1903 Oxnard strike

The 1903 Oxnard strike, also called the Oxnard sugar beet strike, was a farm labor strike in Oxnard, California, in which Japanese and Mexican workers who thinned and harvested sugar beets organized together against a labor-contracting company. Their union, the Japanese Mexican Labor Association (JMLA), grew to about 1,200 members and won a settlement on March 30, 1903.^[1] The strike is often described as the first multiethnic agricultural strike in California history.^[2]

The strike turned violent on March 23, 1903, when five union members were shot and one, Luis Vasquez, died.^[1] After the settlement, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) offered a charter only on the condition that Japanese workers be excluded. The Mexican members refused it, and the union dissolved without AFL affiliation.^[3][4]

Background

By 1903 the American Beet Sugar Company, run by the Oxnard brothers, operated a large sugar factory in Oxnard. The factory had been completed in 1898.^[1] Vida Newspaper reports that it processed over 200,000 tons of beets a year.^[2]

To cut labor costs, growers' interests created the Western Agricultural Contracting Company (WACC) in 1902. It concentrated hiring in one contractor, controlled roughly 75% of the harvesting work, and squeezed out the smaller, independent Japanese labor contractors (Japanese: keiyaku-nin) who had previously competed for the work.^[2][1]

Frank P. Barajas, a historian of Mexican American labor in Oxnard, writes that the WACC cut pay for beet thinning and topping by half. It also kept Mexican and Japanese crews in separate divisions, ran company stores that charged inflated prices, and took commissions both for itself and for its subcontractors.^[1] Workers objected to the commission fees, the wage gaps, and the forced purchases at company stores.^[4]

Organizing the union

The JMLA was founded in early 1903 by roughly 500 Japanese and 200 Mexican workers.^[1][4] Its leaders came from both communities. Kosaburo Baba, a Japanese labor contractor, was president, and each ethnic branch had its own secretary: Y. Yamaguchi for the Japanese branch and J. M. Lizarraras for the Mexican branch.^[1][5] Members refused to work for the WACC, and by March membership reached about 1,200, which Barajas puts at over 90% of the beet workers in Ventura County.^[1]

The union adopted an emblem of clasped hands across a red rising sun, printed on thousands of white buttons that were distributed around Oxnard during the strike.^[2]

Shooting of March 23

On March 23, 1903, a street fight lasting about 20 minutes broke out in Oxnard's Chinatown district when union members confronted a wagon carrying strikebreakers. Five JMLA members were shot. Luis Vasquez, a 21-year-old Mexican worker, died of his wounds, and four others were wounded: two Mexican and two Japanese.^[1][4][5]

Accounts differ on who was responsible. UFCW 324 reports that witnesses said armed Anglo farmers began the shooting, yet an inquest blamed the strikers.^[4] Erik Loomis writes that a man named Charles Arnold was arrested and acquitted by an all-white jury.^[5] The sources consulted do not give the inquest or trial records themselves.

Settlement

On March 30, 1903, the growers settled. Barajas reports they agreed to contract directly with the JMLA and to set a thinning wage at double the WACC rate. Socialist organizers John Murray and Fred C. Wheeler helped negotiate the agreement.^[1] Loomis reports thinning wages of $5 to $6 per acre and union recognition across about 5,000 acres in Ventura County.^[5] The WACC's subcontracting system was abolished.^[4]

The AFL charter dispute

The JMLA sought a charter from the American Federation of Labor. According to Barajas, AFL president Samuel Gompers granted one in mid-May, but only to the Mexican members, under the name Sugar Beet and Farm Laborers' Union.^[1] The American Labor Union Journal reported on June 25, 1903, that Gompers required a guarantee that the union would never admit Chinese or Japanese members, citing US exclusion laws.^[3][4]

Lizarraras wrote to Gompers refusing the charter. The journal quotes the letter: "We would be false to them and to ourselves and to the cause of unionism if we now accepted privileges for ourselves which are not accorded to them."^[3] The journal also noted that the AFL's own stated principle was that "race, color, religion or nationality shall be no bar to fellowship," and argued that organizing California field labor was impossible without Japanese workers.^[3]

Aftermath

Without AFL backing, the union declined. Loomis says it fell apart by the end of 1903, while UFCW 324 says it dissolved by 1910.^[5][4] Barajas notes that beet workers struck again about 30 years later, this time alongside Filipino workers, and were unsuccessful. Farm labor actions in Ventura County continued through the twentieth century.^[1]

The Central Coast Labor Council AFL-CIO held a 120th-anniversary commemoration on March 18, 2023, attended by about 200 union workers.^[1]

Discrepancies among sources

The sources disagree on several details, and the available accounts do not resolve them.

The discrepancies could be settled by consulting contemporary newspapers such as the Oxnard Courier, the coroner's inquest, and the court record of the Arnold case. Barajas's book Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961 is cited by Vida Newspaper as the fullest scholarly treatment.^[2]

Analysis

This section is Agpedia's own analysis, not drawn from the cited sources.

The WACC's design depended on keeping workers divided: separate Mexican and Japanese crews, middlemen who each took a cut, and company stores that left workers with few alternatives. These arrangements limited workers' ability to bargain or to leave. The JMLA's central achievement was to unite the groups the arrangement had separated, and the settlement of March 30 shows that the cross-ethnic organization gave workers more bargaining power than either group had alone.

The Mexican members' decision to refuse a charter that excluded their Japanese colleagues cost them the institutional backing that might have sustained the union. It also shows the members acting on their own judgment about their shared interests, even when the price was high.