Chapter 1The Province

Foreword

I have spent my working life in the archive. My subjects have been Black American writers and intellectuals, the men and women who built the post-war public sphere out of essays and manifestos and quarrels conducted in the little magazines, and the thing they had in common — the thing that made them my subjects — was that they left words behind on purpose. They wrote themselves down. They understood that the record was a place you had to occupy, and they occupied it. When I go looking for them, they are there, in the letters and the transcripts and the recorded lectures, arguing still.

Larry Itliong left almost none of that. A man who changed American labor history, who put fifteen hundred workers on a picket line and started the most consequential agricultural strike this country has seen, survives in the documentary record as one taped speech, delivered to a few hundred people at a university, preserved only because someone in the room happened to have a tape recorder running. That is the archive of the man who started it. One tape, kept by accident.

That absence is why I crossed over. I am a Chicago critic who has never written about a field, a cannery, or a Filipino, and I know how that looks. But my real subject has never been literature. It has been the question underneath the literature: who gets recorded, whose argument survives, whose name ends up on the work. I had spent decades tracing how a Black writer's byline could be borrowed, buried, or handed to someone better positioned to carry it. And here was the case in its purest form — a man who wrote a text as large as a strike and watched another name go onto it.

I expected, when I began, to be writing a corrective footnote. The record led me to expect a supporting figure, a name to be reinserted into a paragraph that belonged to Cesar Chavez. That is not what I found. I found an originator. The Filipino workers walked out first. They struck the vineyards, and then they invited the Mexican-American union to join a fight the manongs had already begun. Working from the public record, from the memoirs and the court files and the press coverage of the period, I kept arriving at the same fact from every direction: the argument was Itliong's before it was anyone's, and the movement kept the argument and lost the man who made it.

I want to be exact about what he was, because the easy version gets it wrong in a flattering way. He was not an ally who chose someone else's struggle and deserves thanks for the choosing. He was the author of the thing itself. He did not lend his conviction to a cause already underway; he began it, and the beginning is precisely the part that history mislaid. The distinction matters. One is generosity. The other is authorship — and authorship is a claim, and this book is about a claim that was taken.

That is why he is worth a book, and worth this one from me in particular. The strike was his text. The byline went to a more photogenic name, a majority story, a movement that could not accommodate an aging Filipino pragmatist and so quietly wrote him out. How credit travels away from the person who did the work and toward the person who fits the narrative — that transaction is the oldest subject I know, and I have never seen it recorded more plainly than in the distance between September 8 and September 16, 1965.

I came to Larry Itliong because he was missing from a record I have spent my life reading. I stayed because his absence explained the record better than any presence I had studied. This book is my attempt to give the argument back to the man who made it.

— Solomon Treadway, Chicago

Chapter 1 · The Province

The province of Pangasinan lies along the western coast of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippine archipelago, and it is flat. From the town of San Nicolas, where Modesto Dulay Itliong was born on October 25, 1913, one can look north across the rice paddies toward the Cordillera mountains and see them only as a suggestion on the horizon, a blue-gray smudge that never comes closer. The flatness is not empty. It is dense with green, the paddies that flood in the monsoon and turn the province into a mirror of the sky, the coconut palms that bend in the typhoon winds, the fish ponds that dot the lowlands where the Agno River spreads into the Lingayen Gulf. The soil is rich. The water is abundant. The province feeds itself and feeds others.

San Nicolas itself was a municipal town in the first district of Pangasinan, administered under the Spanish colonial grid that had organized Philippine lowland life since the sixteenth century. The town sat in the heart of the Agno River basin, its fields divided by the irrigation canals that the Spanish friar orders had engineered and that Filipino farmers had maintained across generations. The population spoke Pangasinense — Pangasinan language — which is distinct from Ilocano, the dominant tongue of the neighboring Ilocos provinces to the north. This distinction mattered, because the labor recruiters who would descend on Pangasinan in the 1920s would draw workers from both linguistic communities, and the Ilocano and Pangasinan men who ended up in the same California labor camps would discover that they shared more — in circumstance, in grievance, in the geography of exploitation — than they shared in words. Itliong himself would learn Ilocano in the camps, the necessity of organizing across the provincial linguistic divide being one of the first practical educations America gave him.

The province was one of the most agriculturally productive in the Philippines. Pangasinan's rice output fed much of central Luzon. The lowland fields grew garlic, onions, and bangus — milkfish — in the aquaculture ponds that traced the river's lower reaches. But the productivity of the land accrued primarily to the landlord class, the ilustrado families and the Catholic Church institutions that controlled most of the arable acreage under the inquilino leasehold system. The Itliong family farmed as kasamas — tenant sharecroppers — on land they would never own. Their portion of the harvest was fixed by custom and enforced by obligation: roughly half went to the landowner, sometimes more when transport costs and seed debts were deducted from the workers' share before division. The mathematics of this arrangement were unambiguous: the people who worked the soil were structurally prevented from accumulating enough capital to buy it.

But the flatness carries another meaning. In a flat place there is nowhere to hide. Power in Pangasinan has always been visible, the landlord's house standing above the nipa huts, the church bell that regulated the hours of labor, the provincial governor whose word carried the weight of Spanish colonial authority for three centuries and then, after 1898, the weight of American colonial authority, which arrived with rifles and stayed with schools. A boy growing up in San Nicolas in the second decade of the twentieth century could see the architecture of power from his front door. He could see who owned the land. He could see who worked it. He could see the distance between the two, and it was not a distance that required a telescope to measure.

Modesto Itliong, he would not become Larry until America renamed him, as America renamed so many things, was the sixth of a farmer's children. His father worked land he did not own. This was not unusual. In Pangasinan, as in most of the Philippines under the American colonial regime, land ownership was concentrated in the hands of a small class of landholders, the principales, the ilustrados, the families whose position was established under Spain and ratified under the Americans. The tenant farmer, the kasama, worked the land on shares, keeping a portion of the harvest and surrendering the rest to the owner. The portion that went to the owner was always larger. The portion that stayed with the farmer was always smaller than it needed to be. This was not a matter of negotiation. It was a matter of structure.

The American colonial government, which had taken the Philippines from Spain in 1898 and then fought a brutal war against the Filipino independence movement to keep it, presented itself as a force for modernization and democracy. It built schools. It trained Filipino teachers. It established a public health system. It created a civil service. It spoke constantly of preparing the Filipinos for self-government, a preparation that would take, by American estimation, as long as America found it useful to be in the Philippines. The schools were real. The modernization was real. The democracy was selective. The economic structure, land concentrated in the hands of the few, labor extracted from the many, remained intact because the Americans found it convenient to work with the existing Filipino elite rather than against them.

What the American colonial project did, more than anything else, was open a door. The door led in one direction: west, across the Pacific, to the fields and canneries and railroads of the American mainland, where labor was needed and wages, even the worst wages, were higher than anything available in the Philippines. The door was not opened out of generosity. It was opened because American agriculture, particularly in Hawaii and on the Pacific coast, required a cheap, mobile, controllable labor force, and the Filipinos, colonial subjects, not immigrants, not citizens, occupying a legal gray zone that denied them the rights of Americans while granting them the ability to travel to America, were ideal.

They were ideal because they could come but could not stay. They could work but could not own. They could be present in American fields and canneries and bunkhouses but absent from American neighborhoods, schools, and voter rolls. The legal architecture was precise. Filipinos were "nationals", not aliens, so they could enter the United States without immigration quotas, but not citizens, so they could not vote, could not naturalize, could not in most states marry outside their race. This last restriction, the anti-miscegenation laws that existed in California and a dozen other western states, would shape the lives of an entire generation of Filipino men more profoundly than any other single law on the books.

The pensionado program sent the sons of the Filipino elite to American universities. The labor recruiters sent the sons of the Filipino farmers to American fields. Modesto Itliong's family was not elite. No one was coming to San Nicolas to offer a scholarship to the University of Michigan. What came to Pangasinan were the agents of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, the Alaska salmon canneries, and the California agricultural enterprises that needed bodies, strong, young, willing, to do the work that white Americans would not do at the wages that white Americans would not accept.

The recruiting machinery that reached into Pangasinan and the neighboring Ilocos provinces operated through multiple channels. Established labor contractors — often Filipinos who had already made the crossing and returned, or who communicated through letter chains — spread word of wages that seemed extraordinary by provincial standards. A field worker in the Sacramento delta could earn two dollars a day cutting asparagus. Two dollars was more than a kasama family might see in a week of rice cultivation, after the landlord took his share. The figures were real, though they omitted the cost of the passage, the debts to the labor contractor, the housing deductions from wages, and the competitive wages that white workers had already secured and that Filipino workers would never be offered. The recruiting agents were not lying, exactly. They were presenting one arithmetic and concealing another.

The Hawaii connection was particularly significant for Pangasinan. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association had been recruiting Filipino workers since 1906 and had established direct lines to the provinces that supplied the most willing migrants. Pangasinan sent thousands. The workers who made the journey to Hawaii, served out their plantation contracts, and then migrated to the California mainland — a well-traveled secondary migration path — carried back to their home provinces the specific knowledge that made the decision legible: the ship route, the entry procedures, the names of labor contractors who could place a new arrival in a paying job within days of docking. This network of returned migrants and correspondent laborers was the actual recruitment engine, more effective than any printed pamphlet, because it carried the authority of personal testimony from men whose families knew them and trusted them.

The young men of Pangasinan also had a specific and underappreciated preparation for American agricultural labor: they were already experienced farmers. The asparagus fields of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the grape vineyards of the Central Valley required the same physical knowledge — bending, cutting, evaluating plant health by touch, reading soil conditions, managing the pace of production against the demands of a harvest window — that rice farming in the Agno River basin had developed. The labor contractors who came to Pangasinan understood that they were recruiting men who already knew how to work in fields. They were not training a labor force. They were relocating one.

The boy grew up watching his father work land that belonged to someone else. He attended the American-built school in San Nicolas, where he learned English, the language of colonial administration, the language that would, in a few years, allow him to speak to judges in Stockton and foremen in Delano and reporters in Sacramento. The American public school system in the Philippines was one of the colonial project's most deliberate investments: the Thomasites, the American teachers who arrived in 1901 aboard the transport ship Thomas, established the template for a colonial education that taught English, American history, American civic values, and the general proposition that advancement in the American colonial system required adoption of American linguistic and cultural norms. By the 1920s, the system was staffed primarily by Filipino teachers who had been trained in it, and it had become the most effective mass literacy program in Philippine history. The irony was not subtle: the colonial school system that prepared Filipino men to work in American fields also prepared them to understand American legal arguments, read American labor contracts, and argue in American courts. Itliong used all of these capacities.

He was intelligent. He was observant. He watched the structure of the province and understood it with the clarity of a child who has not yet learned to accept what he sees.

He was also, by every account that survives, ferocious in argument from a young age. In a culture that valued deference to elders and accommodation to authority, the young Itliong argued. He pushed back. He questioned the arrangements that the adults around him had accepted as permanent, the shares that went to the landlord, the hours that stretched past dark, the conditions that were presented as natural but were, when examined, entirely constructed by human decisions made by specific people for specific reasons.

He left school after the sixth grade — his formal education ended there, as it ended for most boys in the tenant-farming families of Pangasinan, because the fields needed workers and the workers needed wages and the opportunity cost of a boy in a classroom, when the boy could be in a field, was a cost the family could not absorb. But the six years of American-model education that the colonial school system provided were not wasted on him. English was the medium of instruction, and Itliong absorbed it with the intensity of a child who understood, by instinct or by observation, that the language of the colonial power was also the language of the legal system, the labor contract, the foreman's order, and the court transcript. A boy who spoke English in Pangasinan in 1925 had a tool that most of his neighbors lacked. In the United States, that tool would allow him to read the contract that the labor contractor put in front of him, to understand what he was signing, to argue in court when he was arrested, to testify before a Senate subcommittee in language that senators could understand. None of this was what the Thomasite teachers had intended when they established the colonial school system in 1901, but it was what the system produced in certain students, and Itliong was one of those students.

He was not alone in his restlessness. The Philippines of the 1920s was stirring. The independence movement, suppressed by American military force in the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, had not died. It had transformed into a political movement, and its leaders. Manuel Quezon, Sergio Osmena, pursued independence through the same American political system that had colonized them. In the provinces, labor unrest was growing. The Colorum uprisings, the Sakdal movement, the tenant farmer organizations that would eventually coalesce into the Huk rebellion of the 1940s, all of these had their roots in the same soil that fed the Itliong family: land that was worked by many and owned by few, wealth that was produced by labor and captured by ownership.

The boy from San Nicolas absorbed all of this. The power structure of Pangasinan was his first education. The American school was his second. The combination produced something that neither the colonial administrators nor the Filipino elite had intended: a young man who understood power, understood the language of the powerful, and was not willing to accept the role that the structure had assigned him.

In 1929, at the age of fifteen, Modesto Itliong left the Philippines. He was fifteen years old — a fact he concealed from immigration authorities, telling them he was older, because the recruiters wanted men rather than boys and because the boy from San Nicolas was determined not to be turned back for a technicality. He boarded a ship, likely from Manila, as most of the labor migrants did, after traveling south from Pangasinan by bus or by rail, and crossed the Pacific Ocean to the United States. He was part of a wave. Between 1920 and 1934, approximately 150,000 Filipinos came to the American mainland, the vast majority of them young men from the agricultural provinces of Luzon. Pangasinan, Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union. They came because the door was open and because the fields were waiting.

He did not know, as the ship pulled away from the Manila harbor and the green coastline of Luzon faded into the Pacific haze, that he would never live in the Philippines again. He did not know that the country he was traveling to had laws on its books that would prevent him from marrying the women he might love, from owning the land he might work, from becoming a citizen of the nation whose fields he would spend his life in. He did not know that the canneries would take part of his hand and give nothing back. He did not know that he would start a strike that would change American labor history and watch the credit go to someone else.

He was fifteen years old. He spoke English. He had watched his father work another man's land. He was leaving.

The flat province of Pangasinan stayed where it was, the paddies, the palms, the landlord's house visible from every field. The boy who had learned to see power by looking at the distance between the house and the hut carried that education across the Pacific. It would be the only education he ever needed.

The wave that carried Itliong to America was not natural. It was engineered.

The story of Filipino migration to the United States is a story of labor demand manufactured by exclusion. When Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it removed the Chinese laborers who had built the railroads and worked the fields of the American West. Japanese workers filled part of the gap, until the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 restricted Japanese immigration. South Asian workers. Indians, mostly Punjabi Sikhs, came next, until the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 closed that door. Each time America excluded one group of Asian workers, it needed another.

The Filipinos were the last available pool. As colonial subjects, they were exempt from the immigration restrictions that applied to other Asians. They could come. They could work. They could be paid less than white workers, housed in conditions that white workers would not tolerate, and fired without recourse. And when the fields no longer needed them, when the harvest was done, when the season changed, when the economy contracted, they could be moved along, sent to the next field, the next cannery, the next camp, because they had no homes to go to, no families to anchor them, no legal status that required anyone to treat them as permanent.

The recruitment was organized. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association had been bringing Filipinos to Hawaii since 1906, thousands of them, to work the sugar plantations under contracts that specified wages, housing, and the conditions of labor in terms that favored the planters in every particular. Some of those workers, having served out their contracts in Hawaii, migrated to the mainland, where the agricultural enterprises of California's Central Valley were expanding rapidly and needed the same thing the Hawaiian planters needed: cheap, available, disposable labor.

On the mainland, the recruitment was less formal but no less effective. Word traveled back to the Philippines, through letters, through returning workers, through the labor agents who operated in Manila and the provincial capitals, that wages in America, even the lowest wages, were higher than anything available at home. A field worker in California could make two or three dollars a day. A kasama in Pangasinan might see a fraction of that in a season. The mathematics were simple. The young men came.

They came overwhelmingly male. This was partly by design, the recruiters wanted workers, not families, and partly by the structure of the anti-miscegenation laws that awaited them. California's law prohibited marriage between whites and "Mongolians." Whether Filipinos were "Mongolians" was debated in the courts, but the practical effect was clear: Filipino men in California could not marry white women, and Filipino women in California were almost nonexistent. The 1930 census recorded that among Filipinos in the United States, the ratio of men to women was approximately fourteen to one.

This ratio created the manong generation, a generation of Filipino bachelor laborers who lived in camps, in bunkhouses, in the cheap hotels of Stockton and Watsonville and Salinas, who worked the fields and canneries from spring through fall and gathered in the cities during the winter, who aged without wives or children, who grew old in a country that had needed their labor and had no use for anything else about them. The word "manong" is Ilocano for "elder brother" or "respected older man." The manongs were respected by other Filipinos. They were invisible to everyone else.

Modesto Itliong, fifteen years old, stepped off the ship and into this world.

He arrived in 1929. The timing was, by any measure, terrible.

The stock market crashed in October of that year. The Great Depression that followed devastated American agriculture, which was already in crisis from overproduction and falling prices. The Filipino workers who had been recruited to fill the labor gap were now surplus. Worse than surplus, they were scapegoats. In the economic collapse, white workers who had previously refused agricultural labor were now willing to take it, and the presence of Filipino workers who had been doing it for years was no longer convenient. It was threatening.

The anti-Filipino violence that erupted in the early 1930s was concentrated in the agricultural regions of California's coast and central valley. In Watsonville, in January 1930, mobs of white men attacked the Filipino community over five days of rioting, burning buildings and beating anyone they could find. Fermin Tobera, a Filipino lettuce worker, was shot to death in his bunkhouse. The Watsonville riots were not unique, similar attacks occurred in Stockton, in Exeter, in other agricultural towns, but they were the most visible, and they revealed the terms of the arrangement with absolute clarity: Filipino workers were welcome as long as they were needed, and unwelcome the moment they were not.

The boy from Pangasinan, who had come to America because the door was open and the wages were better, learned in his first year that the door could close at any time, that the wages came attached to violence, and that the power structure of American agriculture, the growers who set the wages, the foremen who enforced the conditions, the laws that kept the workers voteless and wifeless and rightless, was not so different from the power structure of Pangasinan. The landlord's house still stood above the fields. The distance between the house and the workers was still the distance that mattered.

The difference was that in America, the distance could be fought. Not easily. Not safely. Not with any guarantee of success. But the tools existed, unions, strikes, collective action, the refusal to work for wages that could not sustain life, and the young man from San Nicolas, who had argued with his elders and questioned the arrangements of his province, recognized those tools immediately.

He was fifteen years old, and he was already looking at the structure. Within a year, he would help organize his first strike. Within thirty-six years, he would start the biggest one in American agricultural history. The flat province of Pangasinan, where power was visible from every field, had prepared him for exactly this.