The collaboration between the Latino and Japanese American communities in Los Angeles to build the garden at Roosevelt High may seem like an unusual alliance, but it is not without precedent in California. Nearly a century ago, two immigrant groups of field laborers joined forces to form the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) in Oxnard, Calif., a booming new community 50 miles north of Los Angeles that developed around the sugar beet industry.
Laborers who worked the sugar beet fields forged the union in February 1903 to protect their wages, which had been slashed from almost $6 per acre for thinning beet plants to $3.75 per acre. In March of that year, during the crucial period in the growing season when the plants required thinning, some 1,200 workers staged a strike. With their crops in jeopardy, the farmers and local industry leaders gave in to the strikers' demands after a few weeks and restored the workers' previous pay rate.
But the JMLA didn't rest easy after its victory. Leaders knew that in order to remain strong, the union needed to secure membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which would provide the support of other union chapters during future crises. J. M. Lizarras, the Mexican secretary of the JMLA, petitioned the AFL for a charter, which AFL President Samuel Gompers granted with one stipulation: the Mexican union members must drop the Japanese laborers from their ranks. It was a dictate that reflected the pervasive prejudice against Asians during this period in U.S. history.
The Mexican branch of the JMLA refused to consent to Gompers' demand. In a letter rejecting the charter, Lizarras eloquently described the kinship that bound the workers together, writing:
We have counseled, fought and lived on very short rations with our Japanese brothers, and toiled with them in the fields, and they have been uniformly kind and considerate. We would be false to them and to ourselves and the cause of unionism if we now accepted privileges for ourselves which are not accorded to them. We are going to stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight which ended in a victory over the enemy. We therefore respectfully petition the A.F. of L. to grant us a charter under which we can unite all the sugar beet and field laborers in Oxnard without regard to their color or race. We will refuse any other kind of charter, except one which will wipe out race prejudices and recognize our fellow workers as being as good as ourselves.
The AFL held to its original decision, however, and the JMLA never gained admittance into the national organization. As JMLA leaders predicted, the union was unable to sustain itself without broader affiliation and support. By 1910, the JMLA had quietly disappeared, but not before carving out for itself a place in history as the first union of farm laborers in California and the first major agricultural labor union in the U.S. formed by different minority groups.
The similarities between the efforts of the JMLA and Roosevelt High's garden project prompted Raven Radio Theater, a group that creates radio dramas for classroom use, to develop a play connecting the stories. Teachers can order the play script, Common Ground (recommended for grades 7-12), along with a CD of theme music and background sounds, for $35.
For more information, contact:
Joe and Paula McHugh
P.O. Box 642
Nevada City, CA 95959
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