Filipino Labor and the Strawberry Fields Behind PCH

The flat agricultural plain east of the coastal approach to Point Mugu is the Oxnard Plain, and it grows strawberries. Roughly one-third of California's strawberries come from this valley. The annual agricultural value is more than one billion dollars. Most visitors on the Pacific Coast Highway pass it without stopping.

Filipino workers arrived in Ventura County's fields during and after World War One, recruited by growers who needed labor after federal immigration law progressively restricted Japanese workers throughout the nineteen tens and twenties, culminating in the Immigration Act of nineteen twenty-four, which effectively ended Japanese immigration entirely. Filipino workers were recruited as replacements, first for sugar beets and vegetables and later for the strawberry harvest.

One of those workers, Larry Itliong, went on to become one of the most consequential labor organizers in California history. In September of nineteen sixty-five, Itliong led Filipino agricultural workers in the Delano Grape Strike, demanding wage parity with white workers. He reached out to the Mexican American farmworker organization led by Cesar Chavez, and their alliance created the movement that became the United Farm Workers. Itliong is honored in a mural at Oxnard College, a few miles from the fields where Filipino labor in Ventura County helped write the first chapter of a story that ended at Delano.

The strawberry harvest happens in the spring. The workers who pick it are mostly Mexican and Central American now, working seasonal contracts. The fields look the same as they looked in nineteen oh three, when the sugar beet workers organized. Labor changes. The land does not.