The Cesar Chavez Foundation (CCF), the City of El Monte, and stakeholders including Boston Financial, JP Morgan Chase, and the California Department of Housing and Community Development, celebrated the grand opening of Plaza Ysabel “Mac” Ortiz II, a new affordable housing community for low-income families in El Monte, California.
Plaza Ysabel “Mac” Ortiz II is CCF’s second project in the City of El Monte and honors a 19-year-old native of El Monte killed during the Korean War. It is the second property commemorating the young soldier, whose remains were returned nearly 70 years after being reported missing in action.
In attendance, El Monte Mayor Jessica Ancona remarked, “One of the things that warms my heart is the addition to the beautiful housing is a Si Se Puede Learning Center. The commitment to families and children is one of the missions of the Cesar Chavez Foundation and one the council values here in the City of El Monte—providing a brighter future for children and families. Families don’t have to go elsewhere for their children to receive additional support by having those opportunities within this development.”
Plaza Ysabel “Mac” Ortiz II provides 53 units of 100% affordable housing and community services, including a Si Se Puede Learning Center, Chavez Foundation’s flagship afterschool program for K-5 students, spaces for residential services, a recreational meeting space, conference and meeting rooms. The property also features a new mural by artist John Park, “Celebración,” paying homage to the city’s farm worker history and Latino culture.
Marlee Martinez, who currently resides in Plaza Ortiz II and was raised in El Monte, has recently moved back from the high desert. She commented, “That’s the whole point of affordable housing…it allows people to thrive in the communities they grew up in and continue to do so. It has been very helpful for my family, as we are finally close together.”
Plaza Ysabel “Mac” Ortiz II is CCF’s second project in the Main Street Specific Plan corridor in the City of El Monte. CCF’s first project, Plaza Ysabel “Mac” Oritz, is located east of the new development at 10950 Railroad Street and provides 53 units of affordable housing for veterans and families.
Mexican-Filipino-American labor activist Lorraine Agtang reflects on the significance of Larry Itliong Unity Park.
I am one of the last surviving Filipino grape strikers who walked out of Delano, Calif. vineyards on Sept. 8, 1965, when Larry Itliong helped lead those historic walkouts. My six siblings and I lived with our parents for years in the same farm labor camp where most of us were born outside Delano. I was 13 when the strike started.
Thus began an epic American civil and labor rights struggle, and Larry Itliong is increasingly celebrated as a landmark figure and as a tough and relentless Filipino American labor organizer and community leader. His Oct. 25 birthday is marked as a special day under state law in California. He is acclaimed in books, films, schools, and now a musical. Larry is finally being honored with the grand opening on May 11 of a park named for him in Delano, where he and the Filipino grape strikers started the five-year-long grape strike and boycott.
The park, Larry Itliong Unity Park, is aptly named. It signifies the solidarity between the races he and the other Filipino grape strikers belonging to the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee initiated by turning to the largely Latino National Farm Workers Association led by Cesar Chavez, and asking them to join their picket lines. Growers historically used the races to break each other’s strikes. So that racial unity was key to the walkouts’ success and the emergence of America’s first enduring farm worker union, the United Farm Workers, the result of a merger of the Filipino and Latino unions in 1966.
Larry’s lifetime of activism predated Delano in 1965. After immigrating from the Philippines at age 15 in 1929, he migrated up and down the West Coast toiling in fields and canaries. His storied organizing career spanned from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Most Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee could not marry because of California’s racist anti-miscegenation law. My family was an exception. My father, Platon Agtang, married my mother, Lorenza Agtang, a Mexican. Larry and my father were called “Manongs”—older, respected ones who helped build the union movement in the fields.
My father was a loyal union member who never broke the strike during its five years. With seven kids to feed, he returned to migrant farm work, laboring as far north as Stockton.
By the time the strike and boycott convinced table grape growers to sign their first UFW contracts in 1970, most Filipino grape strikers were too old for field labor. Without families, they had no decent places to live.
A beautiful adobe-brick Mission-style affordable housing community, Agbayani Village was for the Delano Manongs and other retired or displaced Filipino farm workers. I was the first manager. We went as far as Salinas and Stockton to recruit the initial residents. There, elderly Filipino brothers lived the rest of their years in dignity and security. They had a community kitchen with a Filipino menu, a recreation room, garden, and access to the adjacent medical clinic and social services.
When California’s farm labor law passed in 1975, I was a UFW organizer, practicing lessons about racial solidarity learned from Cesar, Larry and the other Manongs. I organized farm workers at Delano grape ranches who were Filipinos, Arabs, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans.
Larry Itliong, Cesar Chavez, and the other Filipino and Latino leaders of the UFW brought together the two races and cultures. I was a mestiza, of mixed race, Filipino and Mexican. Because Filipinos and Latinos united in one union, for the first time in my life I felt whole as a person grounded in both communities. That’s partly why the UFW succeeded while other unions failed for 80 years to organize farm workers.
We can never forget Larry Itliong, Platon Agtang, and the Filipino workers who started the grape strike. They helped found an extraordinary movement and union that continues fighting for farm workers seven decades later.
On Oct. 19, around Larry’s birthday, we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Agbayani Village. The Filipino Community of Delano is also staging its Filipino Weekend celebration then at the Forty Acres. Please join us in marking these historic events.
About Lorraine Agtang
Lorraine Agtang, a participant in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike at just 13, later became the first Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village manager and has been a lifelong activist in the farm worker movement. She played a crucial role in organizing diverse farm workers for union elections in 1975, continuously honoring the legacy of the Manongs.
The annual Cesar Chavez Legacy Awards ceremony was held on April 4, 2024, at the beautiful Vibiana in downtown Los Angeles. The event brought together leaders from various sectors, including business, government, labor, and education, to commemorate the life and work of Cesar Chavez. In addition to honoring Cesar’s life and legacy, the Legacy Awards celebrate those who exemplify excellence and commitment to advocacy and community.
The inaugural Taste of Avenida Cesar Chavez made its debut at this year’s Legacy Awards. Inspired by a movement and legacy that endure well beyond the fields and into America’s largest cities, this unique culinary experience pays homage to the people and businesses along the street that bears the name—Avenida Cesar Chavez.
2024 HONOREES
Cástulo de la Rocha, President and CEO of AltaMed Health Services, was recognized for his unwavering commitment to expanding access to healthcare in underserved communities. His passion for social justice has driven his professional and personal pursuits, significantly impacting health service accessibility.
Jane Fonda, a stellar actress and fervent activist, was among the distinguished honorees. With a legacy of advocacy that spans decades, Fonda’s work ranges from supporting Indigenous peoples’ rights and economic justice to LGBTQ rights, gender equality, and, more recently, leading efforts against climate change through Fire Drill Fridays and the Jane Fonda Climate PAC.
Robert Rivas, Speaker of the California State Assembly, was honored for his dedication to serving the most vulnerable. Inspired by his grandfather, a labor activist, Rivas’s journey from teacher and firefighter to a historic Assembly Speaker is a testament to his commitment to public service.
The legacy awards included Julián Castro, the former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the new CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, whodelivered the keynote address, andCristela Alonzo, an acclaimed actor, and comedian known for her unique blend of humor and insight, hosted the ceremony. Her role as the evening’s host added a special touch to the celebration, highlighting the achievements of the honorees and the legacy of Cesar Chavez.
Check out our video highlighting the night’s events!
Celebrate Cesar Chavez Day with free sample lessons from the Cesar Chavez Summer Learning Program.
Please fill out the form to access your free lessons.
If you want to learn more about the Cesar Chavez Summer Curriculum for your school or district, please get in touch with edu.partnerships@chavezfoundation.org for more information.
In celebration of Black History Month, we are highlighting Cesar Chavez and the farm worker movement’s deep roots and successful collaborations with the Black Panther Party and African American activism in Oakland.
Before starting to build what became the United Farm Workers in 1962, Cesar helped organize and lead the Community Service Organization, California’s largest and most effective Latino civil rights group in the 1950s and early ‘60s. The first CSO chapter Cesar organized on his own was in West Oakland around 1953.
Founded in Oakland in 1966, The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was ideologically rooted in Black Power, self-determination, and the right to defend oneself against oppressive systems. It quickly gained the trust and respect of Black community members thanks to its Community Survival Programs such as free breakfasts, health clinics, food banks, health clinics, and more.
Greeting young African American children in Oakland (from left) Cesar Chavez, Bobby Seale, and Chavez aide Richard Ybarra.
In its early years, the UFW organized farm workers by providing them with services such as a credit union, death benefit insurance, a service station where migrants could buy cheap gas and fix their cars, and service centers to help them with myriad problems. Cesar and his colleagues believed workers weren’t just workers. While only a union could remedy abuses in the fields, workers faced other crippling dilemmas when they returned to their communities. So, it would take more than a union to overcome those dilemmas; it would take a movement.
Black Panther founders and early leaders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton emphasized dismantling systemic injustice. By focusing on the laws, bureaucratic structures, and economic incentives that maintain white supremacy and capitalism, they strove to dismantle them from the roots.
Meantime, from the UFW’s inception, Cesar Chavez inspired farm workers to challenge and overcome a farm labor system in this country that treats them as if they are not important human beings—as if they are beasts of burden—through self-organization and collective action.
Those visions perfectly positioned the Panthers and the UFW to share a commonality of missions and led them to support each other’s struggles.
Walking precincts in West Oakland in the mid-1970s (from left) U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums, Alameda County Supervisor John George, Cesar Chavez, and Assemblymember Tom Bates.
The Panthers joined the UFW’s international boycott of California table grapes in the late 1960s by picketing major supermarkets in Oakland. They supported farm worker boycotts of grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wine in the early-to-mid ’70s. The party refused donations to its free breakfast program from boycotted stores and organized carpools to shuttle shoppers to other markets.
Cesar and the UFW campaigned to send Ron Dellums to Congress in 1970, the first African American ever elected from Oakland. Cesar and the farm workers worked with the Panthers in Bobby Seale’s unsuccessful 1973 run for Oakland mayor, and in 1977, they helped elect Lionel Wilson, the first African American mayor of Oakland. Cesar walked precincts in West Oakland alongside African American elected officials.
Throughout their decades-long connection, each organization supported the other. The inspiration from their model of multi-racial solidarity is perhaps more relevant in this time of increasing polarization and ideological entrenchment. Their alliance is a reminder that authentic coalition building is possible when we connect through a larger shared vision for systemic change.
Would you like to know more about Cesar Chavez’s legacy? Please visit the National Chavez Center, an organization that is committed to promoting and conserving the memory of Cesar Chavez through his words and images, and the place where he lived during the last quarter century of his life – the César E. Chávez National Monument.
