Filipino American labor leader and civil rights champion Larry Itliong received the Asian American Justice Medal posthumously Aug. 8 during the Asian American Scholar Forum’s 2026 Asian American Pioneer Medal Symposium and Ceremony at Stanford University.
Itliong’s wife, Alice, and daughter, Patricia, accepted the honor on his behalf before an appreciative audience that gave the late organizer a standing ovation. He was among seven Asian American pioneers recognized during the event, which also celebrated leading scientists and innovators, including several Nobel Prize recipients.
“Larry Itliong’s leadership, courage and unwavering commitment to justice helped shape the farmworker movement and continues to inspire generations of advocates, scholars, educators and community leaders,” the Asian American Scholar Forum said in recognizing the Filipino American icon.
The honor placed Itliong’s legacy alongside a diverse group of Asian American trailblazers whose work has had lasting impact in civil rights, science, technology and public life. The Asian American Scholar Forum launched its Justice Medal in 2025 to recognize civil rights leaders and public servants whose commitment to equality and justice has helped shape the nation’s moral direction.
The Aug. 7-9 Stanford gathering was part of AASF’s Pioneer Medal Symposium and Ceremony, a public program designed to educate audiences about Asian American pioneers and scholars whose contributions have transformed the United States and the world.
Itliong, born Modesto “Larry” Dulay Itliong on Oct. 25, 1913, in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, Philippines, immigrated to the United States in 1929 at age 15. He arrived during the Great Depression, when Filipino immigrants encountered both harsh economic conditions and widespread discrimination. His experiences as a migrant worker in farms and Alaska salmon canneries helped forge a lifetime commitment to labor organizing and civil rights.
Known to many as “Seven Fingers” after losing digits in a cannery accident, Itliong organized workers across the West Coast beginning in the 1930s. He helped lead farmworker strikes in Washington and California and became a major organizer in the Alaska cannery industry, where Filipino workers fought for better pay and workplace protections.
His most widely remembered achievement came in 1965, when he and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee led approximately 1,500 Filipino farmworkers in a strike against grape growers in and around Delano, California. Recognizing that the strike needed broader support, Itliong persuaded Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s National Farm Workers Association to join the effort.
The alliance united Filipino and Mexican American farmworkers in the Delano grape strike and boycott, creating momentum for the 1967 merger that formed the United Farm Workers, AFL-CIO. Itliong became the union’s assistant director, while Chavez served as director. Their movement won national attention and helped secure contracts providing higher wages and safer working conditions for farmworkers.
After leaving the UFW in 1971, Itliong continued organizing and advocating for farmworkers and Filipino Americans. He also helped establish the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village in Delano for aging Filipino farmworkers. He died in 1977 at age 63.
California formally recognizes Oct. 25 as Larry Itliong Day, a designation signed into law in 2015. Saturday’s posthumous Justice Medal added another prominent tribute to a labor leader whose role in building multiracial worker solidarity continues to resonate nearly six decades after the Delano strike.—with report from Esther Misa Chavez
