A deliberately forgotten battle: The Lapiang Manggagawa and the Manila Port Strike of 1963 Joseph Scalice This article documents a significant and previously unknown episode in the history of Philippine labor, the explosive Manila Port Strike of the arrastre service workers—ste- vedores and longshoremen—in 1963. The strike was among the largest, costliest and most politically charged labor struggles in the nation’s history and yet not only has no account of it been written, it has found no mention in over a half-century of historiography. Using confidential US State Department memoranda, contemporary newspaper accounts, Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) publications, and mater- ial published by the Lapiang Manggagawa (LM), I reconstruct the history of the strike. This article examines how an event of this magnitude, while still part of living memory, could disappear from the historical record. The case of the 1963 Port Strike highlights the need to recover the histories of the oppressed by reading not only the official archives, but also the narratives of the workers’ own organisations, against the grain. The Manila Port Strike of 1963 was among the largest, costliest, and most politically charged labor struggles in Philippine history and yet it and the new workers’ party, Lapiang Manggagawa (LM, Workers’ Party), to which its political fate was tied, dis- appeared from the historical record. Over a half century has passed and the LM has accumulated but a confused footnote here or there, while the strike itself has gone unmentioned. It is a truism of history that it is written by the victors, but there is more at stake in the disappearance of the port strike than this. The oppressed and the vanquished possess their own mechanisms and organs of historical memory. In agrarian and pre- modern societies, oral traditions through a complex set of mnemonic devices sufficed to preserve this history. The complexities of modern political struggles, however, defy preservation within such traditions. Even more fundamentally, the urban working class is intensely mobile; when it has suffered a significant defeat it cannot return to the fixity of the land, but scatters in search of new employment. There is no stable community to sustain a complex oral tradition. The preservation of the history of the working class rests with the organs which it creates to carry out its struggle, including Joseph Scalice is a Visiting Fellow at the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science. Correspondence in connection with this article should be addressed to: jscalice@berkeley.edu. The author wishes to thank Peter Zinoman, John Sidel, and Vicente Rafael for their support. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 53(1-2), pp 226–251 March–June 2022. 226 © The National University of Singapore, 2022 doi:10.1017/S0022463422000376 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463422000376 Published online by Cambridge University Press