The Oxnard Strike of 1903: The Union That Chose Its Allies

On February eleventh, nineteen oh three, five hundred Japanese farmworkers and two hundred Mexican farmworkers in Oxnard signed a founding charter and called their organization the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association. It was the first multiethnic agricultural union in the history of California. Possibly in the history of the United States. They had been waiting for the right moment since the winter, when the Western Agricultural Contracting Company cut their wages a second time and raised prices at the company store a second time, and the men who picked sugar beets in the flat fields east of here decided that enough was enough.

The strike began in February and spread quickly. On March thirtieth, the Western Agricultural Contracting Company canceled all standing contracts and agreed to restore direct hiring. The union had won. A Mexican worker, twenty-one-year-old Luis Vasquez, was killed in the violence of the strike. Four others were wounded. The victory was real and it cost something real.

Then the union applied for a charter from the American Federation of Labor. AFL president Samuel Gompers wrote back with a condition: the charter would be granted, but only if the Japanese members were excluded. He did not want a multiethnic union under the AFL's roof.

The Japanese-Mexican Labor Association held a vote. The Mexican secretary wrote the reply: we are going to stand by men who stood by us.

They refused the charter.

The union dissolved not long after, as many early labor organizations did, but the act of refusal has lasted. The AFL was, at that moment, the most powerful labor organization in the country. Turning down its charter over the question of whether Japanese workers deserved to belong was not a small thing. It was a statement about who the labor movement was for, made by men who had the least to lose by accepting and the most to lose by refusing.

The fields you can see from this stretch of road grow strawberries now, and the labor history of Ventura County did not end in nineteen oh three. But it begins there, in the most unambiguous terms California history offers.