Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898–1961

4. Bitter Repression, Sweet Resistance

131 4 SWEET RESISTANCE The Mexican community lived in an environment that simultaneously restricted and compelled their integration into the mainstream of Oxnard’s political economy. Community organization was promoted by residents within barrio enclaves and their institutions of churches, mutual aid societies , and leisure. This cultural dynamic existed not only in Oxnard but also within the larger context of Ventura County and Southern California. Shared experiences in the realms of work and leisure generated a network of resistance to injustice. Individual and group struggle took many forms. People resisted with their feet to find better treatment and opportunities elsewhere; in extreme cases, violence occurred.1 This chapter focuses on acts of resistance and protest that ran the gamut from street demonstrations to strikes. It starts with the Mexican community’s inquiry into the unexplained deaths of two jail inmates in 1900 and moves on to the 1903 and 1933 sugar beet strikes. The latter two struggles encompassed alliances with groups outside the culture of Mexicans. Some Mexicans also allied themselves with elites who determined the conditions of labor in the economy of agriculture. In Oxnard, curious unions developed that complicate the understanding of cross-cultural perseverance. Plebeian Mexicans struggled against an interlocked political economy that consisted BITTER REPRESSION, 132 bitter repression, sweet resistance of the refinery and its managers, newspapers, financiers, growers, and law enforcement. So coordinated were the goals and actions of elites that an agricultural-industrial complex emerged. Demographic Growing Pains The development of the city of Oxnard, based on the industry of sugar beets, transformed an environment that was more or less a basic farming economy to one that was part of an emergent system of agribusiness. Divergent communities experienced tensions within this market-oriented economy. Social unrest and upheaval arose as people faced starvation. Others refused to accept the disappearance of a simpler era.2 This scenario existed on the Oxnard Plain with the commercial expansion initiated with the establishment of the American Beet Sugar Company factory in 1898 and the presence of Mexican immigrants, many of whom had already witnessed dramatic social change and a gory civil war known as the Mexican Revolution. Mexico’s peasantry, artisans, and craft workers had found themselves dislocated by the effects of foreign capital since the mid-nineteenth century. Thousands of rural shoemakers, leatherworkers , silversmiths, and other artisans and craftsmen were displaced by the entry of foreign goods by way of the newly constructed foreign-owned railroads. And indigenous people were driven from their ejidos (communal lands) as the Mexican government sought to modernize the nation’s agricultural production. From the 1880s onward the north-south construction of railroads in Mexico facilitated the diaspora of displaced Mexicans.3 Mexico’s population growth—from 10 million in 1885 to 15 million by 1910—added to the stress caused by the forces of modernization. This affected the character and size of the Mexican population in the United States.4 A modest estimate places 375,000 Mexicans, both U.S.-born and immigrant, living in the Southwest in 1900. Another—perhaps more realistic —approximation stands at 552,000.5 During this same year a recorded 103,393 Mexican nationals entered the United States. An estimated one million crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, nonetheless, between 1900 and 1930. Mexican immigration during these thirty years dramatically affected Mexican barrios throughout the United States.6 bitter repression, sweet resistance 133 A Curious Jailhouse Fire: Accident or Arson? The experiences Mexicans brought with them to the Southwest influenced their integration in places such as Oxnard. This was particularly true when conflict with law enforcement was involved. Begnigno Gómez and José Baisia were arrested for public drunkenness and assault in July 1900. Both tragically died in a fire at the Oxnard jailhouse on the Fourth of July. City authorities attributed the deaths to a failed jailbreak as the men attempted to burn a hole through one of the cell walls. Guillermo Andrade, the Mexican consul to the United States in Los Angeles, arrived to investigate the deaths a week later. He interviewed Oxnard notary public J. A. Whitmore, eight Mexican community members (both U.S.-born and Mexican nationals) who witnessed the blaze, and friends of the victims. No white residents, with the exception of Whitmore, were questioned, the Oxnard Courier reported. The newspaper also held that the consul’s presence was due to “some ugly rumors in relation...