Fermin Tobera at Murphy Ranch

The fields outside Watsonville look quiet from the highway. Artichoke rows and strawberry beds, flat land between the road and the mountains. In January of nineteen thirty, those same fields were the geography of a five-day massacre.

Beginning on January nineteenth, white mobs moved through the Watsonville area attacking Filipino farmworkers. They numbered in the hundreds at peak. They pulled men from bunkhouses on ranch properties, threw farmworkers off the Pajaro River bridge, and on the night of January twenty-third, a group opened fire with rifles into sleeping quarters at John Murphy Ranch where a dozen men were hiding in the dark.

Fermin Tobera was twenty-two years old. He had come to California from the Philippines, as tens of thousands of Filipino men had during the nineteen twenties, drawn by labor recruiters who advertised wages that sounded impossible compared to what the islands could offer. He was hired for the same agricultural work, in the same fields, that you can see from this road today. He was hiding in a closet with eleven other men when the bullet found him. He was shot through the heart. He died on the floor.

His body was sent home to the Philippines. The Philippine government declared a national day of mourning. The newspapers there called him a martyr. The Tydings-McDuffie Act passed four years later, in nineteen thirty-four, and reduced Filipino immigration to fifty people per year. The connection between Tobera's death and that legislation is not incidental.

The proximate cause of the riot, as journalists described it at the time, was white working-class resentment of Filipino men who worked for lower wages and who danced with white women at taxi-dance halls in Watsonville. The structural cause was an agricultural economy built on the labor of successive immigrant groups, each eventually targeted when that labor became too visible and too necessary to ignore.

California's legislature formally apologized for the Watsonville riots in two thousand and eleven. Eighty-one years after Fermin Tobera died in a closet.