farmworkers celebrated
By Casey Christie / The Californian
Paul Chavez, president and chairman of the Cesar Chavez Foundation and son of the late founder of the UFW, Cesar Chavez, right, greets old friend John Armington Saturday, at Forty Acres in Delano during the 40th Anniversary Celebration of Agbayani Village to honor the Manongs. In 1965, Armington's father, Mariano Armington, was the president of the Filipino Community and made the motion at a meeting in Delano, with a second from another in attendance, and then a vote took place to start the grape strike. That's when Cesar Chavez and the UFW became involved. Armington was one of the main speakers at the Saturday event in Delano.
Chanting "Si, se puede" and "Mabuhay" "Yes, it can be Louis Vuitton Bags Australia Cheap done," in Spanish, and "Long live," in Tagalog more than 300 people marked the 40th anniversary on Saturday of the opening of Delano Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village for retired Filipino farmworkers.
With cheers, tears, stories and hugs, they saluted Agbayani, a Filipino union member who died of a heart attack on the picket line during a strike, and other "manongs," most of whom emigrated to California from the Philippines as young, single men in the 1920s and 1930s.
The 59 unit Louboutin Flats retirement community, which featured two private rooms per bathroom, as well as a recreation room, a community kitchen, a dining room and garden, was volunteer built on the site of what now called The Forty Acres, the United Farm Workers first headquarters.
The last worker who lived there, Fred Abad, died in 1997, and it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008.
Quoting the late National Farm Workers Association and United Farm Workers founder Cesar Louis Vuitton Outlet Australia Chavez, speakers emphasized what Chavez had always said that Filipino Nike Lunar Eclipse farmworkers had been true pioneers in laborers struggle, voting first to strike on Sept. 8, 1965, and igniting and helping win a five year battle for a 40 cents an hour raise for table grape pickers.
The National Farm Workers Association quickly joined the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee the Filipino union on strike, and in 1966, the two unions merged, ultimately becoming the UFW. It didn happen without mutterings from Latino union members, UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez told the crowd.
"Cesar talked about it in Peter Matthiessen 1969 book Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Christian Louboutin Pigalle Spikes Revolution, " Rodriguez said. "Cesar related how early in the strike, a few Latino union members wanted to have a vote on whether to join the Filipinos. In other words, they wanted to take a vote to discriminate. Cesar said he replied my dead body. "
Agbayani Village was more than payback to workers who Nike Free 3.0 never had pensions or 401Ks and who found themselves working well past retirement age when the strike was settled in 1970.
It was also Pandora Australia a necessity as Louboutin Pigalle Plato many Filipino workers had been barred from labor camps during the strike, NFWA and UFW founder Dolores Huerta recalled.
She remembered a sit in at a Planning Commission meeting in Bakersfield to get the necessary permits.
"When they were trying to get the plans for the Village, down there in Bakersfield, the county would not approve the plans for the Village," Huerta told those assembled under a large white tent Saturday. "So they actually had to do a sit in in the offices of the Planning Commission to get the permits to do the Agbayani Village."
The land itself had to be leached of salt and alkali deposits, Village landscape architect Dennis Dahlin remembered.
"This was just a bare piece of land in the next to the Delano city dump," Dahlin said. "The challenge was the soil."
"I knew nothing about construction but they still wanted me anyway," said Chu, who three years ago introduced the POWER Act in Congress, aimed at protecting workers from discrimination.
"It one thing to learn about the history of discriminatory laws," Chu said in an interview. "It another thing to come up here and talk to them and to see what conditions they faced."
Insurance lawyer John Armington, who started picking grapes at age 9, was present for the 1965 strike vote and remembered manongs as men of wisdom.
Manong "Phillip (Vera Cruz) came up to me one time when I was in high school and was asking if I should stay here and work, or work with the union, or something else and he said to me everyone can go to college and finish, " Armington said in an interview. "He said known you since you were five years old and you can do that. And so that why I did it."
Traditional meals of adobo and lumpia marinated meat and eggrolls followed nearly two hours of speeches and presentations to volunteers.
Cerritos Mayor Mark Pulido, a Filipino American who began coming to the Delano area as a college freshman in 1987, returned Saturday to celebrate the sage manongs and as a trial run for next year 50th anniversary of the 1965 strike.
"This is really the start of a year long celebration of that amazing moment in the American labor movement, and specifically the farmworker movement that brought people together from all backgrounds to fight for social justice in the fields of California," Pulido said. "So that we can enjoy a better, more equitable, more just life."
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