TEMPLE-BEAUDRY : Union Leader’s Legacy Remembered

The late Philip Vera Cruz, a founder of the United Farm Workers union, never realized his dream of a college education, but many Filipino Americans remember him as a working man with a degree in justice and equality.

“He always talked about how important it is to get an education and get involved in causes,” said longtime friend Roy Morales, program director of the Pacific Asian Alcohol Program. “To us he’s a folk hero.”

Morales said Vera Cruz, who died June 11 at 89, was a quiet man “except when he was organizing. He was a dynamic speaker.”

“He had a genuine ability to take a complex or radical program and make it sound like homespun common sense,” said Nate Santa Maria, a UCLA graduate student who plans to follow in Vera Cruz’s footsteps as a union organizer.

Among Asian American and labor activists, Vera Cruz had “a tremendous network of friends,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center and president of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance.

“Philip was quite a remarkable man,” Wong said. “He devoted his life to organizing workers and he symbolizes the story of his generation.”

Vera Cruz planned to go to college when he came to the United States in 1926, but the jobs he took to support his parents and siblings back in the Philippines left no time or money for formal studies.

Working the low-wage, sweaty jobs once reserved for immigrants, Vera Cruz met other Filipino men known as the manong , first-generation immigrants who came in search of a brighter future and toiled most of their lives in fields, factories and canneries on the West Coast.

In the early 1960s, stirred by the injustices he and his fellow farm workers suffered, Vera Cruz helped form an organizing committee, made up mainly of Filipinos, which led a series of strikes in Coachella and Delano.

In 1965, the Filipinos were joined by the more numerous Mexican workers led by Cesar E. Chavez. By 1966 the groups merged to form the United Farm Workers.

Activists working in a multiethnic setting should pay heed to Vera Cruz’s example, said Meg Thornton, a projects coordinator at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. He and his fellow farm workers “went beyond their own ethnic politics to form a union based on common ground,” she said.

Vera Cruz became a vice president of the union but resigned in 1977, angered by what he believed to be the union’s lack of democracy and its closed leadership circle. The final straw was Chavez’s 1977 meeting with President Ferdinand Marcos, who had declared martial law in the Philippines.

“All those years, I was fighting for equality and justice, but I never got there,” Vera Cruz said in a 1992 interview. “I still want to get close to it. And bring my people closer to it.”

The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance honored Vera Cruz in 1992 as a labor-movement pioneer, one of the many tributes he received late in his life.

“He joined in the march at our founding convention,” Wong said. “There he was at 87, still in great spirits, still at the front of the march.”

Despite the accolades he earned for his leadership skills, Vera Cruz always stressed that a movement must go beyond its leaders.

“I remember he said that the cause is the most important thing, not the leadership,” said Joel Jacinto, executive director of Search to Involve Pilipino Americans, a community service agency. “We place so much emphasis today on leadership style but the UFW was about collective action.”

The history of Filipinos in America and the UFW “hasn’t really been told,” Jacinto said. “Our challenge now is to bring to light this history and (Vera Cruz’s) role in it.”