Filipino Migrant Agricultural Workers

Worker standing in front of a field with a sign reading "Stand together for $1.25 a Fair Wage!"

Filipino laborers traveled to work along the West Coast starting as early as 1906. The United States categorized laborers from the Philippines as “U.S. nationals." They were treated as colonial subjects ineligible for citizenship and denied the right to own land, start families, and basic protections against labor abuses and discrimination. For decades, laborers, also affectionately known as “manong” or “older brother” in Ilokano and Tagalog, toiled in the U.S. agricultural and canning industries enjoying limited benefits.

Filipinos and other farm workers of color were excluded from unions like the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which fought for increased pay and regulations in agricultural and industrial sectors during the 1920s and 1930s. Organizing efforts under the Filipino Agricultural Labor Association (FALA) in the 1930s and 1940s eventually came under the leadership of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) in 1959 working with AFL-CIO. AWOC both protested the Bracero program and supported Braceros efforts to organize and assert their rights as workers.

Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC Links to an external site.) member stands with picket sign calling for fair wages in Santa Cruz, Calif Links to an external site.. Henry Pope Anderson Papers, larc.ms.0422, Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.