This spring, 121 years-ago,
Japanese and Mexican sugar beet workers experienced this injustice in 1903.
Reduced to a condition of wage slavery, in response they united not only amongst
themselves but also with contratistas, labor contractors, traditionally utilized
by agricultural lords to divorce themselves from the costs and responsibilities
that came with being employers directly. In this case, however, independent
contratistas led the formation of the Japanese Mexican Labor Association because
sugar beet industry elites established the Western Agricultural Contracting
Company to ostensibly eliminate them. The WACC’s drastic reduction of the
prevailing wage rate to thin sugar beet also impacted the commissions and fees
of contratistas reduced to the status of subcontractors. Therefore, when the
WACC cut the wage rate of betabeleros, sugar beet workers, so was the income of
the subordinated contratistas, uniting the two groups.
The rise of the WACC also
resulted from shrewd Japanese labor contractors, keiyaku-nin, often
renegotiating the abstemious wage rate from which they received their
commissions at the critical moment to spatially thin the rows as
cramped plants resulted in smaller sugar beets with unacceptable levels of
sucrose concentration. Consequently, to maximize the sugar content of beets, refiners, such as the American Beet Sugar Company in Oxnard, meticulously
supervised the cultivation of this crop. The contratistas and betabeleros
understood this and exercised their agency accordingly.
Sugar Beet Thinner
To neutralize (read
eliminate) the influence of independent contractors, a family of white industry
elites formulated a monopsony that made the WACC the sole buyer of non-white
labor. The creation of the WACC also illustrates how capitalist interests do not
function as rugged individuals, a salient historical myth; rather, a
conglomerate of land barons, the ABSC refinery, insurance, utilities, and
petro-chemical companies—the usual suspects of commercialized agriculture—pooled
their interests, with the aid of legislators at all levels of government, to
achieve capitalism’s supreme purpose—insatiable profit maximization. The motive
behind the draconian wage cut.
Oxnard ABSC refinery (Courtesy of the Museum of Ventura County)
A state-supported capitalist unionism, if you
will, often branded as industry associations. A stellar example of agriculture’s
syndication arose by the 1940s with the Associated Farmers. Created by citrus
robber baron Charles Collins Teague of Ventura County, the raison de’trê of the
AS was to torpedo worker safety, minimum wage, healthcare, overtime pay, and
unemployment insurance legislation to guarantee bloated corporate profits over
the well-being of people. The AS also worked treacherously with state agents,
primarily law enforcement, to bust unions. John Steinbeck encapsulated corporate
agriculture’s systemic repression in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Grapes
of Wrath (1939).
Before this, the collective interests that established the WACC
sought to crush the collective action of the JMLA. But in a less systemic
manner.
The strike lasted from early February to March 30, 1903. To break it,
the WACC imported scabs and law enforcement deputized sugar beet growers to
guard their new workers. Led by Kosaburo Baba and J.M. Lizarras, the JMLA relied
on a network of allies in and out of Ventura County to prevent replacement
thinners from entering the sugar beet fields of the Oxnard Plain by intercepting
them at the nearby Montalvo railway station and imploring others to support
their struggle.
On March 23rd, the dispute intensified as union members
attempted to drape a JMLA banner decorated with a rising sun and clasped hands
of unity on a wagon filled with scab workers departing from Oxnard’s downtown
district. As this happened, fierce gunfire erupted from a nearby building. When
the shooting ceased five JMLA members were wounded, four Japanese; one, Luis
Vazquez, mortally. The Los Angeles Times and the Oxnard Press-Courier demonized
the union. Other newspapers were more objective.
Deputized rancher, Charles
Arnold was arrested for the death of Vazquez and ultimately set free after a
grower-friendly coroner’s inquest. But Vazquez’s death only enhanced the resolve
of the JMLA which grew to over 1,500 Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican members.
Oxnard’s workers of the world had united; many longtime US citizens.
But ostensibly all subordinated under our nation’s system of racial capitalism
that privileged white males with lucrative careers while barring men and women
of color from benefiting materially from such occupations. History, indeed, is
prologue to the present. In a March 12, 2024 report published by the CaliforniaCivil Rights Department, Director Kevin Kish states “The new findings we’re
sharing today make it clear that there is a long road ahead of us for true pay
equity in our state.”
By the end of March, the power elite of Oxnard
capitulated. They agreed to eliminate the WACC, restore the original thinning
wage rate, and contract JMLA labor for virtually all the sugar beet acreage
on the Oxnard Plain.
Subsequently, the JMLA renamed itself the Sugar Beet and
Farm Laborers’ Union and applied for recognition from the powerful American
Federation of Labor. In a May 13, 1903, letter, AFL president Samuel Gompers
granted a charter only to the Mexican contingent of the SBFLU to not enrage a
largely white, rank-and-file racist against Asians. This was despite a Los
Angeles County Council of Labor resolution, championed by Fred C. Wheeler and
John Murray, welcoming workers of all races and nationalities. Nonetheless,
Gompers referenced US immigration law that excluded the entrance of Chinese
workers and similar racism toward Japanese immigrants.
Japanese Sugar Beet Workers (Courtesy of the Museum of Ventura County)
In an eloquent June 8th
reply, Lizarras, on behalf of his ethnic Mexican brethren, condemned Gompers’
charter in stating “We would be false to them and to ourselves and to the cause
of Unionism if we, now, accepted privileges for ourselves which are not accorded
to them. We are going to stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight
which ended in a victory over the enemy.”
Mexican Betabeleros (Courtesy of the Musuem of Ventura County)
The SBFLU faded away as employers
throughout Ventura County improved work conditions to avoid similar labor
strikes, however short-lived. A familiar dynamic in labor history.
The March 30,
1903, JMLA victory is an important historical event for several reasons. First
among them is the demonstration of the significance of interracial solidarity to
advance and protect the material interests of all workers. Murray, a white labor
organizer, as well as a reporter for the International Socialist Review,
supported, observed, and documented this lesson. Second, the strike re-orients
old biases in US history textbooks that focus on white-dominant narratives in
relation to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 for workers safety and higher
compensation, Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket Affair for the eight-hour workday, and a
similar wage cut and violent repression at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead,
Pennsylvania steel mill in 1892. With the JMLA story, people of color are the
protagonists, not wallpaper characters.
The JMLA Strike is especially important
for working-class students who do not see their ancestors, or themselves, in US
history. I know this because when I learned about this story in the 1990s, I
became excited about studying the history of my community, the City of Oxnard,
made up of a significant mix of working-class Asian Americans, African
Americans, Euro Americans, and Mexican Americans. So much so, I went on to earn
my doctorate, publish two books, and teach a US history that centers the historically underrepresented.
C/S
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