User:Lil Scar II/Delano grape strike

The consequence of the visions conflicting between Filipino and Mexican participants lead another Filipino leader Philip Vera Cruz decide to leave the union following Cesar Chavez’s meeting with Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos where Chavez received recognition in Marcos’ regime. This essentially meant that Filipino leadership and workers were on their own trying to represent themselves to achieve their needs. Tensions in the UFW between Filipino and Mexican farmworkers would lead The Teamsters to take advantage of the internal chaos within the UFW to become the victors of promoting The Teamsters’ traditional labor system of benefiting the farmworkers, getting the attention of some of the UFW’s Filipino workers to switch to The Teamsters, escaping from the UFW’s alternative labor system that essential promoted racial discrimination against Filipinos.

In response to the success of the strike organized by the AWOC, the NFWA organized a meeting of 1,200 Mexican farmworkers on September 16th, 1965 at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano. The meeting was tactfully held on Mexican Independence Day to rouse the Mexican identity of the farmers, a technique that would go on to define the grape strike. At the meeting, there were concerns whether the NFWA could successfully mount a strike, given that they lacked the housing and meal support as seen in the strike organized by Itliong and the Filipino farmworkers. Despite these concerns, the union voted to move forward with the grape strike. The NFWA adopted a strategy of volunteerism, nonviolence, and union networking. To illustrate, the strike was supported by Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers Union, who provided publicity and financial support for the strike, as well as Dolores Huerta, who would go on to become a co-founder of the United Farmworkers Union when the AWOC and the NFWA merged together. Huerta subsequently expanded the network of the UFW by organizing Grape boycott efforts in New York and New Jersey.