This week we explored who the farmworkers in California are. Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese, African-American, South Asian, Filipino, and Mexican people are some of the groups who have contributed to California’s sizable agricultural economic output. In class the second graders learned about the grape strike in Delano, California in the 1960s when Filipino farmworkers walked off the job to protest exploitative labor practices. In response, grape farmers simply hired Mexican farmworkers to cross the picket lines. Larry Itliong, a Filipino labor leader, approached César Chávez and convinced him and his fellow Mexican farmworkers to join the Filipino farmworkers in solidarity to fight together for justice. Five years later, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, representing the merging of the predominantly Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the predominantly Mexican National Farmworkers Association, won collective bargaining rights.
To commemorate this historic alliance, students blended coconut milk and Okinawan sweet potato (a wonderful native substitute for ube, a popular ingredient in Filipino cuisine) into homemade Mexipino milkshakes we called licuados de ube. Each second grader received a cocktail umbrella in addition to the ingredients at home so we could also host a little party for the 100th day of school. While we enjoyed our licuados, we studied two photos from 1921. One shows the corner of Market and Romain Streets, a few blocks from where Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy now stands; the other shows a farmers market at the corner of Market and 10th Streets. (Scroll down to see the photos below.) The second graders noticed the horses, the undeveloped land, construction equipment, the farmers’ trucks, the gender and dress of the farmers, and the lack of color in the pictures. In 1921, there were 74 commercial farms in San Francisco. A lot has changed!
