Larry Itliong arrived in California in 1929, when his native Philippines was still a United States colony, and began organizing agricultural laborers. In 1965, the seasoned, tough organizer led a strike of thousands of Filipino grape workers of the AFL-CIO’s Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in Delano, California. The Delano Grape Strike and the farmworkers movement became one of the significant social movements of the twentieth century. Decades later, thousands of janitors, most of them Central American immigrant women in Los Angeles, fearlessly organized themselves although janitors’ unions were in their death knell, and despite virulent anti-immigrant sentiment. The stories of the creative strategies, militant bravery, and heroism of the Service Employees International Union and its Justice for Janitors campaign in 1990s Los Angeles and the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott of the United Farm Workers are just two of the dozens of stories told in Fred B. Glass’s epic narrative...

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