Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement

The authors compiled a comprehensive oral history of Philip Vera Cruz, a vice-president of the United Farm Workers union, from his childhood in the Philippine countryside, to his labors in factories and restaurants from Alaska to Chicago, to his leading role in organizing farm workers in California. Vera Cruz speaks with keen political savvy and refreshing honesty about racism, the battles with the growers and their allies in the police departments, courts and government halls, as well as internal conflicts in the union. Some were conflicts between the Filipino and Mexican workers, some between the leadership of the union and the rank and file. I knew and greatly admired Philip when I worked with the UFW, but I still learned so much from this book. I'm so glad that Lilia Villanueva and Craig Scharlin have preserved his voice and thoughts for generations to come!

Amazing and inspiring and insightful. Philip Vera Cruz writing and thoughts into the UFW and the leadership, the Filipino experience, social movements, politics, organizing, capitalism, etc. are incredible. This is a book that I will look back to inform me when I have questions. It's also an incredibly moving account of his struggle in the Philippines and in the US. It's also very notable his perspective as a man, nothing wrong, but interesting when he writes of all the Filipino women going to Japan as prostitutes.

memoir of filipino organizing of the UFW in Ca

When I finished reading Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart: A Personal History I was both tremendously impressed with it as a novel and source of information about California labor history in the first half of the twentieth century, and very curious about why the Filipinos’ role in that history is almost never mentioned. A little research led me to the Filipino activists Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, among others. I couldn’t find a good book about Itliong for adults (there are biographies for children), so chose this one about Vera Cruz.

The text is an oral history and suffers from a bit of repetition, but definitely repaid the time I spent reading it. Like Bulosan, Vera Cruz came from a rural Filipino family, and emigrated to the US to seek his fortune. They were both self educated to some extent; Vera Cruz did his high school work here and also some college. Poverty kept him from going farther. In Vera Cruz’s case, he felt he had to send money home to support his younger brother and sister, since Japanese interrogation of his father during WWII left him a broken man. Both Bulosan and Vera Cruz followed a typical immigrant’s life, moving frequently among jobs in fields and canneries up and down the coast, and for Vera Cruz, restaurant and hotel work.

Bulosan became a journalist and novelist as well as a labor union activist. His novel reflects his radical political connections and impulsive life. Vera Cruz, on the other hand, was a sober and self-controlled man who analyzed situations and acted accordingly. He was not one to push himself forward, so he took a back seat to Itliong and later, to Cesar Chavez. But he served on the council of the United Farm Workers for many years, before breaking with the union over Chavez’s leadership and choice to make an alliance with Ferdinand Marcos.

Most of the book discusses the life of Filipino farm workers as part of a system that left them isolated and exploited. US immigration laws allowed them to immigrate, but did not allow Filipino women to do so. US anti-miscegenation laws left them no recourse other than visiting brothels. With no home companionship and stuck in farm housing that was little better than animals got, they tended to spend their leisure time in parts of town allowed them: full of bars and gambling houses. This led to prejudice and a vicious circle of perception and treatment.

However, Filipino farm workers did strike and try to win recognition and contracts. They were fighting against two forces however: growers who used Filipino agents to manage the workers, and the Teamsters, who made a show of trying to help them but in reality did next to nothing. So eventually the Filipinos started to organize their own union (AWOC), and initiated the strike that really kick-started farm worker power: the grape pickers strike in Delano in 1965. Alongside them the Mexican and Mexican American farm workers had started a separate union, the NFWA. The NFWA decided to join the strike. With that many workers, and a charismatic leader like Chavez that the press loved, the five year strike finally succeeded in recognition and contracts. I was attending the University of California in the last two years of the strike, and dutifully did not buy grapes. I still automatically hesitate to buy grapes, so strong was the public support for the workers.

Vera Cruz explains that the Filipinos were eventually squeezed into obscurity because they were a group that was aging and not replenishing itself, as very few had been able to marry, unlike the Mexican workers. He says that newer Filipino immigrants came for jobs in other industries. With a relatively good education system and English as a commonly used language in the Philippines, they had options.

Vera Cruz is also balanced when discussing Chavez. He lauds Chavez for the organizing work he did, but describes the autocratic style and unfortunate choices of Chavez’s later years as the reason he finally left the union without rancor.

Since most books about farm workers in California focus on the history of the UFW and it emerged from the UFWA, this is one of the few places to get this kind of information. Also, if you are in the region, there is the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies at the University of California, Davis.

When the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) announced the Filipino American History Month 2020 theme The History of Filipino American Activism, I immediately knew what to read for FAHM2020 - PHILIP VERA CRUZ: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF FILIPINO IMMIGRANTS AND THE FARMWORKERS MOVEMENT by Craig Schirlin and Lilia V. Villanueva.

Originally published in 1992, this is Filipino American labor leader and vice-president of the United Farm Workers (UFW) Philip Vera Cruz’s oral memoir. Besides discussing his life in the Philippines and the U.S., Vera Cruz gives insights into organizing the farmworkers movement and its leadership. In 1965 Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong led the Delano Grape Strike, pressuring growers for better wages and working conditions. The strike’s success led to Filipino and Mexican farmworkers joining together to form the UFW. Vera Cruz would leave the UFW in 1977 due to differences with leadership. He died in 1994 at the age of 89.

As the highest-ranking Filipino officer in the UFW, Vera Cruz offers a unique perspective, including the challenges of communicating to the Filipino union members. Vera Cruz emphasizes Filipinos as a “minority within a minority.” Filipino leaders had no real power in the union and members didn’t feel like they had an equal voice.

Most revealing are discussions about the struggles over leadership and conflicts with Cesar Chavez, the charismatic leader of the UFW. Vera Cruz says, “The movement must go beyond its leaders.” The issue of democracy within the union was difficult for Vera Cruz to deal with. Chavez had too much power and some saw him as omnipotent. Criticism against him was not tolerated and Vera Cruz thought not being able to express contrasting opinions limited the growth of the union. “One person is not the union…The farmworkers are the union.”

Vera Cruz’s thoughtful reflections on the UFW’s management decisions and his own shortcomings (i.e. not speaking up) are critical, fair, and considerate. In the end, he’s optimistic about the future and in the younger generation. Also, his commentary about social justice, American agribusiness and the capitalism, exploited immigrant labor, and oppression of the poor are still relevant because workers’ rights are a continual struggle.

Cruz’s oral history is just one example of the overlooked contributions of the manong generation of Filipino Americans to the revolutionary history of the farm labor movement in America.

This first person narrative from Philip Vera Cruz focuses on his role as a labor organizer among Filipino farmworkers in California. It was the Filipino union that started the Grape strike in Delano, Chavez’s union joined in as an act of solidarity, and then both merged into the UFW. The discussion of the UFW focuses on Philip Vera Cruz’s critiques of Chavez’s leadership style and his opposition to the UFW’s implicit endorsement of Marcos’ dictatorship in the Philippines. I think its an important book to think about the history of the UFW, the difficulties with inter-ethnic organizing, and the importance of democratic leadership within unions. Oh, and he also talks about his ideas about religion and the relationship between churches and social movements. He also lays out his opposition to Chavez's policies around undocumented workers.

Forgotten lives. This is what the book tries to make us remember. Lives that have shaped America but deleted in history and buried with the nameless bodies that lived them.

n  
While still across the ocean
I heard about the U.S.A.
So thrilled by wild imagination
I left home through Manila Bay

Then on my way I thought and wondered
Alone what would the future be?
I gambled parental care and love
In search for human liberty.

But beautiful bright pictures painted
Were just half of the whole story…
Reflections of great wealth and power
In the land of slavery.

Minorities in shanty towns, slums…
Disgraceful spots for all to see
In the enviable Garden of Eden,
Land of affluence and poverty.

Since then I was a hungry stray dog,
Too busy to keep myself alive…
It seems equality and freedom
Will never be where billionaires thrive!

A lust for power causes oppression
To rob the poor in senseless greed;
The wealthy few’s excessive profits
Tend to enslave the world in need.
-Philip Vera Cruzn