Graduation Year

2023

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Asian American Studies

Second Department

Politics and International Relations

Reader 1

Nancy Neiman

Reader 2

Todd Honma

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Rights Information

2023 AbigailBPugh

Abstract

In 1965, Delano County, CA, agricultural workers celebrated their five-year strike and boycott campaign with new union contracts guaranteeing better working conditions and wages. The now infamous agricultural strikes led by the United Farm Workers in the 1960’s were initially based out of coalitional organizing between both Chicano and Filipino union leadership–and yet, rarely do we learn this history of solidarity in mainstream narratives of social movements in the United States. While celebrating the history and the collective power of the Delano Strike, I investigate how the erasure of histories of interracial solidarity in public education sites speaks to state repression and systems of colonialism dictated by the American state. In doing so, I work to build a theoretical connection between colonial education interests and state-mandated curriculum as an explanation for the historical erasure of solidarity organizing in the 1965 Delano Strike. Through my literature and theoretical research, I found that the American state’s interest in the historical erasure of solidarity organizing is based on dividing interracial coalitional power––organized power which could potentially be used to protest the legitimacy of the state itself. Therefore, education has become weaponized as a tool of state hegemony to further its own interests. To conclude my research, I celebrate the history, power and potential of solidarity organizing, gaining perspective and inspiration from our ancestor’s histories which we reclaim not for the state, but in the name of our communities and the complexities of histories we embody.

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