Background In 1887,
Henry, James, Benjamin, and Robert Oxnard sold their Brooklyn sugar refinery and moved to
California to capitalize on the growing agricultural economy of the late nineteenth century. In 1897, following the enactment of the
Dingley Tariff Bill that heavily taxed foreign sugar, Henry, James, and Robert Oxnard formed the
American Beet Sugar Company (ABSC). As the ABSC merged its operations with growers, a host of migrant laborers were recruited, with Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, Filipino, Sikh and white laborers procured in various waves. In the segregated sections of Oxnard carved out for primarily non-white workers, there was interethnic socialization: in Oxnard's Chinatown (dubbed "China Alley"), billiards halls such as "Yamaguchi's pool room" served as sites of interaction between agricultural workers of different backgrounds. Although the seasonal Chinese and Mexican laborers already in place in the county easily satisfied agricultural labor needs early in the factory's history, decline in Chinese populations due to
Chinese Exclusion Acts and use of Mexican workers in other agricultural efforts led to an increase in Japanese worker recruitment, often by San Francisco-based Japanese contractors such as Hanzo Kurihara and Kusabura Baba. Many
Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants, moved to California as a result of Meiji-era land reforms which undermined the economic position of many smallholders in the Empire's rural prefectures, as well as political persecution. In 1898, the first Japanese work-crew was introduced by Kurihara, setting off a recruitment pattern which raised the Japanese worker population in Oxnard to a thousand the following year. By 1902 nine major Japanese contractors saw to the seasonal needs in the area. Local Japanese residents of Ventura County distinguished themselves from these seasonal laborers, characterizing them as
buranke katsugi, or "blanket carriers". By the turn of the century, the ABSC had attained substantial managerial power over growers, mandating cultivation practices and setting price and wage schedules, and now turned its attention to replacing Japanese and Mexican labor contractors. Since these contractors had already caused minor slowdowns and protests over wages, recently arrived bank owners and merchants organized an owner-interest oriented contracting company called the
Western Agricultural Contracting Company (WACC). The WACC quickly replaced the Japanese contractors as principal contractors to the
Oxnard Plain and even forced some of them to subcontract through the WACC. Some historians have argued the adeptness of the
keiyaku-nin—bilingual Japanese labor contractors—at winning high-wage contracts was a significant factor in triggering the WACC's formation. This process also adversely affected farmworkers as the WACC charged a fee for subcontracting beneath them. The WACC regularly refused to pay laborers in cash and instead compensated them with credit for company stores which often sold goods at unreasonably high prices. Many Japanese and Mexican labor contractors, holding their own grievances against the WACC, backed the JMLA, historically unusual insofar as labor contractors have typically served as suppliers of strikebreakers for employers. The JMLA is notable for being the first major agricultural union in California to unite agricultural workers of different minority groups. Whereas race/caste relations between white, Black and Indian populations had attained a degree of fixity in much of the United States due to factors like racial slavery and indigenous dispossession, the "racial" dynamics of Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and white populations in the latter half of the nineteenth century following the Mexican-American War and the colonization of California were comparatively "unscripted", i.e. not as hardened as in the case of a predeterminate white/Indian or white/Black binary. Union leaders employed interpreters to overcome linguistic barriers during strategy sessions, translating Spanish and Japanese while using English as a middle-ground tongue. Overcoming these barriers, they immediately elected Kosaburo Baba (president), Y. Yamaguchi (secretary of the Japanese branch), and J.M. Lizarras (secretary of the Mexican branch); Baba and Lizarras were both labor contractors and Yamaguchi has been recognized as a boarding student recruited from San Francisco. Their immediate concerns opposed the WACC on three conditions: • they accused the WACC of artificially suppressing wages; • they opposed the subcontracting system arguing that it forced workers to pay double commissions; and • they called for the freedom to buy goods rather than be subjected to the inflated prices of the company store. In order to remedy these issues, the JMLA membership ceased working through the WACC (essentially declaring a strike). The strike came at a serendipitously precarious time in the sugar beet season, the staple crop of Oxnard Plain agriculture, since the labor-intensive and yield-defining work of thinning the seedlings needed to be done within the scope of a few weeks. By refusing to work through the WACC during the thinning of sugar beet crops, the JMLA challenged the backbone of financial operations in the Oxnard Plain. Laborers who participated in the strike threatened the profits of the owners of the WACC, the American Beet Sugar Company, and the farm owners. Their actions were met with hostile responses from local newspapers and the leadership of the American Beet Sugar Company. Colonel Driffil, manager of the American Beet Sugar Company, formally declared the company's support for the WACC and threatened to drive those who participated in the strike "out of the country". Outside of their own membership and other local Mexican and Japanese residents, the JMLA found little support from the white community in Oxnard outside of a few opportunistic merchants who saw the strike as a chance to disrupt WACC operations. The racial dimensions of the JMLA victory against the WACC brought several issues to the attention of the mainstream American labor movement which traditionally refused to integrate minorities and agricultural workers into unions. While certain socialist groups and local factions of organized labor supported the organization of Japanese and Mexican farmworkers, the majority of AFL affiliates and leadership did not support the JMLA. This position was mostly based in anti-Asian attitudes and the traditional exclusion of farm laborers from AFL activities. The demise of Japanese-Mexican sugar beet unionism is not solely explicable by the SBFLU's rejection of the AFL's racist charter proposal. Following dissolution of the WACC and its attempts to displace independent Japanese and Mexican labor contractors, contractors shifted from class cooperation to market competition. Moreover, the demise of WACC led to the disintegration of common cause between the laborers and contractors, the former having their own grievances against the latter as dishonest and exploitative in their own right.
Legacy Thirty years after the first strike of
betabeleros in Oxnard, a second, and unsuccessful, Oxnard strike of sugar beet workers would take place in 1933. Two keys to the success of the 1903 strike was the cross-class alliance between laborers and their contractors, and the cross-cultural alliance of Mexican and Japanese laborers. On the first point, solidarity between contractors and workers did not materialize because the growers' association cut the wage rate, but did not make the WACC's miscalculation of attempting to displace independent contractors. On the second point, the ethnic composition of field labor had radically changed: whereas the Japanese workers formed a majority in 1903, Mexican and Mexican-American laborers comprised roughly eighty percent of the 1,200 strikers in 1933, the other twenty percent being Filipino. The growers, in not aggrieving the contractors, did not push them into alliance with the laborers. Despite the second strike's failure, the success of the first strike in producing an interethnic unity between Latino and Asian workers can be viewed as prefiguring subsequent history: Cesar Chavez, who would do labor-organizing work in Oxnard, would eventually head up a union encompassing Mexican-American and Filipino-American workers. ==See also==