The Eight-Week March
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Read the opening free
4,291 words · no email, no account
No. 099 · Movements · Civil Rights
The Strike
a biography of Larry Dulay Itliong
What the book is
September 8, 1965. Two thousand Filipino farmworkers walk off the table-grape fields of Delano, California, refusing to pick at the prevailing rate. The strike committee is led by a fifty-one-year-old organiser named Larry Dulay Itliong. A week later he writes to Cesar Chavez of the National Farm Workers Association, proposing that the two unions strike together. The result is the United Farm Workers — and a five-year strike and consumer-boycott campaign that ends in the historic 1970 grape contracts.
Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, where Itliong was born in 1913, and where he arrived in Seattle in 1929 as a fifteen-year-old to work the salmon canneries of Alaska — and follows the arc through the lettuce fields, the canneries, the AFL-CIO Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, the Delano grape strike, the 1965-1970 boycott, the 1971 resignation from the UFW board over the marginalisation of the manong generation, and the colon cancer that killed him in 1977 at age sixty-three.
What emerges is a portrait of a Filipino-American labour organiser whose name the American labour movement is only now, fifty years after his death, finishing the work of recovering.
At a glance
- Subject
- Larry Dulay Itliong
- Shelf
- Movements · Civil Rights
- Written by
- Solomon Treadway
- Chapters
- 18 across 198 pages
- Narrated by
- Rowan Hale
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The ProvinceRead free
- 02The Crossing4,334 words
- 03The Manongs4,416 words
- 04The Apprenticeship4,138 words
- 05Delano3,164 words
- 06September Eighth3,468 words
- 07The Picket Lines3,235 words
- 08The Boycott3,195 words
- 09The Merger3,162 words
- 10The Body3,176 words
- 11The Growers2,820 words
- 12Chavez3,042 words
- 13The Village2,785 words
- 14The Resignation3,130 words
- 15The Law2,787 words
- 16February Eighth2,855 words
- 17The Reclamation3,914 words
- 18The Structure2,996 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 198 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-096-6 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale
ISBN 979-8-90623-166-6
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Strike about?
Larry Dulay Itliong. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Strike — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,291 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
