The Filipino Workers and the Valley Behind the Cliffs
Near Carmel, California
On a clear day from the northern stretch of this highway, you can see the opening of the Salinas Valley to the east, between the ridgelines of the Santa Lucia range. It is twenty minutes by car from the coast. It has been producing lettuce, artichokes, and celery for national markets since the nineteen twenties, and it did so first on the labor of Filipino workers who came because the Philippines were an American territory and the door was open, if only so far.
Filipino workers arrived in California in significant numbers in the nineteen twenties, recruited for agricultural work in the aftermath of the Exclusion Acts that had cut off Chinese and Japanese labor. They worked the Salinas Valley fields, the artichoke rows around Castroville, the lettuce operations around Salinas. They were paid less than white workers for the same work, housed in labor camps separated from the towns, and denied the right to own land in California under the Alien Land Laws that applied to people ineligible for citizenship. Filipino immigrants, as colonial subjects rather than citizens, were ineligible.
In January of nineteen thirty, a series of anti-Filipino riots broke out in Watsonville, roughly twenty miles north of the highway's northern anchor at Carmel. White men attacked Filipino workers, their housing, and their gathering places over several nights. One man was killed. The Watsonville riot was the most violent of several such episodes across California that winter.
John Steinbeck grew up in Salinas and set much of his most important fiction in this valley. He wrote directly about agricultural labor conditions. The workers in his most celebrated books are white migrants. The Filipino laborers who worked these same fields at the same time are largely absent from his fiction and from the literary mythology of a valley that Steinbeck otherwise documented closely. The celebrated remoteness of Big Sur is bounded on the east by an economy that has never appeared in the scenic version of this corridor.
