City of Delano careers

Delano's city government serves the town where American farm labor history pivoted. On September 8, 1965, Larry Itliong and other Filipino leaders led the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in a walk off from the table grape farms here, the start of the Delano grape strike. Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association joined within a week, the two groups went on to form the United Farm Workers of America, and by 1970 the UFW had won contracts with major grape growers across California.

The town itself is older than the strike by nearly a century. Delano was founded on July 14, 1869 as a railroad town, named by the Southern Pacific for Columbus Delano, then U.S. Secretary of the Interior; the first post office opened in 1874 and the city incorporated in 1915. All of it is on the history page the city itself publishes, which is worth noting, because plenty of towns would soft-pedal a labor uprising and Delano publishes it as civic heritage. The municipal government hiring today runs the ordinary services of a California farm-belt city, and it does so in a place where the relationship between work and dignity is the town's own story, told on its own website.