Did you know October is Filipino American History Month?

After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1884 and the anti-Japanese Asian Exclusion Act of 1923, members of Seattle's Filipino community became the majority of laborers working on the line at canneries

Just a few short decades after the American colonization of the Philippines, which included plenty of propaganda about The American Dream, they began organizing against the normalized abuse, inequity, and wage theft they faced at the hands of their employers in Seattle

Their fight became more urgent in late 1927 as a pattern of murderous anti-Filipino race riots began in Kashmere and the Yakima Valley, eventually spreading down the entire coast

By 1933, they had successfully organized and the American Federation of Labor issued the Cannery Workers’ and Farm Laborers’ Union Local 18257 a charter on June 19, 1933 making it the first Filipino-led union in the United States

On the first of December in 1936, founding President Virgil Duyungan and union secretary Aurelio Simon were murdered in an International District restaurant in broad daylight by an anti-union activist hoping to disempower their organization

The funeral service and subsequent parade celebrating their lives and work is still the largest ever thrown in America in honor of anyone of Filipino descent

The movement to investigate their murders brought worker's rights activists together from across Washington, Oregon, California, and even Seattle's own Labor Council on a scale the labor movement had never before seen.G

Go check out @UW's great Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project for more about the important work of Seattle's Filipino community in the fight for worker's rights

https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/Cannery_intro.htm