The story of the farmworker movement did not begin with monuments, school names, or holidays. It began in the fields, in the dust, the heat, and the long days of exhausting labor endured by men and women whose work fed this country even as their humanity was too often ignored. It was built by Filipino and Mexican farmworkers in Delano who came together in common cause, by families who sacrificed paychecks and security, by organizers who turned a local strike into a national boycott, and by workers whose courage helped win contracts and lay the foundation for legal protections for collective bargaining and the right to organize.
