Delano Grape Strike Launches UFW Movement, Challenges Agricultural Corporations

On September 8, 1965, Filipino American grape workers in the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked out on strike against Delano-area table and wine grape growers, protesting years of poverty wages and brutal working conditions, and asked Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association to join them. On September 16—Mexican Independence Day—the NFWA membership voted overwhelmingly at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Delano to honor the Filipino workers’ strike, and within days the NFWA was picketing ten additional vineyards. The strike demanded hourly wages increase from $1.25 to $1.40 and piece rates rise from ten cents to twenty-five cents per box of grapes packed, along with basic dignity and safety protections for agricultural workers who had been excluded from New Deal labor laws.

Chavez recognized that achieving victory required financial pressure beyond local strikes, so in October 1965 he called for a nationwide consumer boycott of California table grapes and products from corporations owning vineyards. The boycott strategy proved revolutionary, turning labor organizing into a broader social justice movement that mobilized consumers, religious organizations, and civil rights groups. In 1966, Chavez organized a twenty-five-day, three-hundred-mile march from Delano to Sacramento inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, heightening national awareness of farmworkers’ struggles. The Delano Grape Strike marked the first major collaboration between Filipino and Mexican workers, who growers had deliberately recruited to undermine each other’s strikes.

In August 1966, the AWOC and NFWA merged to form the United Farm Workers, committed to nonviolent protest as a core principle. When some protestors contemplated violence in February 1968, Chavez began a 25-day hunger fast, refusing food until everyone pledged nonviolence, with thousands arriving in Delano to make the pledge. In July 1970, most major Delano growers agreed to pay grape pickers $1.80 per hour plus 20 cents per box, contribute to union health plans, and protect workers from pesticide exposure. By the mid-1970s, 85 percent of California grapes were picked by UFW-contracted workers. The Delano strike demonstrated that excluded and vulnerable workers could build power through consumer solidarity and moral witness, directly challenging agricultural corporations’ assumption that farmworkers were too divided and powerless to organize effectively.