Willa Needham | October 28, 2024

Community members, teachers and local labor movement leaders gathered to launch Jollene Levid’s “Filipinos that Strike” oral history project documenting the voices of Filipino UTLA members at United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) headquarters in Downtown L.A. on Monday Oct. 21.

A full-time regional organizer at UTLA, in 2019 and 2023 Levid co-coordinated unprecedented strikes that shut down hundreds of schools across the Los Angeles Unified School District. The strikes were monumental for their economic disruption and impressive contract victories. The ongoing oral history project documents the role Filipino union members and leaders played during the historic strikes. The project was initiated through Levid’s residency as an inaugural UCLA Labor Movement Fellow, an initiative of UCLA’s Labor Studies program. 

The first round of oral histories documented the stories of elected UTLA leaders and staff who were critical to achieving victory during the 2019 and 2023 campaigns. Their testimonies illustrate how UTLA member organizers forged strong coalitional networks and promoted cross-racial solidarity as integral to movement building. 

As she presented her project to the audience, Levid reflected on how she was inspired to join the labor movement after reading an oral history from the influential Filipino labor leader Philip Vera Cruz, who organized California farmworkers in the 20th century. Addressing Filipino teachers and organizers in the room, Levid said, “You deserve libraries worth of books written about you, about striking educators. This archive is the beginning of that.” Levid stressed that the critical contributions of Filipinos in the labor movement have been underappreciated for decades. Her oral history project was designed to address that gap in the historical record.  

After her introduction, Levid displayed reflection prompts related to the UTLA strikes and invited attendees to tell their stories in a participatory exercise. The prompts asked the audience to share a memory from the strikes or reflect on how these movements impacted their lives. Attendees had the opportunity to contribute to the project by giving spontaneous testimonies that were recorded as oral histories in real-time.

Everyone was given an equal platform– speakers ranged from a current LAUSD student who was a child at the time of the 2019 strikes to Alex Caputo-Pearl, the former president of UTLA who helped orchestrate the campaign. The testimonies were deeply touching and incited applause, laughter and tears from the tight-knit group gathered at the event. 

In his remarks, UCLA Labor Studies Chair Chris Zepeda-Millán highlighted why programs of this type are important for labor education and the wider community. The UCLA Labor Movement Fellowship, Zepeda-Millán explained, was created in response to the belief that social movement theory is developed on the ground by organizers and rank-and-file members during active campaigns. The program builds bridges between the university and the labor movement and allows organizers to reflect and synthesize their valuable knowledge so that it may be shared with students in labor studies and beyond. 

The lively community gathering generated a unique forum in which oral histories could be shared and recorded. Levid’s experience as an organizer undoubtedly informed this innovative research methodology, underscoring the value of opening collaborative pathways between academia and social movement practitioners through initiatives like the Labor Movement Fellows Program. 

“Filipinos that Strike” joins a canon of oral histories produced in collaboration with the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) documenting the lives of labor organizers and union members, including the UNITE HERE Local 11 Oral History Project. It will be available for free online for all researchers upon completion.