A dictatorship of billionaires—the Bezos, Musks, Soon-Shiongs of the world—ostensibly rule the lives of workers whose wages stagnate, if they’re not fired first. The expectation of COLA raises is long gone; post-Boomer generations do not even know what the acronym stands for: cost of living adjustments. Employees in retail, the trades, media, healthcare, and education annually take a pay cut as inflation steadily erodes the purchasing power of their income. Meanwhile, rich bosses and their superiors, the wealthy, billionaire class, enjoy the high life of increased profits as they monopolize assets year after year.
In 1902, a curious union of white land barons, merchants, financiers, and industrialists—yes, they were exclusively white and male—conspired in the creation of the Western Agricultural Contracting Company (WACC) to maximize capitalism’s lodestar, the maximization of profits. At the head of this syndicate in what would become the City of Oxnard the next year were merchants, the Bank of A. Levy, and the American Beet Sugar Company owned and operated by the capos of United States refined sugar, the Oxnard Brothers—Benjamin, Henry, James, and Robert.
To further advance the profits of this racial capitalism (a white commercial class exploiting a labor force of color), in early March of 1903, the WACC callously slashed the sugar beet thinning rate by fifty percent. This impacted Japanese and Mexican subcontractors who recruited and marketed the labor of sugar beet workers, aka betabeleros, who predominantly consisted of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican men, women, and children. Whether thinning or topping sugar beets, betabeleros stooped over in the fields, wielding short-handled hoes and long knives ten to twelve hours a day. In addition to their wages being hacked in half, these early twentieth century helots were paid in script forcing them to purchase sundries at inflated prices from merchants in cahoots with the WACC.
To resist this oppression, seven hundred labor contractors and betabeleros formed a collective of their own in the Japanese Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) led by Kosaburo Baba (president), Y. Yamaguchi (secretary of the Japanese branch), and J.M. Lizarras (secretary of the Mexican branch).
The union shut down factory-like production in the fields to win back their economic competence. To defend themselves from the vigilantism of deputized ranchers, the JMLA clandestinely gathered in sheds and storefronts under the cover of night. John Murray, journalist for the International Socialist Review, reported on JMLA meetings simultaneously conducted in English, Japanese, and Spanish with the help of interpreters as labor contractors and workers—another curious union—shared intelligence on agribusiness’s importation of strike breakers to deploy picketers to achieve its goal, the abolition of the WACC’s monopoly of the contract labor system and the company stores from which betabeleros were compelled to patronize.
After a month of fierce struggle that involved a shootout on March 23rd in Oxnard’s downtown district in which five betabeleros were shot by law enforcement, one fatally, the JMLA claimed victory.
The union’s success attracted the support of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), as he extended a charter that May to the JMLA, renamed the Sugar Beet and Farm Laborers’ Union (SBFLU), but on the condition that it exclude Asian workers.
In an eloquent reply dispatched the next month, Lizarras, on behalf of his ethnic Mexican comrades, denounced Gompers’ racist invitation as they would not betray their Asian brethren whom they struggled beside.
Without the larger organizational support of the AFL, the SBFLU dissipated. But the collective struggle of Asian and Mexican farmworkers vis-à-vis agribusiness’s racial capitalism continued with the Cannery and Agricultural Industrial Workers Union Betabelero strike of 1933 that involved Filipinos and Mexicans, the Ventura County Citrus Strike of 1941 spearheaded by the Agricultural and Citrus Workers Union of the AFL, the Community Service Organization’s 1958 fight against agribusiness’s importation of braceros to depress the wage rate, and the United Farm Workers union’s campaigns in the fields, orchards, and Egg City plant of Ventura County during the 1970s.
Today, an even more multicultural labor force of nurses, baristas, teachers, and warehouse workers collectively fight against the economic oppression and union-busting tactics of a nearly exclusive white class of Chief Executive Officers and their subaltern managers—a present-day plantation system.
As the 1903 Sugar Beet Strike is an inspirational story how inter-racial solidarity can liberate all people from the domination of a racial capitalist dictatorship, the Central Coast Labor Council is sponsoring Rooted In Resistance, a reflective celebration of the Japanese and Mexican Labor Association starting at 1:30 pm, Sunday, April 12, 2026, at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center. Be there to learn about Southern California’s rich labor history that parallel the challenges of labor today.
Workers of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.