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

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION For much of the twentieth century, an imposing factory in the fields of the Oxnard Plain stood at the center of a community named after three brothers—Henry, James, and Robert Oxnard—that did much to establish the sugar beet industry in Southern California. The Oxnard brothers, like other sugar beet magnates, developed a curious union with local independent growers. They provided the science and technology to propel the production of sugar beets, and they contracted with growers to produce this relatively novel, yet lucrative, crop in Southern California. Sugar beet refineries then took responsibility for both obtaining and maintaining the workforce needed for the backbreaking cultivation and harvest of this crop.1 The early integration of the interests of the Oxnard brothers’ American Beet Sugar Company (absc) with that of independent growers spawned a multitude of other curious unions. Their enterprise depended on the recruitment and distribution of an industrialized labor force of exploitable non-whites. Overlapping cycles of recruitment introduced a cross-cultural array of migrant workers that began with Chinese workers and ended with people of Mexican origins. Between these two groups, men, women, and children of Japanese, Filipino, Sikh, and white origins toiled in the fields of this Southern California coastal community. 2 introduction The union of lumpen workers and residents within and outside these industrialized fields promoted the creation of unexpected, and often intricate , cross-cultural relationships. As early as 1903, labor contractors, both Japanese and Mexican, united to resist their displacement by a contracting company created by the absc, financiers, and growers. These Japanese and Mexican contractors served as labor organizers of sugar beet workers. The interests of labor contractors have traditionally been antithetical to those of workers. Historically, growers have utilized labor contractors, in large part, to buffer themselves from labor provisions directly related to pay, recruitment, and conditions, which is why such contracting would be at the center of tensions from this period to 1959. That was the year César Chávez, as an organizer of the Community Service Organization (cso), led domestic farmworkers to challenge the concentrated power of the Ventura County Farm Labor Association and the larger agriculturalindustrial complex made up of state and federal agencies, elected officials, the media, and other interests that had supported the elusive “contractor” arrangement. From the late nineteenth century onward, Mexicans encountered, in addition to a conflictual labor environment, a Southern California that both romanticized and vilified much that was Mexican. Boosters attempted to erase Southern California’s Mexican heritage by superimposing a myth that was Spanish. The discrimination Mexicans experienced in schools, public spaces, employment, and with law enforcement reaffirmed the subordinate status of Mexicans born on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. They identified themselves, and were identified, as Mexican, but with nuanced distinctions.2 Cultural borders between Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens became pronounced as the U.S.-born offspring of Mexican immigrants began to dominate this population. Many U.S.-born Mexicans saw themselves as more acculturated and less Mexican than their parents. Immigrant deportation and repatriation campaigns of the Great Depression solidified the formation of a Mexican American identity throughout Southern California. And at the start of World War II, agribusiness’s successful lobbying for the federal government’s subsidization of imported Mexican workers (the bracero program) made this true.3 introduction 3 Between the Great Depression and the conclusion of World War II, two events occurred on the Oxnard Plain that complicated the relationship of the U.S.-born with Mexican nationals. In the nadir of the Great Depression , another, yet unsuccessful, sugar beet strike took place in 1933. Then a more regional strike that involved Southern California citrus pickers and packinghouse workers commenced and concluded in a stalemate in 1941. The following year, once the United States entered World War II, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration entered into a bilateral agreement with Mexico to contract laborers for an agricultural industry that putatively lost a significant part of its workforce to military service and war-related industries. Even after the war, longtime Mexican residents found themselves increasingly competing, ineffectively, against braceros, who were favored by employers. Enamored with the utterly exploitable character of braceros, growers colluded with local, state, and federal functionaries to maintain unimpeded access to braceros at the expense of domestic agricultural workers, both local and migrant. So interlocked were...