Mapping a Recuperative History of Filipino Farmworkers in the Pajaro Valley

During the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of Filipinos, primarily young men, migrated to California in the pursuit of employment and education. Most of these men found seasonal work in the agricultural and industrial sectors. While other Asian populations had been restricted from entering the United States, Filipinos were legally classified as “U.S. nationals.” This status was a result of the United States’ colonization of the Philippines that had begun in 1898. As nationals, Filipinos were seen as an ideal source of temporary migrant labor. Once in the United States, Filipinos were excluded from rights determined by citizenship. They were barred from becoming naturalized citizens and, in states like California, they were prohibited from purchasing property and marrying white partners. Like other non-white groups, they were also subject to segregation in housing, access to public spaces, and employment. Filipinos were integrated into a racialized labor hierarchy in which they were required to perform challenging and painful work and were paid low wages.

Anti-Filipino sentiments were common among white Americans. Many nativists viewed Filipinos as a threat to public health, economic security, and white racial purity. Fears of interracial interactions and job competition sparked racial hysteria and violence targeting Filipinos on the West Coast, including race riots in Yakima, Washington (1927), Exeter, California (1929), and most infamously, Watsonville, California (1930). In Watsonville and the surrounding Pajaro Valley region of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, mobs of over 700 white men terrorized Filipinos for five days in January 1930. The violence apexed in the murder of twenty-two-year-old Fermin Tobera, shot dead in his sleep by a white mob that stormed a labor camp where Filipinos resided. News of the events radiated throughout California and across the Pacific to Manila, where demonstrators protested U.S. discrimination and demanded Philippine independence.

Scholars have marked the Watsonville anti-Filipino race riots as a major event in California, U.S., and Asian American history, even though limited documentation has perpetuated a narrow understanding of this traumatic event. To date, there has been no definitive history of Filipino Americans in the Pajaro Valley. Faculty and students from the Santa Cruz and Berkeley campuses in the University of California system partnered with The Tobera Project, a grassroots organization founded by descendants of the first wave of migrant Filipino laborers (also known as “manong” or older brother), to refuse the thin victim-narrative of manong and their families resulting from the scant accounting of the riots. With funding from University of California Humanities Research Institute, we created a multimedia map that traces the events of the 1930 riots and a counter-map that marks important sites of belonging in the Pajaro Valley for members of the Filipino community.

The map draws on novel primary source documents, including oral interviews, documentary footage, and photographs, from the Watsonville is in the Heart Community Digital Archive; local and transpacific newspaper reporting on the race riots; and community-engaged field research and re-photography conducted with Filipino American descendants of the Pajaro Valley manong. The map was designed to be incorporated into educational settings and to be accessible for a wide range of users. Each map includes discussion questions that target high school and college-level learners.

Find all content at these links:

• Map of the 1930 Watsonville Anti-Filipino Race Riots
• Watsonville Filipino American Community Counter-Map
• Digital Map Resources (Discussion Questions + Bibliography)
• Map Credits