Venice celery strike of 1936

Japanese American workers return to harvest celery fields in Venice after going on strike, Los Angeles, 1936 (Illustrated Daily News via UCLA Digital)

The Venice celery strike of 1936 was a labor action in Venice, California (in Los Angeles County) that lasted from April 20, 1936 to May 27, 1936. A 1938 history of Asian-American and Latino/Hispanic labor action prepared by the Federal Writers' Project stated that the strike was called by CUCOM (Confederación de Unión Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos) in order to negotiate "higher wages and better hours." The strike was reportedly "attended by considerable violence."

The strikers were Mexican American, Filipino American, and Japanese American farmworkers, organized as the Filipino Federated Workers Union, the American Agricultural Industrial Workers, and the Japanese Farm Workers Union of California. They were employed by Japanese American farmers who had no legal right to own their own land, which was held in the name of various banks (especially Bank of America) and leased to the resident alien farmers to get around the exclusion laws that prohibited Japanese American land ownership.

The "considerable violence" was mostly the work of the LAPD Red Squad, which "used brutal and violent tactics to punish strikers and their supporters". There was, however, an incident in Torrance on May 25, in which one young strikebreaker reported that he "was one of 25 men who had been brought to section from Chula Vista to replace striking celery workers" and had been "set upon by Mexicans and Filipinos".

In his 1939 book Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California, journalist Carey McWilliams dubbed it "the backyard strike", because until this strike Angelenos had only heard about strike-related violence in distant parts of the vast state, whereas this strike took place in "vacant lots" in the southwestern section of Los Angeles County. Much of that violence occurred in the San Joaquin Valley during a series of agricultural strikes that took place in 1933.

The celery strike concluded with workers winning a modest wage increase and other concessions, in an agreement that was later renewed twice.

See also

• El Monte berry strike of 1933
• Citrus Strike of 1936
• History of the Japanese in Los Angeles
• History of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles
• Strikes in the United States in the 1930s
• Celery mosaic virus

Further reading

• Banh, Jenny; King, Melissa, eds. (2017). Anthropology of Los Angeles: place and agency in an urban setting. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-1-4985-2854-2.
• Bonacich, Edna; Luqian, Cheng, eds. (2023) [1984]. Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II. University of California Press. doi:10.2307/jj.2430610. ISBN 978-0-520-31781-9.
• Chi, Tsung (2005). East Asian Americans and political participation: a reference handbook. Political participation in America. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-57607-290-5.
• Lowenstein, Norman (1940). Strikes and Strike Tactics in California Agriculture: A History. University of California, Berkeley.
• Modell, John (1977). The economics and politics of racial accommodation: the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900–1942. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
• Niiya, Brian, ed. (1993). Japanese American history: an A-to-Z reference from 1868 to the present. Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, Calif.). New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-8160-2680-7.

External links

• "Understanding the History of Japanese-Mexican Relations and Nurturing Empathy Toward Others". UC Press Blog. Retrieved 2024-04-14.