Before Delano: The Coachella Valley Grape Strike of 1965

Before Delano became a national symbol of farmworker organizing, grape workers in the Coachella Valley had already walked out of the fields.

In May 1965, a largely Filipino union organized a local strike and won higher wages. The victory was limited, but its importance traveled: workers and organizers carried that experience into the confrontation in Delano later that year.

For the Coachella Valley, this is a different way to read the agricultural landscape. Behind the fields, irrigation systems and harvests were people deciding what their labor was worth—and what they could achieve together.

The May strike in the Coachella Valley

The organization was the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, usually shortened to AWOC. Its membership was predominantly Filipino. In May 1965, its workers challenged Coachella Valley grape growers over pay and conditions.

The National Park Service records the outcome plainly: the workers won a wage increase, but AWOC did not negotiate a contract with the growers. [1]

That difference is essential. A raise changes the immediate return for work. A union contract can also establish agreed procedures and continuing obligations. Winning the first did not automatically deliver the second.

The Coachella action deserves attention in its own right. It also belongs in the larger story because an earlier success could make a later demand seem possible.

Follow the story from Coachella to Delano

Select a chapter to see how the local victory connected to the later campaign.

The organizers brought decades of experience

Larry Itliong did not enter labor organizing in 1965. He had worked and organized across the West Coast, including farm fields and Alaska’s salmon canneries. His experience reached back to the Depression, and included organizing alongside other Filipino labor leaders in Stockton. [4]

The seasonal movement of workers connected these places. Skills, relationships and experiences of earlier strikes moved with them. A vineyard was one workplace in a much larger working life.

Another important figure, Philip Vera Cruz, had arrived in the United States in 1926. He worked many low-paid jobs and became a farmworker organizer. His life helps explain the term manong: an Ilokano expression of respect for an older brother or older male relative, often used for this generation of Filipino immigrants. [5]

Remembering those backgrounds changes the picture. The Filipino workers who helped shape the movement were experienced participants with their own organizations, priorities and decisions.

Why 1965 offered an opening

The Bracero Program, which had brought Mexican contract workers to the United States, ended in 1964 after years of opposition to abuses within the program. The following period brought renewed opportunities for farmworkers to press wage demands.

That opening had limits. Employers could still replace strikers, and workers could risk both income and employer-owned housing. The NPS places AWOC’s activity within decades of earlier farmworker organizing—not a movement that suddenly appeared in one field in 1965. [6]

A harvest gives both sides a deadline. Workers need wages; growers need a crop picked while it can be sold. The Coachella story shows workers successfully applying pressure at one moment. It does not mean that the same approach would produce the same result everywhere.

Delano required a wider alliance

In September, the confrontation moved into the San Joaquin Valley. Filipino AWOC members voted at Delano’s Filipino Community Hall on September 7; the walkout began the next day. The NPS identifies Larry Itliong and Ben Gines as key strike organizers. [2, 3]

On September 16, the National Farm Workers Association voted to join. Its leadership included Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. The largely Mexican and Mexican American organization’s participation made it harder to use one group of workers to replace another. [2]

Cooperation also had an everyday form. Filipino Community Hall served as a shared organizing space and strike kitchen. Feeding people and maintaining a common meeting place helped sustain the decision to act together. [3]

A raise was a beginning, not the end

The wider campaign extended far beyond one harvest. AWOC and NFWA merged in 1966 as the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Strikes and consumer boycotts helped build pressure, and major grape contracts followed in 1970. [1]

Those later agreements should not be read backward into the May 1965 Coachella strike. The local workers had won higher wages. The longer struggle sought more enduring changes in the relationship between workers and employers.

Read the fields with the workers in view

Our agricultural histories often begin with water, crops and the people who financed farms. Those subjects matter. But a field also depended on the people who tended, picked, sorted and packed its crop.

The May 1965 strike adds those workers to the foreground. It connects the Coachella Valley to Filipino American history and to a wider labor movement without making the valley the sole birthplace of either.

For another view of this landscape, explore what grows beyond dates, the Coachella Canal’s history, and how Indio developed. They describe connected parts of the valley’s story.

For regional context, Shields Date Garden connects to the valley’s agricultural heritage, while La Quinta Museum explores local history. These are contextual stops, not identified locations of the 1965 strike.