Mariano Laya Armington

Mariano Laya Armington (1908 — 1994) was a Filipino community and labor leader. Mariano, with Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, Andy Imutan, Pete Velasco and others, helped begin the Delano grape strike in Delano, California in 1965. The strike began for Mariano and his crew of workers after he spoke with grape ranch owner George A. Lucas, making a demand for a 30-cent per hour raise to 1.40. Mariano indicated that the raise was needed or that a strike could begin, to which Lucas responded, as stated in my presence, "You Filipinos will come crawling back on your hands and knees". Andy Imutan, in his memoirs of the period archived with the United Farm Workers, confirmed that a meeting was held at the Filipino Community Hall on Glenwood street in Delano a week before the Delano Grape Strike. Andy Imutan's memoir notes that after much discussion among the present Filipino foremen and workers regarding the response from the various Delano grape growers to Filipino overtures for a raise, which was rejected, it was Mariano who rose to make the formal motion to begin the strike. With the seconding of the motion and passing by vote that night, the 1965 grape strike in Delano began.
The strike was started by the Agricultural Worker's Organizing Committee (AWOC) under leadership of many Filipino leaders. Mariano later continued organizing farm workers with Phillip Vera Cruz, first under the NFWA, and under the UFW Union led by Cesar Chavez. As the strike, in the beginning, was only in the central San Joaquin town of Delano, other faming communities in the Coachella valley or in the northern part of the state, as in Lodi, were not part of the strike. Many striking workers from the union came to work with Mariano's crews outside of the Delano area so that they could pay their bills and the mortgages on their homes without crossing a picket line.
Mariano served as worshipful master in the Filipino Masonic Lodge in Delano, Lapu Lapu Lodge, a lodge within the Grand Oriente Filipino. A past president of the Filipino Community of Delano, he arranged for use of the Filipino Community Hall in Delano as the "strike hall" for the UFW. As a forman over the course of 50 years he hired workers, some of whom worked with him continually for forty plus years, of Filipino, Mexican, Indian, White, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, Yemeni, Black, and Eskimo ancestry.
Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino-American author and labor activist, worked in the vineyards for a time under Mariano near Delano, on the Lucas ranch. Mariano helped found the Filipino American Political Association and, on invitation, attended the inauguration of Philippine president Diosdado Macapagal. A cousin, Juan C. Laya, came to the United States to study at Indiana University. Mariano and Juan often communicated and Mariano helped with Juan's expenses while he studied in the U.S. Juan C. Laya returned to the Philippines where he became a teacher and school principal. He also wrote several textbooks including a secondary school text and a curriculum for elementary and secondary education for the Philippines. Juan C. Laya was also a novelist who was awarded a Commonwealth Prize for his English novel His Native Land. The Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel in a Foreign Language is awarded annually in the Philippines by The Critics Circle National Book Awards, an organization composed of professional literary critics and newspaper columnists.
Though he had no children of his own, he raised four sons and one daughter by marriage and adoption. Two sons served respectively in Korea and Viet Nam, the third was a pilot and the forth an attorney. His daughter raised a family and, for a time, was a UFW strike captain on picket lines and served the UFW on the boycott in Canada. Unlike some who make a distinction regarding another Filipino's provincial origin, Mariano made it a point to never ask a Filipino upon meeting them, what province they were from in the Philippines. To him all Filipinos were the same and such a question was irrelevant. Strong in his Christian and Masonic beliefs, he was never known to have refused assistance to anyone in need.

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