1. Asian-Mexican Relations in the Early 20th Century

Asian and Mexican farmworkers traveled the migrant farmworker circuits in Central and Southern California.

Throughout the 20th century, ethnic groups such as the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Mexicans served as the bulk of the immigrant farmworker force. By the 1930s, Filipinos immigrated to various cities in the Western United States. At the same time, Mexican workers were deported back to Mexico due to job shortages caused by the Great Depression. By 1934, with the passage of the Tydings-Mcduffie Act, Filipinos, like other Asian groups before them, were excluded from entering the United States due to anti-immigrant nativist sentiment. After the outbreak of World War II, age-eligible American farmworkers were drafted into the armed services, causing a labor shortage in fields. At the behest of American growers, the U.S. government enacted the Bracero Program, bringing hundreds of Mexican nationals back to the U.S. to tend to the fields.

Ethnic farmworker groups banded together on several occasions to demand respectable wages and improved working conditions. On 1930, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers went on strike against Imperial Valley’s lettuce growers. A decade later, Mexican and Japanese farmworkers went on strike against Washington growers during the 1943 Dayton Strike.

Although separated by language and culture, ethnic farmworkers shared similar hardships and exploitation from U.S. growers. In Central California, immigrant farmworkers of all ethnicities typically lived in cramped labor camps. "They lived in labor camps, [with] no telephones, no air-conditioning, no heater in the winter," recalled Philip Vera Cruz. "It's hell and they have lived that way every day of their lives in this country."[1]

During the early 20th century, working crews were segregated by ethnicity.

To prevent mutual cooperation, American growers often pit ethnic groups against each other by using divide-and-conquer tactics. "There always was competition," remarked Lorraine Agtang. "Like 'oh the Filipinos made 100 more boxes than you guys' or 'the Mexicans finished this much work than you guys.' There was always that competitive sense against the crews [and] the growers were trying to just make more money."[2]

Although the growers grew rich off of these tactics, the farmworkers were hardly paid at all. Prior to the 1965 Delano Grape Strike, workers were paid $1.20 an hour. Often, they were paid only one dollar a day for a ten-hour workday.[3]

[3] Linda Mabalot, “Willie Barrientos Oral History Transcript, Interview 1,” Welga! Filipino American Labor Archives, accessed March 30, 2015, https://welgadigitalarchive.omeka.net/items/show/9.