Filipino farm worker Fermin Tobera was slain by a bullet fired from a group of 500 white locals on Jan. 23, 1930 seeking to throw out Filipino farm hands. The crowd was accusing the workers of taking away their jobs and their women.
Though the incident occurred in Watsonville — about 25 miles from Hollister, San Benito County was untouched by the riots.
But its consequences were felt worldwide.
The Watsonville race riots effectively martyred Tobera and fueled the campaign for the U.S. to grant independence to the Philippines.
The Watsonville incident helped improve labor laws for workers. The lessons learned would be the catalysts for main events like the Delano grape strike, near Bakersfield in 1965 and the civil rights movement in 1967.
Large portions of agriculture in California have been industrialized, unlike in the Midwest where much of the farming is still family-owned. And even in the 1930s, large scale farming needed a large, cheap labor force. This meant working 16-hour days in the sun for extremely low wages (50 cents an hour, according to the Watsonville Register, January 28, 1930. That would be equivalent to about $5.00 an hour today).
So, came the Chinese from railroad labor in 1865, the Mexicans, Southeast Asian Indians and the Japanese in the early 1900s.
The recruitment of an ethnically diverse labor force served farm contractors well. According to “Facts About Filipino Immigration into California” by the California State Department of Industrial Relations, 1972, from the original Special bulletin #3 of the California Department of Industrial Relations, 1930: “The growers prefer to have the contractor to employ a massive mixture of laborers of various races, speaking diverse languages, and not accustomed to mingling with each other.”
The government report said the strategy was farm workers not from the same race or nationality would not agree to strikes or group together to protest labor troubles during harvest season.
But another problem beset the foreign farm workers. They were seen as competition by white farm workers. Consequently, the foreign workers were met with violence and then legislation.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese labor immigrants from entering the US for 10 years. The 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act also excluded Southeast Indians and people from the Middle East. Then the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act overhauled the 1921 Quota Act, favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe over those from Asia and southern and eastern Europe. And in the 1930s, nativists campaigned for Mexicans to be differentiated from “white” in the Census to control their immigration to the US.
Spain ceded the Philippines to the U.S. for $20 million after the Spanish-American War (April to August 1898). Filipino resistance remained against U.S. occupation. But U.S. President William Howard Taft’s pacification campaign won over the Filipino elite and effectively ended the Philippine-American War in 1902.
In the same year, the Philippines became a U.S. territory and Filipinos were technically U.S. nationals. Filipinos were the next logical choice as farm workers. By 1903, mostly Filipino men (because of immigration laws) aged 16 to 30 years old moved to California, lured by “streets paved in gold.”
Said Stuart Marshall Jamieson in his book “Labor Unionism in American Agriculture,” a Department of Labor Report, Bulletin #836, 1945, “Filipinos were recruited for agricultural labor in California when it appeared that Mexican immigration would be restricted during the 1920s. They were regarded as the sole remaining substitute in the field of cheap labor.”
According to “The Story of California,” about 2/3 of an estimated 45,000 Filipinos lived in California by 1930. They worked through harsh conditions planting and harvesting mostly lettuce, asparagus, celery, figs, grapes and other produce.
By 1928, anti-Filipino violence in Oregon, Washington and California (specifically Stockton and Exeter in the San Joaquin Valley) occurred. But the most violent riots occurred in Watsonville.
What precipitated it was a resolution by Watsonville Judge DW Rohrbach at a Monterey Chamber of Commerce meeting on January 10, 1930. The next day local newspapers printed his remarks. From The Evening Pajaronian, January 11, 1930:
“For a wage that a white man cannot exist on, the Filipinos will take the job and, through the clannish, low standard mode of housing and feeding, practiced among them, will soon be well clothed, and strutting about like a peacock and endeavoring to attract the eyes of the young American and Mexican girls. Fifteen Filipinos will live in a room or two, sleeping on the floor and contenting themselves with squatting on the floors and eating fish and rice. The same group will form a club and buy a partnership in a classy automobile and, like Solomon in all his glory, will roll along the highways.
Marriages among white and Filipinos soon will be common, and if the present state of affairs continues there will be 40,000 half-breeds in the State of California before 10 years have passed. We do not advocate violence but we do feel that the United States should give the Filipinos their liberty and then send those unwelcome inhabitants from our shores that the whites who have inherited this country for themselves and their offspring, might live.”
The same day, a taxi-dance hall opened in Palm Beach, west of Watsonville. White dance girls danced with Filipino males for 10 cents a minute. Many young Filipino males, unable to bring female companions to the U.S., found this an outlet for their loneliness. But this outraged the community.
Said an eyewitness interviewed by sociologist E. Bogardus in “Anti-Filipino Race Riots” for the Ingram Institute of Social Science of San Diego, May 15, 1930: “Taxi dance halls where white girls dance with Orientals may be all right in San Francisco or Los Angeles but not in our community … We won’t stand for anything of the kind.”
On Jan. 19, whites picketed the taxi-dance hall while hundreds of Filipinos assembled to protest Rorhrbach’s racist resolution. The next day until the 22nd, armed local whites raided the dance hall. On the 23rd, the white raiders grew to 500 and went to the farms, fatally shot 22-year old Fermin Tobera and injured others in San Juan Road.
It took the local American Legion and local citizens to calm down the white mob. In the end, eight rioters were caught, four were tried. One was jailed for a month; the others were set free on probation. But the murderer was never charged.
The Hollister Evening Freelance reported on Jan. 28, 1930, the “strict vigilance” of the Hollister and San Juan police saved San Benito County from an outbreak of the white-Filipino race riots.
Police presence was enough to dissuade young whites from Watsonville and Salinas hunting for Filipinos. But not before they posted warning signs in the mission town for Filipinos to get out.
In 1934, the Tydings McDuffie Act granted the Philippines independence, making Filipinos aliens and ending their easy access to the US. Only 50 Filipinos were permitted to immigrate to mainland USA every year until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
In 1935, the Filipino Repatriation Act became law and many Filipinos voluntarily returned to the Philippines. Leaving the Mexicans as the sole source of cheap farm labor.
News of violence over race and violations of the anti-miscegenation law criminalizing mixed race marriages (in 1933 an amendment outlawed marriages between whites and Malays – to include Filipinos) would still be in the papers until the onset of World War II.
Eventually, Americans and Filipinos would fight and struggle side by side against the Japanese in the fall of Corregidor (May 1942) and the Bataan Death March (April 1942).
In 1965, Filipino leaders Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz stood alongside Mexican leader Cesar Chavez to bring about changes in farm labor laws through boycotts and unionizing.
In September 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown approved a California legislature apologizing to Filipino-Americans for “violations of civil liberties and constitutional rights caused by anti-miscegenation laws.”
The city of Watsonville approved a resolution to apologize to the local Filipino community for the 1930 anti-Filipino riots on November 10, 2020 – 90 years later.
Last month, the city of Watsonville gave the greenlight for the campaign to memorialize Fermin Tobera with their project logo installed as a sidewalk medallion at the corner of Freedom Boulevard and Main Street and a mosaic mural of Filipino-American farmers in Pajaro Valley adorning the Second Street side of the Watsonville City Civic Center.
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