Chinese, Japanese, & Filipino Farmworkers

Interior glass house with carnations, Yonemoto Family, 1940.

The Valley sprouted yearly, creating waves of work. July brought apricots, followed by peaches and pears in August, then prunes in September, ending the harvest with tomatoes in September and October. The Chinese and Japanese workers overlapped in agricultural labor. Chinese contractors employed Japanese laborers during the early 1900s, starting new labor relations between the two ethnic groups. However, starting in 1910, white farmers began to favor hiring Japanese farm labor over the aging and physically declining Chinese farm laborers. Chinese immigrants, predominantly men, labored the California farms to support immediate and extended families who remained in rural villages in Southern China. While Chinese laborers kept far away family in mind, Japanese immigrants focused on settling in California and having a family, therefore, establishing the American dream to succeed as a farmer and support a wife and children while signifying his status in his community. Different from the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Filipino migrant workers faced a different farm life. The majority of the men were paid poorly through the seasons and during the Great Depression that continued through the decades. This poor treatment led to the work the Filipino men found in forming multiracial coalitions in the farm labor movement.

In Robert Ragsac’s A First Generation Fil-Am Looks Back, he writes in chapter Six to Six, But Not On Sunday’s, about the summers of the 1940s when he and his brother worked with the celery crop. They would use the now outlawed tool, the short hoe to create a small hole to lay the celery stalks into the ground. They did this work with no complaining. Along with the celery, they worked picking string beans, tomatoes, squash, bell peppers, onions, cucumbers, peaches, apricots, and strawberries, and gathering prunes from the ground. Most of Ragsac’s generation worked in the fields, packing houses, and canneries. They were the workers of the post-War generation, and that included the girls at the time. The jobs they worked were hard and often thankless, with a bleak future, “one that reached only to next season’s crops and kampo.” 

The Valley’s agricultural economy changed as the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino immigrants became a part of the labor force. Change also evolved in white residents’ ideas about race, gender and what it meant to be an American family farmer.