There was a scattering of African American farmers in the Pajaro Valley in the 1850s, providing the nucleus of a small community in Watsonville. One of the most prominent was Robert Johnson, a farmer from Tennessee, who came to the Pajaro Valley in the 1850s. The Johnson children would be the major impetus for the formation of a “separate-but-equal” school in Watsonville in 1866. Though Johnson owned property in the Pajaro Valley, his decendants eventually moved away.


An unusual experiment—to transplant a little of the antebellum south—occurred in the Cienega District of neighboring San Benito County. In 1888, Daniel Gilmore, a white farmer from Arkansas, bought a 465-acre parcel in the mountains above Hollister and invited the freed slaves who were still working on his father’s farm in Arkansas to come to work for him. In January of 1889, the first of what would eventually be 40 ex-slaves from Aransas arrived in Hollister and moved up to the farm to work for Gilmore. The African Americans remained forming the nucleus for a sizable community in Hollister that continued well into the twentieth century. The descendants of this unusual agricultural experiment are now dispersed throughout California.
Excerpt from the book: The California Agricultural Workers’ History Center by Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon

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The first crews of Chinese agricultural workers in the Pajaro Valley appeared during the summer of 1866 and, from that time into the 1890s, immigrant men from China performed most of the large-scale labor in the Pajaro Valley. The Chinese not only provided the labor-base upon which the Valley’s agriculture diversified, but they also helped expand the arable acreage by draining and clearing the Valley’s low-lying land. Some of the Chinese were horticulturists, providing the skills that saw the growth of the strawberry industry and helping fledgling regional farmers establish new crops. They also pioneered several industries, most notably transforming nuisance mustard into a viable crop. The Chinese Exclusion Law, passed in 1882, began to be felt in the 1890s, and the Japanese began replacing Chinese Men in the fields.
Excerpt from the book: The California Agricultural Workers’ History Center by Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon

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The exclusion of the Chinese in 1882 and the restriction and eventual exclusion of the Japanese in 1924 created a need for a group of laborers to replace them. Since the Philippines was an unincorporated territory of the United States after 1902, Filipino immigrants could come to the United States without restriction. Welcomed at first because of their knowledge of English and their Roman Catholicism, the Filipinos soon became the targets of racism and discrimination, just as had their Chinese and Japanese predecessors. This resentment broke into the national and international news headlines when, in January, 1930, a four-day race riot raged through the streets of Watsonville. The murder of Fermin Tobera, a young Filipino agricultural worker, helped bring law enforcement into focus, and the rioting eventually ended—but not before Fermin Tobera became a national hero in the Philippines, his death symbolizing the oppression that many Filipinos were suffering on the mainland of the United States.
Excerpt from the book: The California Agricultural Workers’ History Center by Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon

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The first Japanese agricultural workers came into the region in the late 1880s and, in the following transitional decade, they began slowly to replace the aging Chinese in the fields. The early immigrants were young men from the rural and coastal areas of Japan, and their unique cultural skills in group organization translated quickly into organizing into labor groups. They inherited not only the jobs previously held by Chinese workers but also the racial animosity that had been directed toward their Asian predecessors. The Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920 hampered their ability to become land-owners and the 1924 prohibition prevented further Japanese immigration to the US. Their role in the regions agriculture (and everything else) ended abruptly in 1942, when they were removed to concentration camps.
Excerpt from the book: The California Agricultural Workers’ History Center by Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon

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Fueled by the economic and political dislocation of the Mexican Revolution and civil war beginning in 1910, a second surge of Mexican immigrants came into California. Fleeing war, inflation and poverty, they came north for work. The earliest immigrants into the region found work in the New Idria mercury mines in southern San Benito County and the cement plant in San Juan Bautista. However, by the 1920s, a growing number of Mexican agricultural workers began working in the fields alongside the Filipinos, together forming the mainstay for the agricultural industry in the region; by the 1940s they would dominate the work force.

The Bracero Years: 1942-1964
The Second World War ushered in a new era in California and Pajaro Valley agricultural workers’ history. For the past 60 years, this history has been dominated by Mexican, and Mexican-American, workers.

Initiated at the start of World War II by the U.S. Department of Labor to fill the vacuum in the fields created by the war-time draft, the deportation of Filipinos and the relocation of Japanese-Americans, the Bracero Program (from the Spanish word “brazos,” for “arms”) provided temporary work visas to Mexican field workers throughout the war and into the 1960s. Initially, the braceros were almost entirely men without families—a mobile, migrant labor force which ebbed and flowed throughout California, following the crops as they ripened. Although other gropus were brought into the fields as part of the war effort---notably, Jamaicans and prisoners of war—the Mexican-national braceros were preeminent.

While much has been written about California agriculture prior to World War II, and also about the United Farmworkers Movement from 1965 on, the Bracero Program has been virtually neglected by historians, particularly its role in Pajaro Valley agricultural history. Although there is a body of work focusing on the policies and economic implications of the Bracero Program at a statewide level, little has been written directly about the lives of the men and women who migrated from Mexico during this era and whose labor sustained California agriculture for nearly a quarter century. Excerpt from the book: The California Agricultural Workers’ History Center by Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon

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This famous photo of Florence Owens Thompson and her children was taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange in Nipomo, California, in March of 1936. The family arrived in the Pajaro Valley later that day, hoping to find work picking lettuce.

Despite the fact that these new migrant workers fit the profile of the farm owner’s ideal farm worker by being white and speaking English, they soon found themselves saddled with the same stereotypes that had been heaped on their predecessors in the fields, most notably that they were biologically and culturally inferior to the resident population. Though they often referred to themselves proudly as “Okies,” “Arkies,” and “Texies,” these became pejorative terms when used by California-born residents.
Excerpt from the book: The California Agricultural Workers’ History Center by Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon

Following the growing seasons along the Pacific Coast, these migrant workers were called “fruit tramps,” often living in makeshift roadside clusters known as “ditch camps.” Eventually, just as Chinatowns, Japantowns, and “Little Manilas” sprang up to house Asian farm workers in the Pajaro Valley, “Little Oklahomas” grew up throughout the region to serves these new migrants from the heartland of the United States. Corralitos had several such communities, with the largest concentration of Little Oklahomas being located in Aromas.
Excerpt from the book: The California Agricultural Workers’ History Center by Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon

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The University of California, Davis has an extensive collection of books, articles and a detailed web site where you can view the pictures below in better detail. Go to http://people.lib.ucdavis.edu/tss/punjab/SikhFarmers.html

California's Punjab Mexican Americans

In the early 1900s male immigrants from the Punjab region were unable to bring family members from India and sought out wives within the Mexican community of farmers. Sikh men were not allowed to own land but Mexican women could. Go to http://people.lib.ucdavis.edu/tss/punjab/SikhFarmers.html to learn more.

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Click Here for the Official Web Page of United Farmworkers

Biography of Cesar Chavez

http://www.ufw.org/cecstory.htm

Biography of Dolores Huerta

http://www.ufw.org/dh.htm

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"In 1965, an aspiring playwright named Luis Valdez left the San Francisco Mime Troupe to join Cesar Chavez in organizing farmworkers in Delano, California. Valdez organized the workers into El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers Theater) in an effort to popularize and raise funds for the grape boycott and farmworker strike." continued..........

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