Therefore, Itliong’s signature was binding, not Chavez’s. Itliong represented a true union, while Chavez was head of an organizing committee with no union powers. I let the students know that, in fact, Itliong’s union and Chavez’s organizing committee had not merged as the United Farm Workers Union yet. I stressed to the class that when you don’t know the history and you watch a film about a famous person, you accept what happens, especially the details, as having actually happened. Luna’s response was that he took artistic license and the film was about Chavez and not the Filipinos. In the scene, which I have not seen but heard plenty about, Larry Itliong is a bystander in the historic signing, while Chavez is penning the contracts on behalf of the farm workers. Johnny asked Luna why his father was standing in the background and not at the table when the 28 growers finally sat down to sign union contracts. For example, Johnny Itliong, Larry Itliong’s son, told the story back at Bold Step: The 50th Anniversary of the Delano Grape Strike in Delano last September, of how he had approached the director Diego Luna to ask about historical inaccuracy in his 2014 feature film about Cesar Chavez. I shared a lot of buried stories, as well as the general history. Once I got going, I had plenty of stories to share! Whereas before I came on campus, I fretted that it had been several months since I’d last spoken about the book and the history, I went into full-speed-ahead mode. So for me, my goal was to share that rich history with them. As expected, none of the students were aware that the Filipino American farm workers had started the strike. I’m not really sure how many of the students (I’m guessing there were 40-50 students per class, which was heartening to see) actually read the chapter because none of the questions were directed at anything that happened in that chapter. Plus, the juniors and seniors have taken many more AAS courses and their awareness is markedly more advanced. The maturity level is quite stark between those in their first year of college and those getting ready to graduate. And just as important, most of them were juniors and seniors. For one, these students read the entire book. As I got up to speak, I reminded myself not to expect an engaging group of students as I had when I spoke last fall at Professor Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales’s Filipino/a Literature, Art, and Culture class. No matter how many times I see the documentary, I am always moved by the images and the stories. Addressing the afternoon class.Īfter the student presentations, Kei showed Marissa Aroy’s documentary, Delano Manongs: The Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers Movement. And I told the second class how important it is to capture their families’ stories. I told Kei after the first class that it was a wonderful project to assign. At the same time, there were obvious generational differences, but I realized that the immigrant experience is still a journey fraught with anxiety and hope. Some parents didn’t know English and had to learn, they had to struggle with assimilation and isolation, and the American Dream was through their children. Since most of these kids are eighteen or nineteen years old, their parents’ immigrant stories from the mid-1990s were fascinating to me. Before I spoke before each class, three students presented. Kei had assigned the students an oral history project in which they had to interview someone about their history and present to the class. Lecturer Kei Fischer had her students, who were mostly freshmen, read Chapter 11 of A Village in the Fields, which chronicles the beginning of the Delano Grape Strike, and invited me to discuss the Filipino American contributions to the farm labor movement. class, under San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies, College of Ethnic Studies. This past Thursday, I attended two sections of History of Asians in the U.S. At the first class discussing Filipino American farm workers’ contributions.
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