The Significance of Filipino Hall

Before the Delano grape strike of 1965, Filipino Community Hall served as a gathering place for Filipino farm workers to socialize and hold union meetings. When Mexican farm workers joined the Delano grape strike in solidarity, Filipino farm workers invited them to eat at Filipino Hall. Historian and activist Frank Bardacke explains the significance of this gesture: 

The first great triumph of the strike was the newfound warmth and solidarity between the Mexican and Filipino strikers … NFWA [strikers] had been trying to get by on baloney sandwiches from the association hall or on small amounts of food they could afford to prepare at home. Neither sufficed, and many NFWA strikers came to the picket lines hungry, a fact not lost on the Filipino strikers. The invitation to Filipino Hall came without prior approval from [Filipino leaders] and without the knowledge of the NFWA leadership … But looking at it from the bottom up, how could there be any objection? There seemed to be plenty of food. Letting the Mexicans eat at the hall did not mean that the Filipinos would have any less. And what better way to strengthen the bonds of solidarity? Two sets of strikers sitting down to eat together, the Filipinos sharing one of the most prized parts of their culture, unable to hide their pleasure as some Mexicans began to appreciate the Filipino food they had long ridiculed. Those meals made Filipino Hall into Strike Central, and the memory of that shared pleasure would endure long after most of the Filipino and Mexican strikers had gone their separate ways. ¹  

• 1Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso, 2011), 162.

Gilbert Padilla recalled that “for the first time I began to talk to the Filipinos as brothers and friends. Before that we never talked to them, and they never talked to us.” Along with becoming the central gathering space for farm workers, Filipino Hall was the location for weekly Friday-night strike meetings. Agustín Lira, a Mexican farm worker, reflected on the importance of these meetings:

[T]he meetings would last hours and hours at Filipino Hall. Because it was [translated into] English, Spanish, and two or three different dialects of Tagalog. It took guts to attend these meetings, but people really wanted to know so they stayed … Campesinos (farm workers) from all over the San Joaquin Valley would come … where they would be exposed to music, theater, short skits that spoke positively about farm workers for the first time. I had never seen any place that spoke about farm workers in a positive light … Filipino Hall was the lifeblood, it was the heart beating. ¹

Teach a Facing History lesson featuring this resource: Building and Sustaining Unity in the Farm Workers Movement: Supporting Question 3.

• 1Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (Smithsonian Folklife channel), “Filipinos in the UFW Movement: Agustín Lira & Patricia Wells Solórzano on Larry Itliong,” YouTube video, posted July 19, 2019.