No street in California carries the name Pete Velasco. But for countless Filipinos and labor activists on the Pacific coast, Velasco is remembered as the man who started the grape strike that gave birth to the United Farm Workers. His inspiration, and that of his generation of fellow immigrants, was America -- not the country but the idea. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on immigrant and labor issues.

BAKERSFIELD, CA. -- One of the last of a generation of Filipino heroes died here last week in a hospital bed in Bakersfield. A modest man who started the grape strike that gave birth to the United Farm Workers, what made Pete Velasco great was his vision of America not as a country but as an idea.

Pete Velasco came to California from his native Philippines three decades after it had become a U.S. colony -- and not before he had imbibed American ideals of freedom and democracy preached in the new American-run schools. Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen of the 1920s and 30s, he crossed the Pacific Ocean filled with dreams of education and advancement. But instead of a promised land he found only brutal working conditions and racial oppression.

For the next five decades, these immigrants sailed in rusty ships to Alaskan salmon canneries so isolated they could only be reached by sea. They migrated from labor camp to labor camp across the Southwest picking everything from grapes to asparagus. They sweated in the hot kitchens of restaurants, returning in the small hours of the morning to skid row hotels rigidly segregated from polite society.

"When we walked the sidewalks in those early days," Velasco recalled, "they shouted at us, 'Hey monkey -- go home!"

They were single men, though not by choice. U.S. immigration laws prevented women from the islands from entering the country until after World War II. Anti-miscegenation laws in California and the west prohibited the marriage of Filipino men and white women. A few of Velasco's countrymen traveled a thousand miles to the midwest to have a legal marriage. Velasco himself finally married but only years after those laws were struck down.

Far from humbling them, their experiences in America turned the immigrants hard. They became a generation of union organizers, men highly conscious of their status not just as workers but as immigrants at the bottom of American society. They led strikes, wrote books, edited newspapers. Velasco himself, along with Philip Veracruz and Larry Itliong, started the grape strike of 1965 from which the United Farm Workers was born.

"They were radicalized," says Avelino Ramos, an organizer with the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's union who was born to the generation that followed Velasco's. "They compared the ideals of the U.S. constitution, which they were taught in the islands, with the harsh reality they found here, and they never stopped fighting to realize those ideals."

Carlos Bulosan, the best known writer of that generation, identified their great motivator as the idea of America. "America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men who died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world," he wrote.

That such idealism was possible under such forbidding circumstances might seem a miraculous exception, were it not reflected in the immigrant experience of millions of other workers, coming to the U.S. for a century from every continent.

Today a new generation of immigrants from Mexico and Central America are sparking a wave of union organizing and radicalism in the southwest much like that of the manongs. They too, compare American ideals with the reality of their lives, and find the same answer.

Velasco would be embarrassed at being remembered as a hero. He was much more proud of simply opening up the Filipino Community Hall in Delano at 2 a.m. each morning during the first year of the grape strike, making coffee and setting up the food bank for the strikers, or standing in front of supermarkets, passing out leaflets and raising the first few dollars the union needed to survive.

In the small dusty towns of the San Joaquin Valley, Velasco was called a "manong" -- a term of respect in Filipino culture that has also come to refer to an entire generation of Filipino American men without families who have inspired successor generations. Nor did his sense of urgency diminish with his stature. "Don't let your guard down," he advised a group of labor activists shortly before his death. "Organize. Unite yourselves. Be strong."