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In the early 1970s, Bill Ravanesi had been asked by a Boston newspaper to accompany a journalist and take a portrait of Cesar Chavez during the interview. Chavez, a well-known labor leader and civil rights organizer active among the farm workers in California was touring Boston to discuss the national table grape boycott. During that visit Chavez asked Ravanesi to come to California to photograph farm workers, which he subsequently did, spending 3 months capturing images every year from 1974-1977. The selected photographs below are mostly from the Agbayani Village in Delano, built by the United Farm Workers Union for retired Filipino farm workers who helped lead the well-known Delano grape strikes.

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 In 1980, he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to continue his work on farm labor.  His interest coincided with the Foundation’s program concerns with rural poverty, especially among landless farm laborers; the social consequences of large-scale migrations; and the human and civil rights of racial and ethnic minorities. His photographs were made in the Coachella, Imperial, and San Joaquin Valleys of California, and in a seventy-mile Texas border region from McAllen to Brownsville, along the Lower Rio Grande Valley. His view camera portraits on this web site of the Filipinos farm workers were made in Delano, California at the Agbayani Retirement Village. His Filipino photographs appeared as a cover story in the 1981 May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, The Manongs of California written by Harvard historian, Dr Peter W. Stanley.

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Peter W. Stanley’s article in Harvard Magazine, The Manongs of California describes the plight of the manongs: “Tens of thousands of Filipino men immigrated to the United States during the 1920s and early 1930s, seeking a better life as farm laborers. Taken for granted, victimized, they quickly sank almost to the bottom of American society. Now old men, alone together, they call themselves manongs—older brothers.” The article was accompanied by Ravanesi’s portraits of the manongs. Stanley's article chronicles the largely ignored history of Filipinos in farm labor in the US, where the manongs “faced social and legal constraints to accompany their economic plight… They were ineligible for citizenship, forbidden by many states to own property, marry white women, or own land.”

 

Ravanesi's photos capture the manongs, stranded far from their homeland, now in their old age “alone together.”