Philip Vera Cruz

Philip Vera Cruz
Author: Craig Scharlin
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2011-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295802952

Filipino farmworkers sat down in the grape fields of Delano, California, in 1965 and began the strike that brought about a dramatic turn in the long history of farm labor struggles in California. Their efforts led to the creation of the United Farm Workers union under Cesar Chavez, with Philip Vera Cruz as its vice-president and highest-ranking Filipino officer. Philip Vera Cruz (1904–1994) embodied the experiences of the manong generation, an enormous wave of Filipino immigrants who came to the United States between 1910 and 1930. Instead of better opportunities, they found racial discrimination, deplorable living conditions, and oppressive labor practices. In his deeply reflective and thought-provoking oral memoir, Vera Cruz explores the toll these conditions took on both families and individuals. Craig Scharlin and Lilia V. Villanueva met Philip Vera Cruz in 1974 as volunteers in the construction of Agbayani Village, the United Farm Workers retirement complex in Delano, California. This oral history, first published in 1992, is the product of hundreds of hours of interviews. Elaine H. Kim teaches Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context.

Union by Law

Union by Law
Author: Michael W. McCann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 515
Release: 2020-04-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 022668007X

Starting in the early 1900s, many thousands of native Filipinos were conscripted as laborers in American West Coast agricultural fields and Alaska salmon canneries. There, they found themselves confined to exploitative low-wage jobs in racially segregated workplaces as well as subjected to vigilante violence and other forms of ethnic persecution. In time, though, Filipino workers formed political organizations and affiliated with labor unions to represent their interests and to advance their struggles for class, race, and gender-based social justice. Union by Law analyzes the broader social and legal history of Filipino American workers’ rights-based struggles, culminating in the devastating landmark Supreme Court ruling, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989). Organized chronologically, the book begins with the US invasion of the Philippines and the imposition of colonial rule at the dawn of the twentieth century. The narrative then follows the migration of Filipino workers to the United States, where they mobilized for many decades within and against the injustices of American racial capitalist empire that the Wards Cove majority willfully ignored in rejecting their longstanding claims. This racial innocence in turn rationalized judicial reconstruction of official civil rights law in ways that significantly increased the obstacles for all workers seeking remedies for institutionalized racism and sexism. A reclamation of a long legacy of racial capitalist domination over Filipinos and other low-wage or unpaid migrant workers, Union by Law also tells a story of noble aspirational struggles for human rights over several generations and of the many ways that law was mobilized both to enforce and to challenge race, class, and gender hierarchy at work.

Out of this Struggle

Out of this Struggle
Author: Luis V. Teodoro
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2019-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0824883969

In his preface, Danilo E. Ponce describes this book as an "unblinking look at Filipino history in Hawaii." Written from a Filipino viewpoint, the book commemorates seventy five years of collective existence of this ethnic group in the Aloha State. It examines Filipino experience in Hawaii in the context of Philippine history and culture. This is not a simple book, for its subject is complex. For example, there were three waves of Filipino immigration to Hawaii — each wave bringing people of differing socio-economic, educational, and geopolitical backgrounds. It would be misleading to speak of one homogeneous group called "Filipinos" being affected at any given time. Implicit in Out of This Struggle is the human drama that underlies events. Hawaii's need for labor promised the Filipinos the possibility of bettering their economic status, but plantation wages proved so low that entire families needed to work to live, limiting their access to education. Out of this frustration came their active and telling role in the organization of the IL WU and the labor strife of the 1920s. As Hawaii's Filipinos look to the future beyond 1981, they find in their community many and varied elements-proof of vitality, of a community trying to identify issues, examine events, and understand itself. Out of This Struggle will contribute to that understanding. This book is one of the projects of the Filipino 75th Anniversary Commemoration Commission, which was created by the 1977 Hawaii State Legislature, through Enabling Act 181, to oversee the year-long celebration of the arrival of the first Filipinos in Hawaii in 1906. The idea of the Commission itself came from a group called the Hawaii Filipino-American Community Foundation, which, as early as 1976, had thought of the need to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Filipino immigration to Hawaii not only through ceremony, but more appropriately, through more permanent means. One of these means was to be a book which would give its readers some understanding of what the past 75 years have meant for the Filipinos in Hawaii. At the same time, 'the members of the Foundation felt that such a book would adequately mirror the changes that have taken place in the Filipino community, as well as lay to rest the prevalent view that the old stereotypes still apply. The members of the Education (Printed) Committee of the Commission, whose task was to oversee the production of this book, are, fittingly, also members of the Foundation.

Worker Movement in the Philippines

Worker Movement in the Philippines
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1981
Genre:
ISBN:

Study of employment, working conditions and the labour movement in the Philippines - reviews expansion of capitalism and the labour movement' s history; looks at labour force participation of woman workers and child labour, migrant workers and wages; discusses the standing of the labour movement as manifested by labour relations; comments on labour legislation. References.