After the defeat of the revolutionary Filipino independence movement in 1902, Filipinos became the largest colonial workforce in the United States. Immigrant Filipino agricultural workers enabled the transformation of U.S. agriculture from simple small-scale farming into the corporate behemoth we have today. Decades of intense class warfare between Filipino agricultural workers and U.S. agribusiness capitalists culminated in the historic 1965 Grape Strikes of Coachella and Delano.
Mary Jane Galviso, a member of the Filipino Farmers Cooperative in the California Central Valley, was born and raised in the California Imperial Valley. She will talk about her life as a young worker in the Central Valley, and the lessons for the Left resulting from the fierce struggle between Filipino agricultural workers and agribusiness capitalists.
