The Watsonville Riot (1930) was an anti-Filipino riot in Watsonville, California. The violence lasted five days and led to violence in nearby Stockton, Salinas, Gilroy and San Francisco. There were protests in the Philippines. The body of Fermin Tobera, who was killed during the riot, was sent back to the Philippines for his funeral, where he became a martyr. The Philippines was then under US rule.
By 1909 California grew half the fruits and vegetables in the US. With refrigerated railway cars crossing the nation, California growers stood to make a ton of money.
California news editors and politicians, on the other hand, found they could sell newspapers or win votes by fanning the flames of White hatred against Asians, hatred that often turned violent. They were so successful that by 1882 Congress had all but shut off immigration from China and, in 1917, from the rest of Asia – with one exception: the Philippines.
The US had taken over the Philippines in the Philippine American War (1899-1902). Congress was too racist to make the Philippines into states or its people into citizens, but Filipinos did become US nationals. While they could not vote or serve on juries, they could live and work anywhere in the US and its territories.
So by the 1920s, Filipinos had become the cheapest farm workers in California. Growers used them as strikebreakers. White people (aka voters) were being thrown out of work. Then in 1929 the stock market crashed in New York and the country sank into the Great Depression.
It gets worse: Most Filipinos in California were young, single men. That put them in direct competition with White men for White women. California had outlawed marriage between Whites and “negros”, “mulattos”, or “Mongolians”, but it was not clear to everyone whether Filipinos counted as “Mongolians”. Some said they were “Malay” instead.
Some Filipino men went to taxi dance halls where, for ten cents, they could get a dance with a White woman. A dance hall like that with nine White women opened in Watsonville. On January 18th 1930, hundreds of White men gathered and threatened to take the White women and burn down the dance hall. The owner shot on them. A fight broke out. The police restored order.
Two days later hundreds of men met at the Pajaro River bridge: Filipino men on one side, White and Mexican men on the other. Five days of violence followed. Over 200 White men ranged through Watsonville looking for Filipinos to beat up, dragging them out of their homes or labour camps. They shot up houses and destroyed the Filipino part of town. One person was killed: Fermin Tobera.
At least some of the police tried to protect Filipinos, but they did not restore order till five days later.
In 1933, California outlawed marriage between Whites and Malays.
In 1934, the US, in the Tydings-McDuffie Act, limited the number of Filipinos who could move to the mainland US to 50 a year. That made Mexicans the cheapest farm workers.
In 2011, after 81 years, California apologized for the riot.
– Abagond, 2015.
See also:
- Welcome to Asian American History Month 2015
- Philippine American War
- The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
- Bhagat Singh Thind
- Caucasian – the man who gave us “Caucasian” as race also counted “Malays” as one.
534
This country was absolutely NUTS in the early 19th century
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It still is.
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This country has amnesia about rioting especially regarding the participation of whites. This country has so much blood on it’s hands in regard to hatred and brutality of non white people. There was mention of congress being to racist to make the Philippines into states or it’s people into citizens, but Filipinos were US nationals. Today in my opinion Congress is still racist in regards to immigrants and other marginalized people in this country. Informative post.
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Oh you people love to live in the past. C’mon, we have progressed past all this and Merika has become a warm and welcoming place for all hard working, god loving people no matter where they happen to come from. I mean Black folk enjoy a level of living here in Murika like no where else on the planet – never mind the cops kill one every 28 hours or less. Women are respected for their worth and not their bra size – never mind they still make less than men. Just stop complaining and get with the program.
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Filipino men on one side, White and Mexican men on the other.
In 1934, the US, in the Tydings-McDuffie Act, limited the number of Filipinos who could move to the mainland US to 50 a year. That made Mexicans the cheapest farm workers.
This is why domestically I support immigration reform but only if they make people without status permanent residents or citizens. Some of them have been working here their whole lives. Just make them citizens so that they can pay income taxes and yes even vote. Votes aren’t counted anyway. And this is why some Low Income White people are dumb or too scared to think for themselves and protect heir own interests: they are against legal immigration because they think being the lowest tier of the racial majority of America will protect their negligible status, and I don’t blame them for having class insecurity due to economic policies that suppress labor rights and favor the rich forcing them to fight victims of labor trafficking for jobs. I blame them for not realizing that they’re playing into the Upper Classe’s hands by opening up the door for a permanent underclass to be used for slave labor at their expense.
If low income people in general just took their seat at the American table they wouldn’t need to sit under it like dogs fighting for the scraps that fall from the top.
I hate the way US Capitalism pits low income people and migrants against each other. Europe is just as capitalist and those governments don’t do that to their own citizens.Many Hispanics are just as racist as White people, even if they pick fruit for below minimum wage for them, they do attack other racial minorities and discriminate against minorities, that’s why so many employers prefer to hire or buy services, like cleaning from so many immigrants in general. Most of the people are trafficked for labor so they can be abused and controlled better than low income Americans can. They work for less than minimum wage or for nothing and much of the money they make just gets sent back home in remittances. Every other country handles immigration very differently than the United Stated does and I know that we have a big land border but the problem isn’t the border the problem is that Federal Regulations don’t ever get enforced well enough to combat Local and State corruption because the representatives that we elect take payoffs and kickbacks from the corrupt buisness or groups that lobby for those buisnesses and when those officials get elected they turn their back on the people who voted them in or whose vote they didn’t count for a fake election and then get into their seat in office and turn a blind eye to Labor Abuses and Classism and Racism in general until the next “election” time rolls around.
I don’t blame the migrants either…until they start attacking other PoC and acting as Racist White people’s goons. Racist White people don’t need any help from racist PoC to discriminate or practice racial terrorism and they always throw any PoC who ally with them under the bus and back the bus over them a few times just to make sure they hit them, once all is said and done so it’s not only futile but it’s stupid to help Racist White people do anything to attack other PoC.
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I mean at the end of the day what did the Mexicans attack the Philippinos for? To be the only subsistence wage farm laborers? That’s not something that I would fight much less attack someone else for it seems like a losing battle.
They should have let White People do that themselves. That’s just like those middle to upper class black people that complain about racism but deny that it’s happening when someone else decides to speak up about it and then throw that person under the bus, only to get thrown under that bus themselves once they’ve served their purpose. Don’t they know the Devil is Liar?
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Brilliant post. That riot goes to show the need of white America to suppress People of Color, especially people living in the U.S. for centuries or American nationals. That the Watsonville riots are about white male control of white women and the suppression of Filipinos.
S.B.
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According to modelminority.com:
Remembering the Watsonville Riots
Remembering the Watsonville Riots PDF Print E-mail
This day in 1929 marked the beginning of one of the worst episodes of anti-Asian American mob violence in our nation’s history, the Watsonville Riots. In this article, Richard Meynell explores the racist roots and continuing relevance of these tragic events.
By Richard B. Meynell
Excerpted from “Little Brown Brothers, Little White Girls: The Anti-Filipino Hysteria of 1930 and the Watsonville Riots”
Passports
Volume 22 (1998)
For more than one hundred years California has depended on cheap imported labor to harvest its crops. The dilemma for agriculture and the state has been how to mitigate a chronic labor shortage in the fields without raising ethnic tension. Foreign workers who have wished to remain or assimilate periodically have encountered a racist reaction from local nativists in the form of sporadic violence, calls for limits on imported labor and, ultimately, expulsion. This pattern, which we see echoed today in the passage of Proposition 187, has been repeated in turn with the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos.
It was largely as a result of conflicts between locals and Filipinos that ranged over the entire state during the 1930s that the decision was made to turn away from the Asian labor pool after World War II and rely exclusively upon Mexican braceros. The January rioting of 1930 in Watsonville, one of California’s worst racial clashes, was pivotal to this history in two respects. It precipitated the decline of Filipino immigration and it may have marked the exact psychological moment when this state decided to throw in its lot with the Mexican workers.
What were the causes of the anti-Filipino riots in cities and towns all over California in 1930, precipitated by—or culminating in—the five days of vigilante terror known as the Watsonville Riots? A variety of motives fed the anger and cruelty of those mobs, yet it seems starkly clear in retrospect that, of all the aroused emotions—fear, revulsion, indignation, jealousy, and rage—what connected them and supplied the energy that burst the bonds of civility was an explosive mixture of racism and sex.
The young Filipino lettuce pickers had few women among them. They admired American girls and the feeling was reciprocated. In conservative rural areas, however, racial mixing was not only frowned upon, it was shocking, and miscegenation (interracial marriage) was illegal.1 Love and youthful urges cannot easily be denied, however. In the years leading up to the January riots of 1930, a series of short, violent rampages occurred in the agricultural areas of California, triggered by the fraternization of the “little brown brothers” with white girls. Bitter rivalry over labor added to the resentment of white males who saw their supremacy under challenge.
The Tension Mounts
The first of these rampages blew up out of a pool hall “scrap” in Stockton on New Year’s Eve in 1926, and sounded the first tocsin of “race war.”2 Two years later, American Legion vigilantes went on patrols in Dinuba after Filipinos tried to infiltrate the annual street dance. It was reported that “the fruit pickers insist on their rights to attend dances and escort white girls about the city.” 3 As a result of this disturbance, U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson and Representative Richard Welch from the San Jose-Watsonville area favored exclusion of Filipino farm labor,4 a policy endorsed by the California State Federation of Labor’s Paul Scharrenberg.5
On 24 October 1929, the day of the Wall Street Crash, Filipinos were shot with rubber bands as they escorted white girls at a street carnival in Exeter, southeast of Fresno. A fight broke out, a white man was stabbed, and a riot ensued in which vigilante whites, led by Chief of Police C. E. Joyner, beat and stoned Filipinos in the fields. The Exeter Sun accused Filipinos of a “penchant for violence,” while the Stockton Record deplored their “insistence. . .that they be treated as equals by white girls.”6 Commenting on this violence, the Salinas Index-Journal saw labor rivalry as the key element. White men could not and would not do the work—stoop labor—which the Filipino would do for less money. The “living standards,” even of a white day laborer, were “more exacting than those of a Latin, Oriental, or African laborer.” There was an ominous suggestion that the rioting would spread elsewhere in the state.7
Three months later this prophecy was fulfilled in the Watsonville riots that culminated in the murder of Fermin Tobera. Early on the morning of 2 December 1929, police raided the room of Perfecto Bandalan, 25, and found in the darkness two scantily attired white girls, Bertha and Esther Schmick, ages ten and sixteen. To a shocked public it was announced in court that the father of the girls had wanted to sell Esther to Bandalan for $500.8 Subsequently he charged that his wife had urged the deal so that she could “live on easy street.”9 In the period prior to the riots this case was a constant topic in the local papers.
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(continued)
With memories of the Exeter Riot fresh in everyone’s mind, a photo of Perfecto embracing Esther was splashed on the front page of the Watsonville Evening Pajaronian.10 Simultaneously, it was announced that a taxi-dance hall would soon open in Palm Beach, seven miles southwest of Watsonville. De Witt believes the conjuncture of these inflaming pieces of news was the spark that set off the future conflagration,11 and while I do not agree with that assessment, it certainly charged the atmosphere.
Between 8 December and 10 January, a series of Filipino run-ins with the law were reported in the local press, including violent brawls over women, hit and run driving, and sexual assault; in addition, the Schmick case continued to attract attention. In themselves these articles were trivial, but taken cumulatively they were added provocations.
The Pajaronian printed Judge Rohrbach’s resolution on 10 January which included, in addition to those cited previously, the following remarks:
“… if the present state of affairs continues … there will be 40,000 half-breeds in the State of California before ten years have passed.” … “We do not advocate violence but … the United States should send those unwelcome inhabitants from out shores …” “I hope that we overcome this menace to our general welfare ….”12
In another interview he stated: “The worst part of his being here is [the Filipino’s] mixing with young white girls from thirteen to seventeen. He gives them silk underwear and makes them pregnant and crowds whites out of jobs in the bargain.”13
The next day, Saturday, the Palm Beach taxi-dance hall opened. White youths who were turned away promptly cut off the power.14 During the ensuing week, Senator Hiram Johnson offered a Filipino exclusion bill to the U.S. Senate, again using the word “menace,”15 followed by Representative Welch’s similar bill in the House,16 and Greenfield’s Chamber of Commerce joined with Rohrbach in calling for a ban on Filipino labor.17
On Saturday the 18th, the Pajaronian headline read “STATE ORGANIZATIONS WILL FIGHT FILIPINO INFLUX INTO COUNTRY.” In the psychology of a riot, one must consider the element of moral legitimacy; in this case it seems clear that the signals being sent by responsible persons to the public, whether from judges, publishers, or state officials, pointed to the Filipino as a target for justifiable action.
The same day, 10,000 copies of a circular called The Torch flooded the streets of Watsonville. Printed in Salinas, and written by David P. De Tagle, a Filipino editor from Stockton, The Torch was a bold, inflammatory reply to Judge Rohrbach which justified Filipinos’ seduction of white girls as “the Law of Nature,” contrasted thrifty Filipino workers with white beggars, and complained that a judge “suffering from Filipinomania” like Rohrbach could never be fair to a Filipino.18 The Pajaronian pointed out, “It bristles with an aggressiveness that apparently says : ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’”19 Here was all the provocation needed to hurl angry young men upon each other: The Torch provided the match that touched off the Watsonville Riots.
Orgy of Rage
That same night, a Saturday, a mob of white youths seeking to break up the taxi-dance was stopped by a chain and armed guards barring the road leading to the Palm Beach dance hall. The next afternoon, the 19th, inflamed by an article disclosing the presence of nine white girls living at the club, they returned and again were repulsed; but in the evening a fight broke out between Filipinos and Chinese at a gambling den, followed by fights and rock-throwing with whites in downtown Watsonville.20
On Monday a Filipino mob gathered and confronted a white mob of equal size near the Pajaro River bridge. The tension increased as a group of twenty-five Mexicans appeared around a corner. After a period of indecision, as each side wondered what the Mexicans would do, the new arrivals began to saunter over as individuals and take up positions next to the whites, drawing out long knives and quietly, yet pointedly, began to pare their fingernails.21 The Filipinos took the point and dispersed. For the two remaining days of the riots, the Filipinos offered no resistance.
Whites then formed “hunting parties” of twenty-five to one hundred men after an “indignation meeting” at a local pool hall, but lacking leadership, they were easily broken up by the police, who made an earnest effort throughout the riots to keep control, although clearly outmanned. Early on the morning of the 21st, shots were fired into a bunkhouse on the McGowan ranch occupied by six Japanese who escaped unscathed. A car full of whites looking for Filipinos was blamed.22
Tuesday a mob charged the dance hall, where a Filipino protest meeting had been called, and was repulsed with buckshot by the Locke-Paddon brothers, San Francisco owners of the taxi-dance hall, and by police using tear gas grenades. Two of the attackers were wounded. Police escorted the Filipinos to their homes. “Hundreds of spectators, including many women, crowded the highway at a safe distance to watch the fray. Headlights flashed in every direction, and the effect was dazzling.”23
On Wednesday, 22 January, the riot reached its peak with mobs of hundreds dragging Filipinos out of their homes, whipping and beating them, and throwing them off the Pajaro River bridge. The mobs ranged up the San Juan road, attacking Fillipinos at the Storm and Detlefsen ranches; a Chinese apple-dryer that employed Filipinos was demolished, and volleys of shots were reportedly fired into a Filipino home on Ford Street. At Riberal’s labor camp, twenty-two Filipinos were dragged out and beaten. This time the mob had leaders and organization—it moved “military-like” and responded to orders to attack or withdraw. The police in Watsonville, led by Sheriff Nick Sinnott, rounded up as many Filipinos as they could rescue and guarded them in the City Council’s chamber.24 Monterey County Sheriff Carl Abbott tried to hold the Pajaro side of the river.
Early the next morning (the 23rd) bullets were fired into a bunkhouse on the Murphy ranch on the San Juan Road. Eleven Filipinos huddled in a closet to escape the fusillade. At dawn they discovered that a twelfth, Fermin Tobera, had been shot through the heart.
As Tobera was laid out at Mehl Undertakers, D.W. Rohrbach deplored the murder, but maintained his stand that the Filipinos were “only ten years removed from savagery and should be kept out of the valley.” Sheriff Sinnott arrested seven whites for the murder, one of whom had left his shoe at the scene of the crime. They were not unemployed “roughs” or “lettuce tramps”; several were the sons of respected members of the community. All charges were eventually dropped; the fact that the presiding judge, Rohrbach, had received a threat, or that prominent Filipino leaders, anxious to placate the white community, pleaded for leniency may or may not have influenced the court’s decision.
The American Legion was deputized and went out on patrol, but the fact that someone had been killed shocked people back to their senses. The Watsonville Riots were all about violence, but of a sort that was meant to be nonlethal. Stabbings and slashings and fistfights were often in the news, but murder was relatively rare. The one fatality appeared to have come from a random shot.
Aftermath
The violence spread to San Jose and San Francisco, where Filipinos were beaten on the street. A Filipino club was blown up in Stockton, and the blast was promptly blamed on the Filipinos themselves. In Gilroy, masked men warned a Japanese farmer to discharge his Filipinos, and fifty unemployed whites and Filipinos were hustled out of town by police to preempt possible fighting.
There were protests from the Philippines; the Resident Commissioner spoke before Congress. The body of Fermin Tobera, now a martyr, was sent back to Manila, where it lay in state in the capitol. He had become a symbol for the independence movement of his country.
Many Filipinos fled the country, but most remained and responded to the challenge in a characteristically tough, resilient manner. Seven months later, they conducted a successful strike in the Salinas lettuce fields.25
While many whites also hardened their stance, young white girls still fell in love with their ardent “little brown brothers,” causing the occasional scandal: Dorcia Wilson (15) eloped on 21 March, and Velma Espinosa (15), “a mere slip of a child with golden brown curls falling to her shoulders, and blue eyes filled with tears,” was dragged into Salinas court on 1 July for marrying Rufo Canete.26
For a time during the riots, “pretty Carrie Victorini” (15) was rumored to be held by Filipinos, but she had merely run away from home.27
Conclusion
The five days of the Watsonville riots, throwing two counties into turmoil and spreading fear and hatred throughout the state, had a profound impact on California’s attitude toward imported Asian labor. As a result, Filipino immigration plummeted, and while they remained a significant part of the labor in the fields, they began to be replaced by Mexicans.
We may never know what impact the Mexicans’ dramatic action at the 20 January bridge confrontation may have had. Only the Santa Cruz News reported the incident, though it may be assumed that such an event would have been given wide notoriety in agricultural areas. Nevertheless, if there ever was a moment when attitudes and allegiances appeared to shift, even symbolically, that was such a moment. We live today with the consequences of those events. The Filipino experience in the Thirties should give us a perspective on current issues surrounding Proposition 187. It would seem that in replacing the Filipinos in the fields, the Mexican migrant workers have also inherited the role of economic and social scapegoat whenever times are bad. It also teaches us something about the fragility of “civilization” and the roots of the maddening prejudice that continues to haunt the American nation.
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Exactly.
S.B.
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Here’s more on the Watsonville Riot to read and think about how white patriarchy were determined to control and destroy Filipino aspiration and humanity:
http://ucifilam.blogspot.com/2009/11/watsonville-riots.html
Here’s the video from YouTube:
(https://youtu.be/Jsh8yvbDPCM)
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Interesting, I never knew about this riot.
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Sparkle, this is because this nation would rather have its people ignorant of its true history than to face its ugliness that is racism/white supremacy. It’s not limited to Blacks/African American/Caribbean people. Latin@s, Native Americans, and Asians were also persecuted and marginalized(still are).
Thanks for stopping by.
S.B.
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I remember reading about The Watsonville Riots. From what I learned the white men were incensed that these Filipino men were so bold to approach their women. Please. The white women made a choice to be around these Filipino men. Besides, Filipinos have a love for dancing, They were quite good at “cutting a rug”. Not only that, Filipino (men) tended to be quite the socializers and love a good time. The white women were looking for fun and these Filipinos fit the bill.
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[…] The Watsonville Riot (1930) was an anti-Filipino riot in Watsonville, California. The violence lasted five days and led to violence in nearby Stockton, Salinas, Gilroy and San Francisco. There were protests in the Philippines. The body of Fermin Tobera, who was killed during the riot, was sent back to the Philippines for his funeral, where he became a martyr. The Philippines was then under US rule.By 1909 California grew half the fruits and vegetables in the US. With refrigerated railway cars crossing the nation, California growers stood to make a ton of money.California news editors and politicians, on the other hand, found they could sell newspapers or win votes by fanning the flames of White hatred against Asians, hatred that often turned violent. They were so successful that by1882 Congress had all but shut off immigration from China and, in 1917, from the rest of Asia – with one exception: the Philippines.The US had taken over the Philippines in the Philippine American War (1899-1902). Congress was too racist to make the Philippines into states or its people into citizens, but Filipinos did become US nationals. While they could not vote or serve on juries, they could live and work anywhere in the US and its territories.So by the 1920s, Filipinos had become the cheapest farm workers in California. Growers used them as strikebreakers. White people (aka voters) were being thrown out of work. Then in 1929 the stock market crashed in New York and the country sank into the Great Depression.It gets worse: Most Filipinos in California were young, single men. That put them in direct competition with White men for White women. California had outlawed marriage between Whites and “negros”, “mulattos”, or “Mongolians”, but it was not clear to everyone whether Filipinos counted as “Mongolians”. Some said they were “Malay” instead….In 1933, California outlawed marriage between Whites and Malays.Continue reading… […]
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[…] Source: abagond.wordpress.com […]
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I wonder if most Americans know the difference between US citizen and US national.
Here is a website which explains it:
(http://www.immihelp.com/immigration/us-national.html)
Basically, they have the same rights as a US permanent resident except that
– their national status is permanent (ie, not required to demonstrate permanent residency in the US)
– they can hold a US passport
– they can transmit US nationality to their descendants.
However, this was true for all US nationals except for … those from the Philippines after 1935 until the Philippines was made independent in 1946. The US nationality status was rescinded for all Filipinos in 1935. The US has never rescinded nationality for people living in other US territory or possession.
The people in Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands were all upgraded from national to citizen. Filipinos lost their US nationality in 1935, so I am not sure what their nationality was before they were made an independent country, as there was no such thing as Philippine nationality before 1946.
US Nationals are now confined to American Samoa and islands administered under American Samoa.
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@stephaniegirl
I would go as far to argue that the US has had a continuous policy / campaign to suppress the accessibility of marriage, family and sexuality of Asian males since the mid 19th century.
Asian men could not bring over Asian brides or wives and were not permitted to date or marry white women. lest they risk getting beaten or killed.
The War Brides act has to be the biggest slap in the face to that. Asian men could not bring Asian women to the USA due to exclusion laws and strict immigration quotas, but soon after WWII, American GIs could bring Asian women to the USA without any facing immigration restrictions.
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I’m sure something like this threw these white men into a tizzy.
source: http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/when-hilario-met-sally-the-fight-against-anti-miscegenation-laws
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source: http://ucifilam.blogspot.ca/2009/11/filipino-immgrant-workers-reinvented-in.html
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I looked for the names of the above couple. If my memory serves me correctly, the young woman is Ester Schmink and the man is Perfecto Bandalan.
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Just thinking, my godmother’s father came to USA from the Philippines as a very young man around 1929-1930 – right at this very time. It is important to learn the backdrop of the country he entered into.
In the late 50s, my father had a lot of Filipino male buddies, including the brothers of my godmother, and they used to go to the dance halls and sometimes they danced with white women. My father asked my mother to dance – that is where they met.
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I thought this article might be an interesting read.
http://www.ozy.com/flashback/filipino-laborers-the-politics-of-partying/32389
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Wow, great article, Leigh! Thanks.
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Funny how white people in those days said the Filipinos were taking their jobs. The kind of jobs they wouldn’t dream of doing. Even today, white people complain that immigrants/POC are taking jobs away from hardworking (white) citizens.
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Thanks a lot Leigh for bringing this part of America’s sordid racist past to light and how it’s affecting us POC today. We cannot ignore history nor explain away the past. America’s racist past is still with us to this very day. POC experience racism/microaggressions on the daily basis. That’s why we need Moral Mondays to push back against legislation that would take us back to that past.
Again, Leigh, Thank you.
S.B.
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@leigh204: Thanks for those photos and bringing light to this horrible incident.
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IMHO this is just arrogance of white men feeling they should own everything, always feeling threatened by someone else.
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@Kiwi: I think you are right Kiwi about this.
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I know it was already mention up thread but i am curious to know why did the Mexican men join forces with the white men to attack the Filipino men? Seeing how the white men didn’t like them either.
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@ Mary Burrell
The Whites probably went to the Mexican men and pointed something out.
– Taken from Leigh’s article:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. (as long as it’s useful)
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@ Kiwi
Yes, it is often extremely demeaning particularly for male hapas to know that they are Asian males, yet their mother explicitly chose to mate with a white man because she thought white men were superior in status, looks and the whole package. In white male/Asian female relationships, both people actively look down Asian men. White men see Asian men as being feminine, nerdy, not really American and “beta”, whatever that means. Asian females in these relationships hate Asian men because they see them as lower status, over-bearing, overly dominant in relationships as well as internalizing American stereotypes about Asian men. I notice many WMAF couples often do not have kids because they don’t want to bring people of color into this world, especially not half-caste hapa men. The WMAF couples who do have sons are often oblivious to their plight and want to believe that their son will be accepted as white which is cringe-worthy. Hapa sons of WMAF relationships often develop strong self-hatred because they see their fathers and mothers stick their noses up at Asian men everyday. Not to mention the less than flattering portrayal of Asian men in the mainstream media and the refusal of most whites to accept hapas or any mixed race person as being mixed at all. Barack Obama is probably the only biracial person in decades to be considered as biracial by white mainstream America. If Obama was a garbage man, most white people would say he was black even if they knew his mother and whole family was white.
The phenomena of WMAF couple’s thinly veiled disdain for Asian American men has created male hapa nutjobs like Elliot Rodgers who feel like they are entitled to white women simply because they are half white. Many upper middle class hapa males from WMAF relationships who grew up in mostly white rich areas are in a constant identity crisis. They are often rejected by white people but worship white people because it has been ingrained into their minds that whites are superior from the stereotypical power balance of their parent’s relationship as well as being half-castes in mainstream white America which puts whites ahead of everybody else. Elliot Rodgers hated Asian people and resented his Asianness passed down from his mother. And then you have the non-whitewashed hapas who wish to be accepted by Asians only to be labelled as “only half”. I’m glad that I had a diverse no stereotypical upbringing and am not victim to this mentality. I know that white people will never accept me as a mixed race person, so forget kissing their ass.
I think male hapas from WMAF relationships go through the same thing as half-black/half-white women from black male/white female relationships. In BMWF relationships, both the mother and father resent black women and see them as an enemy, yet they bring half-black/half-white women into this world; women who are considered black because of the legacy of the one drop rule.
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You’re welcome King, stephaniegirl, and Mary Burrell! 🙂
Btw, I have to thank Jefe for reminding me of The Black Eyed Peas Bebot (Generation One) song. It’s about the taxi dancehalls with the Filipino men and white women. Btw, bebot is pronounced beh-but which is slang for ‘hot babe/chick”. Also, there’s another version of Bebot. You guys should check it out.
Here are the Tagalog and English translations.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AILY6psx36g)
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@Leigh204,
Really thanks for the article links you are providing. They help flesh out some of the information in this post.
Also makes me think of my father. In his early 20s (mid-late 1950s – before he dated my mother) he used to dress up in these fancy suits and hang out at the dance halls with his Filipino buddies. The articles reminds me of the photos I have seen of them.
Secondly, I notice that many of the Filipinos I know who grew up and were educated in the Philippines learned about
– the Manila Galleons and that Filipinos came to the West coast back in the 1580s.
– the Philippine-American war around the prior turn of the century
– the term of “Little Brown Brothers” during the times of these dance halls in the 1930s
– the racism exhibited by US congress regarding making the Philippines a state
yet NONE of this gets taught in the USA. NOTHING. Sometimes I wonder if more US history gets taught overseas than in the USA.
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@Leigh204 Black Eyed Peas Bebot Abagond said last week he would do a post. I sent a link for the English translation last week, but I noticed some words are different from the one you posted. For example, the one I sent translates “sige” as “c’mon”, but yours above totally leaves it out. Actually, it might be closer to leave “c’mon” in.
Anyhow, I said there a few words here and there I would put differently, and it doesn’t matter too much – the basic idea is similar.
BTW, I only heard that song in HK and the Philippines. I never heard that song in the USA, even though it was recorded by the Black Eyed Peas and shot in California. It was not released as a single in the USA like it was overseas.
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@ jefe:
You’re welcome, Jefe. The Watsonville Riot post made me think of the times when Asian men were once regarded as sexual predators. It also made me think of what white people were capable of when non-white folks prosper and they would stop at nothing to ensure non-white people don’t get a leg up.
I believe this to be true. I learned a lot about Filipino history through my father. As a child, he would talk at length about how US history is whitewashed. I distinctly remember my father laughing when he said Asians already set foot in America prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival. It’s interesting that I know this because I’m Canadian! I was mostly taught Canadian history in school.
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@ jefe:
Yes, I didn’t understand why the person translating didn’t include “sige”. I found the translation here.
http://filipinolibrarian.blogspot.ca/2006/08/filipina-black-eyed-peas-bebot-videos.html
IKR?! I thought it was rather odd, but I’m guessing it’s due to the Tagalog language. Can’t have anything sounding foreign now, can we? *sarcasm*
Oddly enough, this is weird to me because years ago, when the Bebot song first came out, I saw a video of white people dancing to this song at a pep rally, I believe.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMMpSfSD1rk)
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I clicked on Leigh’s link and those Filipino men when they cleaned up looked fly and had some serious swagger. They looked good i see why the whites and Mexican men felt threatened the Filipino men were very handsome as well.
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SanFranPysco415 Always bring good points. I like reading you.
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..Great article, it was very informative Abagond! If I had a dollar for every time someone would ask me about the p–nis size of some of the Asian men I’ve dated in the Bay Area on occasion (Filipino included)..sigh..
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Not sayin’ that Filipinos asked (they didn’t), in case that last sentence needed to be clarified-just sayin’ that even when I dated people of that background and other Asian ethnicities, idiot questions were peppered at me all the time.
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Mz. Nikita,
Sounds like you could quit your “day job” and just have people pay to ask you questions. 😛
To everyone else,
I think that the USA has sorely underestimated and neglected the damage that over a century and a half of Yellow Peril and control of Asian family and sexuality has done to Asian Americans, esp. Asian males. Before they prevented them from bringing over wives, tried to wipe them out, beat and killed them for dating white women, dehumanizing them in order to kill Asians in Asian wars, then wage a campaign to emasculate Asian men so that whites can take “their” women.
I get the impression America simply scoffs and writes off this severe psychological and social oppression as nothing important and then wonder why some snap and we have mass murderers like Seung-Hui Cho and Elliot Rodger.
I really feel that what they have done to Asians, esp. Asian men in this area is just as serious as the thuggification of blacks, esp. black men. Maybe it is even worse as some subsectors of whites admit what has been done to blacks, but flatly deny or ignore what they have done to Asians.
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@ jefe, hmm..perhaps I could be like Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon and set up a booth? lolol
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@Kiwi,
It sounds like we are basically in agreement here.
But we need to identify and address the very forces that are teaching Asian women to bash Asian men. It couldn’t be just the same forces that are teaching white men to bash Asian men. Are the mothers of these Asian women who are married to their Asian fathers also teaching their daughters to bash Asian men?
Filipino men back in the day were snazzy dressers and dancers, enough to attract white women to dance with them and dance with them, even if many of them were manual labourers. But, maybe at that time, since there were so few Asian women, they were forced to search out white, Mexican and other non-Asian women for companionship.
But the 1930s was well before white men started to assume ownership over Asian women sexuality. That didn’t start until after the War Brides. That was because at that time, white men did not have much access to Asian women.
May I ask where you are going to school now?
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When one looks at the photos, Filipino men were happy and respectful toward the women. The white women were happy and confident. The relationships were consensual and public, unlike white men/black women and other women of color back in the day.
I’m just saying.
S.B.
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True!
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Riots in 1930 revealed Watsonville racism: California apologizes to Filipino Americans
WATSONVILLE — Hundreds of white men armed with pistols and clubs roamed the streets of Watsonville for five days in January 1930, beating Filipino fieldworkers and finally, in a shooting on San Juan Road, killing 22-year-old Fermin Tobera.
The Watsonville riots touched off violence in San Francisco, Stockton, San Jose and Salinas and outrage in Manila.
But well before then — and afterward — the immigrants from what was then an American colony, suffered from discrimination and hostility in California.
Now, California has apologized to Filipinos and Filipino Americans in an Assembly resolution authored by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Salinas.
“Filipino Americans have a proud history of hard work and perseverance,” Alejo said in a statement. “California, however, does not have as proud a history regarding its treatment of Filipino Americans. For these past injustices, it’s time that we recognize the pain and suffering this community has endured.”
Mob violence
The opening of a taxi-dance hall, where Filipino men could pay to dance with “white girls” is the oft-cited trigger for the Watsonville riots. But violence was in the air. In Stockton and the San Joaquin Valley town of Exeter, clashes between whites and Filipino “manongs” — the bachelor immigrants who replaced earlier and now excluded waves of Chinese and Japanese laborers in the fields — preceded the local trouble.
Newspapers throughout Northern California, which earlier stoked hatred against Chinese and Japanese immigrants, began to write of Filipinos as the state’s “next problem.”
In December, echoing sentiments being expressed throughout the state, a Pajaro judge declared Filipinos undesirable, unhealthy and destructive to living wages. Filipino leaders spoke out against the racial slurs and urged resistance to the mobs that were beginning to form.
As tensions escalated, the dance hall opened. Mobs, estimated at 200 to 500 strong, hunted Filipinos. They attempted to burn down the dance hall, but were stopped by brothers William and Edward Locke-Paddon, who loaded shotguns with salt and repelled the mob.
William owned the property at what’s now Pajaro Dunes. He had leased the hall to the Filipinos, who had previously paid to picnic and hold cockfights at the beach. Aptos lawyer Bill Locke-Paddon recalled his father telling him the story, and that he had been “blackballed” in some quarters for his actions.
“My father was never a prejudiced man,” Locke-Paddon said. “But he was also loyal to his customers.”
Others in town felt differently, and the attacks continued. Police broke up smaller groups, but were unable to quell the unrest. Finally, on Jan. 23, a group of young men fired shots into a bunkhouse at a San Juan Road ranch. The sleeping Tobera was struck by a bullet and killed.
AFTERMATH
With Tobera’s death, the violence in Watsonville subsided. But it continued elsewhere, and calls for an end to Filipino immigration intensified. In the mid-1930s, the United States, which gained possession of the Philippines at the conclusion of the Spanish American War in 1898, took the first steps toward granting independence to its colony, limited Filipino immigration to 50 people a year and began encouraging repatriation of those already here.
Tobera’s body was taken back to the Philippines, where an angry nation mourned.
But Filipinos continued to work in California fields, playing crucial roles in the development of the agriculture labor movement for decades. In 1965, a Filipino labor union, led by Larry Itliong, launched a strike against grape growers in Delano. Soon, the Filipinos joined forces with a fledgling group of mostly Mexican laborers led by a young organizer named Cesar Chavez to form the United Farm Workers.
At home in Watsonville
After the riots, a peace settled on Watsonville, and the Filipino community became part of the city’s multi-ethnic mix. For many years, Filipino businesses flourished on lower Main Street.
Jess Tabasa, a Watsonville native and president of the Monterey Bay Chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society, grew up on Bridge Street near Watsonville High School in the 1940s and ’50s. He recalled his mother’s restaurant, the Oriental Cafe on Main near Front Street. Relatives owned a pool hall across the street and a barber shop around the corner. Other Filipinos, along with Japanese and Chinese immigrants or their children, owned nearby businesses.
Second Street, he said, was the dividing line between the Asian business communities and the more upscale white-owned stores near the City Plaza.
On lower Main Street, people spoke native languages, switching to English when they went uptown, he said.
“It was de facto segregation but not enforced,” Tabasa said, “not like Jim Crow.”
In the late 1950s, the Oriental Cafe burned down, and Rosita Tabasa moved her restaurant to First Street, renaming it Philippine Gardens. She operated Santa Cruz County’s only Filipino restaurant there until 1985, when the block was razed for redevelopment.
By that time, many businesses closer to the bridge were lost in the creation of Riverside Drive, and the Asian district disappeared. But the Filipino American community remains, bolstered by new immigrants who arrived from the independent Republic of the Philippines after immigration laws were eased in the 1960s. They didn’t encounter the discrimination of the earlier arrivals, Tabasa said.
Today, Manuel Bersamin, the son of immigrants from the Philippines and Mexico, sits on the city council.
Tabasa declined to comment on Alejo’s resolution as he had yet to see the wording. But the retired E.A. Hall Middle School social studies teacher, values the telling of people’s stories.
“I say preserve the history, promote the legacy,’ ” he said.
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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxsJfJpWmwY)
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The Watsonville Riot began outside a Filipino dance club in the Palm Beach section of Watsonville. The club was owned by a Filipino and offered dances with the nine white women who lived there. The mob came with clubs and weapons intending to take the women out and burn the place down. The owners threatened to shoot if the rioters persisted, and when the mob refused to leave, the owners opened fire. The body of Mr Tobera, who was shot in the heart while he hid in a closet from the marauders, was brought home and extolled as a martyr of American injustice and inequality by advocates of Philippine independence.
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