"…in 1965, [Larry Itliong] and 1,000 field laborers — the first wave of Filipinos to the United States, known as manongs — began the grape strike that set the stage for the boycott that would lead Cesar Chavez and thousands of farmworker families to create the nation’s pioneering agricultural labor union, the United Farm Workers." - Victor Ganata

"In popular culture, [the farmworker labor movement is] seen as a Chicano movement, not as the multiethnic alliance that it actually was.” — Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, associate professor of history at San Francisco State University. - Victor Ganata

"Filipino activism had deep roots: harsh treatment in the Hawaiian cane fields, including whippings, led to a history of sometimes violent strikes." - Victor Ganata

"West Coast farmers started turning to Filipinos — mostly single men — for cheap labor after the Immigration Act of 1924 excluded Asians from entering the United States. Filipinos were an exception because the United States had annexed their country." - Victor Ganata

"For the manongs, it was a largely segregated existence, confined to dilapidated labor camps or squalid rentals in various 'Little Manilas.' Anti-miscegenation laws in California and some other states prohibited Filipinos and whites from marrying, and most spent decades deprived of a normal social and family life. 'We became an entire generation that was forced by society to find love and companionship in dance halls,' wrote Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino labor leader." - Victor Ganata

"There had been no love lost between Mexicans and Filipinos, historically pitted against one another to suppress wages or break strikes. Yet Mr. Itliong’s workers could not go it alone. He approached Mr. Chavez, then busy organizing the National Farm Workers Association." - Victor Ganata

"Mr. Chavez made a momentous decision. 'Cesar said, ‘We can’t scab the strike, we can’t cross it even though it might lose,’' Mr. Bardacke said in an interview. For the first time, Filipino and Mexican workers became 'brothers,' eventually forming one organization — the United Farm Workers — with Mr. Itliong as a vice president, one of several Filipino leaders on the executive board. Mr. Chavez saw an opportunity to use nonviolent tactics to take the struggle beyond the Central Valley." - Victor Ganata