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Frank P. Barajas. Courtesy photo.
By Frank P. Barajas / Guest contributor
Imagine your reaction if your employer slashed the wages of workers by fifty to sixty percent. Why would a business do such a thing?
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 of sugar beets 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.
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.
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 that grew to over 1,500 Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican members.
Oxnard’s workers of the world had united; many who were 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 California Civil 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 to 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.
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.”
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 still 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 underrepresented peoples who also made America great.
— Frank P. Barajas is a lifetime resident of Oxnard and Professor of History, Faculty Early Retirement Program at California State University Channel Islands.
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