hw help

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 95

The rise in popularity of “food studies” has produced renewed interest in the history of agriculture and U.S. agrarian reform movements, including a virtual renaissance in the study of the United Farm Workers and the farm- worker movement of the 1960s and 1970s.1 These studies have contributed attention to the much overlooked subject of labor, offering a view from below that explores the diversity of workers and activists who struggled for farmworker justice, often with limited success. What is still evolving in the literature is a nuanced look at the growers that these workers and activists faced. Like workers, the growers harbored a signifi cant degree of racial and class diversity that shaped the direction of the movement.

During the early years of California agribusiness, the cultural divisions among growers impeded organizing among some producers. Coopera- tion suggested sameness in modes of production, when in reality growers often raised a variety of crops using culture-bound methods on farms located within ethnic-specifi c colonies. Although the image of the wealthy Anglo-Saxon grower predominates in current literature on California farming, producers were actually a rather ethnically heterogeneous bunch that often harbored suspicions about their fellow growers. In their early days, agriculture communities encompassed native Mexican Californios, white colonists from the East and Midwest, and large numbers of Italian, Slavic, Armenian, and Japanese immigrants. Later, as specialty crops took shape and industries matured, immigrants remained important partici- pants. According to Marshall Ganz, former strategist for the United Farm Workers, “agriculture itself was a mosaic of ethnic groups” divided into “tightly knit clumps.”2 Like the rest of society throughout the fi rst half of

f i v e

The Importance of Being Asian growers, the united farm workers, and

the rise of colorblindness

Matthew Garcia

96 • matthew garcia

the twentieth century, communities in rural California participated in a process of racial formation, determining the racial fault lines among them.3

In this chapter, I explore a process of racial formation among owners of grape farms in rural California during the twentieth century. My attention to the histories of two immigrant groups—Armenians and Japanese— considered “Asian” when they arrived in the San Joaquin Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrates the divergent paths some immigrants took in pursuing acceptance from peers of European descent. While Armenians succeeded in crossing the racial divide from Asian to white during World War II, Japanese Americans found themselves the victims of increased state oppression in the form of Executive Order 9066, which required the evacuation of all people of Japanese descent on the West Coast to internment camps in the interior of the country. Over time, however, Nisei (or second-generation Japanese Americans) small farmers earned their way into the grower class, especially during the height of the labor wars with the United Farm Workers in the 1970s. Unlike the Armenians, Nisei farmers gained acceptance not by pursuing a white identity, but rather by mobilizing their nonwhiteness in the service of all growers, regardless of race.

The career of Harry Kubo, a fi fty-three-year-old Nisei small farmer and grower activist in 1975, best illustrates how the importance of being Asian in rural California changed during the second half of the twentieth century. His acceptance by white growers as a spokesperson for agribusi- ness in the mid-seventies signaled their embrace of a colorblind ideology that championed the heroic efforts of Japanese Americans to overcome internment and succeed in California agriculture. Under these new beliefs, growers accepted a history of racial discrimination not as evidence of the government’s obligation to right the wrongs of the past, but rather as proof that American capitalism enabled anyone, regardless of race, to overcome hardships and succeed. Kubo’s self-promotion as an antidote to Mexican and Filipino farmworkers and the black urban poor aided the growers’ position and strengthened the belief that race had little to do with one’s success.

A study of racial formations in rural California provides a useful test for Omi and Winant’s assertion that “racial theory is shaped by actually exist- ing race relations in any given historical period” (Omi and Winant 1994, 11). I contend that the different trajectories of assimilation and cultural

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 97

adjustment experienced by Armenians and Japanese refl ect, in part, the paradigmatic shifts in racial thinking that occurred in the United States from the 1960s to 1990s. According to Omi and Winant, the fi rst shift occurred in the 1960s, when participants in racial minority movements rejected the prevailing premise inherent in the ethnicity model: that racial minorities could be incorporated into American life in the same way white ethnic groups had, and that equality and social justice defi ned the experience for all Americans, regardless of race. Pressure from civil rights groups, such as the United Farm Workers, forced a reconsideration of these assumptions and produced public policy that accounted for the prevalence of racial hostility. By the 1970s and 1980s, Omi and Winant argue, a white “backlash” against this approach led to the resurgence of ethnicity theory under the guise of “neoconservatism” (Omi and Winant 1994, 11). The story of Harry Kubo’s life, in particular, parallels these developments, and offers a useful example of how one man of color shaped the neoconserva- tive agenda that emerged during this period.

armenians and japanese in the founding of grape culture

From the beginning in the late nineteenth century, through the boom years of the 1970s, immigrants played a signifi cant role in determining the culture of grapes in California. Many immigrants fl ocked to grape country, drawing on knowledge from their homelands and solidarity with coethnics. Armenian, Slavic (specifi cally Croatian), Italian, and Japanese growers were among the leading ethnic groups.

The participation of Armenians in the world of the grower challenged the boundaries of citizenship and whiteness. Armenians came to the United States in waves, often in response to ethnic and religious persecu- tion from Turks in their homeland. Between 1915 and 1923 the Ittihad Party in the Turkish capital of Constantinople attempted to exterminate two million Armenians living within the Ottoman Empire. Of this total, one million were massacred and another 500,000 escaped to become part of a worldwide Armenian Diaspora ( Jendian 2001, 46–51).

Throughout this period, Armenians migrated to the United States in search of “Yettem,” or an “Eden” away from the religious and ethnic

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persecution at home. Although Armenian immigrants established commu- nities elsewhere during the nineteenth century, few claimed to have found paradise until hearty pioneers traveled across the country to the Central Valley of California during the 1880s. By 1920 Armenians accounted for 25 percent of Fresno County’s foreign-born population, enough to establish Yettem, the only all-Armenian town in the United States ( Jendian 2001, 62; Minasian 1983).

Most Armenians found Eden elusive in the San Joaquin Valley. Often labeled “Dirty Armenians” and “Fresno Indians” by their neighbors, Armenians found themselves the subject of restrictive covenants and hostile, racist attitudes from white residents. Discrimination in housing made clear the racial dimensions of this harassment. The San Joaquin Abstract Company maintained restrictions in its sales contracts for prop- erty barring “any person born in the Turkish Empire [or] any lineal descen- dent of such person” from buying land in a new, upscale portion of north Fresno. Such restrictive deeds against Armenians remained in contracts through 1944 ( Jendian 2001, 67).

The debate concerning Armenians’ racial identity went beyond Fresno realtors to U.S. courts. During the fi rst quarter century, Armenians played a prominent role in determining the boundaries of whiteness in the United States in two federal immigration cases: In re Halladjian in 1909 and United States v. Cartozian in 1925. In Halladjian, four Arme- nian immigrants challenged a U.S. Bureau of Naturalization decision to bar their application for U.S. citizenship on the basis of their “Asiatic” origins. The Massachusetts court not only overturned the bureau’s deci- sion but also established a defi nition of whiteness in the course of its decision. On the question of Armenians’ “Asiatic” origins, the court held: “They are no darker than many west Europeans, and they resemble the Chinese in feature no more than they resemble the American aborigines” (M. Jacobson 1998, 231–233).

By the 1920s, court decisions undermined skin color and origins as the primary criteria for determining the boundaries of whiteness. In 1922 Japanese immigrant Takao Ozawa questioned his exclusion by arguing that Japanese people had a white complexion and therefore should be granted U.S. citizenship on the basis of their whiteness. The court denied his request, fi nding that Ozawa “is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian.” When a federal district court in Oregon granted Indian immigrant Bhagat Singh Thind U.S. citizenship in 1920 on the premise that he was a Cauca-

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 99

sian and thus should be eligible for citizenship, government lawyers suc- ceeded in convincing the court that even an “average man” in the United States could see that Thind was not white. According to legal scholar Ian Haney López, the Thind decision established a “common knowledge” test for determining the racial status of immigrants based on “popular, widely held conceptions of race and racial divisions” (López 1996, 5).

The new “common knowledge” litmus test created by Thind forced Armenians back into a racial gray zone given the everyday discrimination against them in places like Fresno, California. Having achieved success in reversing the naturalization of Ozawa and Thind, the United States went after the citizenship eligibility of Armenian applicant Tatos O. Carto- zian in 1925 on the grounds that he was “not a free white person within the meaning of the naturalization laws of Congress.”4 In United States v. Cartozian (1925), the court ruled in favor of Cartozian, holding “that the Armenians are of the Alpine stock” and therefore must be considered white by law. To establish this fact, the defendant called in famed anthropologist Franz Boas to explain away the Asian identity of a people whose origins resided well within the “Asian” territory of the Turkish empire. Boas testi- fi ed: “The evidence is so overwhelming that nobody doubts any more their early migration from Thrace across the Hellespont into Asia Minor.”5 The Christianity of Armenians in a Muslim world provided perhaps the stron- gest argument for their European ways. Cartozian’s lawyers also claimed that Armenian men, upon their arrival in the United States, commonly married “American wives.” Embracing the logic of “white is what white does,” the court saw such behavior as a sign of the whiteness of Armenians and, thus, their eligibility for citizenship.6

The court’s verdict fl ew in the face of the treatment of Armenians in the grape-growing regions of California. In 1930 Stanford researcher Richard Tracy LaPiere conducted a survey of the 474 non-Armenian residents of Fresno County concerning their impressions of Armenians. LaPiere conducted his studies in the tradition of the Chicago School, a research group started by University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park concerned with the attitudes of the dominant white population toward immigrants and minority groups. True to his training, LaPiere directed most of his questions toward a deeper understanding of the racial tension within society. For Fresno and its Armenians, LaPiere’s results were not encour- aging. When asked “What do you fi nd are the principal characteristics of Armenians?” respondents listed a total of 1,119 derogatory traits, including

100 • matthew garcia

“dishonest” (16%), “undependable” (12%), “arrogant” (11%), and “tricky” (9%). For at least half of LaPiere’s respondents, Armenians reminded them of Jews, while 92.5 percent refused to accept marriage between Armenians and their kin. A majority of respondents also rejected Armenians as neigh- bors or playmates for their children and advocated barring Armenians from becoming U.S. citizens. The Christian backgrounds of Armenians did not convince at least 42.5 percent of respondents to accept them as members of their church. Although the courts considered Armenians white in 1925, that whiteness remained “of a different color” for those who policed racial boundaries in grape country throughout the 1930s and forties (M. Jacobson 1998).

LaPiere described the divisions between non-Armenians and Arme- nians as “racial-cultural” given the racial language used by some of his respondents. A banker who provided credit to many Armenian businessmen in the county told LaPiere, “The Armenians are, as a race, the worst we have to deal with.” Claiming that they “steal, lie and do everything to save a penny,” the man compared them to “the nigger who steals his dinner on the way home from church” (LaPiere 1930, 380). In the raisin industry, fellow growers accused Armenians of oppos- ing the organization of the California Associated Raisin Company, though the number of Armenians resisting the CARC did not substanti- ate their claims. According to LaPiere, at the time of the association’s attempts to organize a cooperative of between 60 and 80 percent of the growers in the industry, Armenian growers produced between 10 and 15 percent of the raisin crop (Jendian 2001, 64–65; LaPiere 1930, 383–385; M. Jacobson 1998). It should come as no surprise that some Armenians were wary of joining a cooperative made up of people who opposed their presence in the valley.

Eventually, however, Armenians’ “European origins” and Christian beliefs opened the door for them to secure white privilege through a performance of whiteness, especially in the realm of business. Krikor Ara- kelian of Fresno County provides perhaps the earliest and best example of how business acumen translated into acceptance among the elite members of society. Born in Marsovan, Turkish Armenia, in 1871, Arakelian moved with his parents to Fresno County in 1883, where he spent a substantial portion of his youth. In 1892 Arakelian returned to Marsovan for college and became an outspoken critic of the Ottoman Empire and an advocate for Armenian independence. The Islamic government imprisoned him for

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 101

revolutionary activities, though he quickly gained his release on account of his U.S. citizenship.

Arakelian sought refuge from political persecution in Fresno, where he invested all of his savings in a forty-acre melon farm. Within a short time he became known as the “Melon King of America,” based on the sale of his Mission Bell brand of watermelons and cantaloupes. In 1919 Arakelian again tempted fate when he retired from melons and bought two of the largest vineyards in California at severely discounted prices after the specter of Prohibition dampened investments in the wine industry. Although Pro- hibition became law in 1920, Arakelian foresaw a robust raisin and table grape market he could exploit. Marketing his raisins and grapes under the same Mission Bell brand that he had used for his melons, he enjoyed success that earned him the respect of his Anglo peers, who admired his ability to expand within the limits of his personal credit during the Great Depression. Despite the economic crisis, Arakelian built six packing- houses in the San Joaquin Valley and purchased property in Fresno, Kings, Madera, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin Counties. In 1933, when Prohibition ended, Arakelian parlayed his good fortune into wine production, develop- ing the Madera brand used for sacramental, medicinal, and manufacturing purposes across the United States (Winchell 1933, 291–292).

As subsequent generations of Armenians settled in California, the ten- dency to marry non-Armenians gradually became more common. Krikor Arakelian’s marriage to Rose Agamian, a fellow Armenian immigrant from Constantinople, in 1899 would have placed them among the 90 percent of Armenian couples who chose a spouse of the same ethnic background during that period. By 1980, however, Armenians were as likely to marry a non-Armenian as an Armenian, an act that made it harder to deny them their whiteness. While too much can be made of these marriage patterns, they suggest that assimilation and a retention of ethnic identity occurred among Armenians in Fresno at a time when grapes dominated the agri- cultural landscape of rural California.7

If the grower culture somehow could forget the Asian identity of Arme- nians and bring them into the fold over time, it could not do the same for Japanese growers. Several Japanese immigrants (Issei) arrived in California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the ambition of owning their own farms. By 1920, 5,152 Japanese residents had achieved this goal on 361,276 acres, producing crops valued at $67 million (Mat- sumoto 1993, 31). This fortunate class of horticulturalists constituted a

102 • matthew garcia

minority among Japanese immigrants, most of whom never transitioned from laborer to owner. Nevertheless, the few who succeeded as farmers mirrored the successful among Armenians, if not in outcome, at least in approach. Under the assistance of Japanese businessman Kyutaro Abiko, Japanese farmers established three colonies in the San Joaquin Valley: Livingston (known as Yamato), Cressey, and Cortez.

Local resistance to Japanese farmers proved to be too strong for their assimilation into San Joaquin Valley society. By 1919, rural opposition to Japanese settlement had become more pronounced as Abiko established the two-thousand-acre Cortez Colony in Merced County on the heels of creating the Yamato colony in 1907 and Cressey colony in 1918 (Matsu- moto 1993, 30). Journalists writing about the “hordes of nonassimilable” Japanese in the local newspapers prompted the Merced County Farm Bureau directors to form a special committee to oppose further Japanese colonization. Elbert G. Adams, editor of the Livingston Chronicle, sounded an ominous tone in the pages of his daily beginning in 1919. Differen- tiating between the original inhabitants of Yamato and the new arrivals, Adams opined that “we could not blind our eyes or deaden our senses to the fact that more Japanese were coming in here; Japanese not of the type of the original twenty-one families.” Although the fi rst Yamato colonists tended to be better educated and have more money than later settlers, the increased hysteria over the “Japanese Problem” signaled the strength of anti-Japanese sentiments among members of the dominant culture, and was not precipitated by new or unusual actions by more recent Japanese immigrants. By 1920 Merced County maintained one of the most aggres- sive Anti-Japanese Associations, one that routinely posted signs stating, “No more Japanese wanted.” The association also circulated cards among landowners requesting a “morally binding” agreement not to sell land to Japanese buyers. When these measures did not work, exclusionists in the state assembly passed the California Alien Land Law, barring the transfer or lease of land to Japanese nationals and preventing the ownership of land by any corporation in which Japanese held a majority of the stock. In 1924, as a part of that year’s Immigration Act, the federal government imposed a quota on Japan that limited the number of new immigrants to a mere 2 percent of the current population of Japanese immigrants in the United States and prohibited the entry of any “alien ineligible to citi- zenship.” This legislation essentially cut off all further immigration from Japan (Matsumoto 1993, 32, 42).

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 103

harry kubo and the rise of colorblindness

This was the world Harry Kubo entered on December 4, 1922, in Sacra- mento, California. As a son of Japanese immigrant tenant farmers in Placer County, Kubo came of age at the height of anti-Japanese sentiments. Such discrimination intensifi ed after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Decem- ber 7, 1941. Kubo had been attending community college when the raid happened, on a Sunday. Kubo recalled, “The fi rst thought that came to mind was . . . I do not particularly care to go to school [on Monday,] knowing the climate that already existed among these few people.” His parents refused to allow him to stay home as an act of defi ance against such racism. “When we entered the bus the following morning,” Kubo remembered, fellow riders peppered the family with insults; “why don’t you Japs go home, you dirty Japs.” Although Kubo and other Japanese American students felt tension throughout the winter and spring, few incidents occurred. Kubo attributed the absence of confl ict to the “docile” and “quiet” nature of Japanese Americans, and prided himself on being one among a people who “were non-reactionary and were able to take abuses . . . because it doesn’t solve anything to get in confrontations with people who don’t understand the situation.”8

In spite of his demeanor, Kubo, like other Japanese Americans, fell victim to Executive Order 9066. The authorities came for the Kubos on May 12, 1942, and told the family they had forty-eight hours to prepare to relocate to an assembly center in Arboga, California. Kubo saw the internment as “one of the darkest days amongst the people of Japa- nese ancestry.” Kubo refl ected: “Can you imagine ordering a citizen without due process—you are going to be uprooted from your home; we don’t know when you are going to get back, but in the meantime we want you to settle your business; we don’t know where we are going to take you, but be prepared to leave for anyplace that we may wish you to go?” Local whites whom Kubo referred to as “vultures” in his 1978 oral history offered to buy appliances at severely discounted prices from the family, adding insult to injury. “It took a lifetime to buy those things,” Kubo explained, “and they were offering my parents for the refrigerator and the washing machine two dollars, a dollar and a half, fi ve dollars, and my father said, ‘well, even if we had to throw it away, we wouldn’t give it to them.”9 Fortunately for the Kubos, the Leak family, which owned the property the Kubos sharecropped, stored their possessions and even

104 • matthew garcia

sent them their portion of the profi ts after they moved to the internment camp at Tulare Lake in Modoc County, California. Still, the threat of losing everything and watching other Japanese American families have their private property appropriated by the state inspired in Kubo a distrust of government.

Following their release from the camp, the Kubos landed in Sanger, just outside Fresno, where the entire family worked as fi eld hands for seventy-fi ve cents an hour. By 1949 they had pooled their earnings into one bank account and purchased a forty-acre grape and tree-fruit farm in the neighboring town of Parlier. While the family worked the homestead, Kubo and his brothers continued as farmworkers to pay off the mortgage and raise money to buy another 60 acres from a neighbor in 1954. By the mid-1950s, the Kubos had accumulated 110 acres in the Parlier-Sanger section of the San Joaquin Valley and eventually acquired 210 acres in 1976. Kubo took great pride in the ability of Japanese Americans like himself to recover from the trauma of internment. In 1971 he joined with fellow Japanese American farmers Abe Masaru and Frank Kimura to organize the Nisei Farmers League. The league’s defense of private property rights and vigorous opposition to United Farm Workers attempts to unionize fi eld laborers drew both Japanese and non-Japanese growers into the organiza- tion. The league began with 25 neighboring farmers; under Kubo’s leader- ship, it grew to 250 members within a year. By 1976 the league had swelled to more than 1,400 members, of which, surprisingly, only 43 percent were of Japanese descent.10

Kubo served as the league’s fi rst president and emerged as an outspoken critic of UFW president César Chávez. The two fi rst butted heads in 1970, when the UFW attempted to corral a small group (15%) of independent family farms that had escaped signing the grower-union accord on July 29. Chávez and UFW cofounder Gilbert Padilla directed United Farm Workers pickets against eight packinghouses handling the fruit picked on seventeen farms in Tulare and Fresno Counties. Japanese Americans owned fourteen of the seventeen fi elds picketed, including the Kubos’ small farm.11 During the confl ict, tension erupted into occasional acts of vandalism, including slashed tractor tires, nails and spikes left in driveways, arson, and yearling trees cut down at the trunks. Larry Kubo, Harry’s son, remembered one incident in which a number of young UFW picketers entered the Kubo farm at night. “I was fourteen,” Larry recalled, “and they ran on to our property and started screaming and yelling at us, and they

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 105

were not much older than me.” In their exuberance, the group vandalized the Kubo tractor, though Harry kept his family inside and told his son to “stay where you’re at” until the group left. Such incidents alarmed the Japanese grower community and precipitated the formation of the league and inspired Kubo’s activism.12

Kubo’s star rose in 1976 when the United Farm Workers attempted to strengthen the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB). In 1975 Cali- fornia passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which established the board and a number of regional offi ces to regulate farm labor disputes and conduct union elections. During the fi rst fi ve months of the law’s existence, these offi ces oversaw hundreds of union elections. The fl urry of activity refl ected the pent-up demand for justice; however, it also quickly exhausted agency budgets. The UFW won a majority of the elections, prompting growers to appeal to state senators to block an additional appropriation to keep the ALRB functioning through the year. When the agency ran out of money in February 1976, the United Farm Workers turned to the voters by sponsoring Proposition 14, an initiative that, among other things, would secure year-round funding for the ALRB.

The United Farm Workers also designed Proposition 14 to address the thorny issue of union access to workers on California farms. Although ALRA recommended equal access to unions, in practice, this provision was honored more in the breach than in the observance by farmers and agents. The UFW experienced diffi culty in gaining entry to farms before and after working hours in order to campaign for votes, and struggled for time equal to that permitted the Teamsters. The initiative sought to write into the law an “access rule” that required growers to permit union representatives on their property one hour before work, one hour after work, and at lunchtime. Marshall Ganz, head of the “Yes on 14” cam- paign, simplifi ed the union’s argument for the rule change as “an access to information” issue. “If you are going to have free union elections,” he explained, “the workers must be fully informed.”13

The growers responded fi rst by organizing an Ad Hoc Committee composed of many organizations, including the Nisei Farmers League, to determine how to fi ght Proposition 14. At the meeting, Kubo distinguished himself as a credible voice on farm labor issues and earned the grudging praise of his peers as the chair of the committee. “[Kubo’s] not polished and he’s not a professional,” one unidentifi ed leader of a statewide farm group told a reporter, “but he knows what he’s talking about and he knows

106 • matthew garcia

how to tell it to the people.” The local newspaper took note of Kubo’s rags-to-riches story in 1976, deeming him “the ineloquent speaker-turned- spokesman” for all farmers.14 His handling of labor issues facing a wide spectrum of the agricultural community, from large-scale farmers to small family farmers like himself, provided useful cover to corporate entities that had become easy targets for derision in this David-and-Goliath struggle. Seeking a more focused, sustained campaign, the Ad Hoc Committee formed a “No on 14” organization known as Citizens for a Fair Farm Labor Law and named Harry Kubo as its president.

Chávez and the “Yes on 14” advocates viewed Kubo’s involvement as a cynical ploy by wealthy growers to hide behind a small farmer, and discounted his concern for private-property rights violations. Throughout the campaign, Chávez emphasized the $2.5 million budget of his oppo- nents, used to hire “experienced manipulators of public opinion” who tried to “persuade a lot of people that passage of Proposition 14 will give the right to Mexican farm workers to enter their homes without per- mission.” Such allusions to white fears of home invasion never directly entered into Kubo’s vocabulary; however, others disseminated these ideas to the public on behalf of growers.15 In his public speeches and published commentaries, Kubo remained focused on the consequences of the rules change for farmers and farmworkers. For farmers, he worried, “you kick an organizer off the farm for being disruptive, . . . and the next day the guy is back on your farm and you have to let him enter and he can disrupt things all over again.” For workers, Kubo argued, “under ‘14’ the worker would just about lose his right to work or not work under a union contract.” He added, “the union could bring such pressure on him . . . he’d have to join even if he didn’t want to.”16 In his rebuttal, Chávez ignored nuances in the anti-14 position, inserting a not-so-subtle gibe at Kubo’s credibility by asserting that agribusiness had “started a slick campaign with . . . a small grower as a front, presenting Proposition 14 as a violation of prop- erty rights.”17 Kubo rarely, if ever, criticized Chávez’s character in public, though in his oral history, he shared his impressions of the labor leader after they met for the fi rst time in 1974 at a debate held at the Hilton Hotel in Fresno. “My fi rst impression of him,” he told his interviewer, “was [of ] a person that was very arrogant, very arrogant in his statements, but I also found that he was a very intelligent man, a person with total dedication to the cause that he was pursuing.” Kubo maintained an abiding respect for Chávez, acknowledging that their “roots are the same” and that they

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 107

shared a commitment to improving farmworkers’ lives, though by differ- ent means.18

The cities became the battleground for Proposition 14, with both the UFW and Citizens for a Fair Farm Labor Law investing much time and money in winning the war of ideas among the large blocs of voters. Kubo traveled more than thirty thousand miles in 1976, engaging Chávez in a number of debates and becoming what one newspaper called the “focus of Chávez’s wrath.”19 He organized highly visible “No on 14” rallies in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and San Diego in the week prior to the election, drawing as many as four thousand participants at each event.20 In each location, he orchestrated successful door-to-door campaigns that rivaled the UFW’s supremacy in grassroots outreach, and conducted media events, complete with a country-and-western concert, throughout the state. Kubo honed the growers’ position to an easily digested message, “Protect Private Property—No on 14,” that the public understood and that the editorial boards of several urban newspapers and television and radio stations picked up and incorporated in their opinions on the subject.21 These efforts gave the growers an unprecedented voice in the cities and helped raise political contributions that supported campaign ads on the airwaves.22

The union countered these events with an aggressive grassroots cam- paign of its own, which included community groups that communicated their message via leafl ets and door-to-door appeals. In Los Angeles, for example, the Coalition for Economic Survival (CES) worked on behalf of the union to challenge the private-property argument as “the old ‘big lie’ campaign.” “They have poured millions into a demagogic ‘vote no’ campaign,” CES’s steering committee wrote to its members, “using the phony ‘private property’ slogan.”23 As the election neared, Chávez’s attack on the validity of the private-property argument became more urgent. In a speech to eight hundred supporters in National City, Chávez implored the partisan crowd not to take victory for granted and asked everyone to take individual responsibility for challenging the growers’ attempt to confuse voters. “We’ve got to tell the people that [the private-property argument] is a phony issue,” he warned, “or we’re in trouble.”24 In many posters and fl iers that appeared in the months leading up to the election, the UFW routinely drew attention to Kubo’s private-property argument as “the Big Lie” and republished articles naming the wealthy growers who contributed to Citizens for a Fair Labor Law.25 The union also highlighted the many

108 • matthew garcia

politicians whom it counted as allies, including President Jimmy Carter, Governor Jerry Brown, San Francisco mayor George Moscone, and Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley.26

In the end, none of these endorsements helped the union. Voters handed the UFW a crushing defeat, rejecting Proposition 14 by a better than 3–2 margin on November 2, 1976. The “No on 14” forces garnered more than two million more votes than advocates for the initiative, and carried fi fty-six of the state’s fi fty-eight counties, with Alameda and San Francisco the only two counties voting in favor.27 Although the growers’ newsletter interpreted the outcome as “a repudiation of the naked power grab of César Chávez” and “a major defeat for Governor Gerald Brown,” Kubo offered a more sanguine evaluation, highlighting the importance of the organizing drive: “[It was] amazing to see the grassroots response from agriculture. People we didn’t know were out there came to the front and pitched into the effort to defeat this bad initiative. It was this all-out support that made the victory possible. . . . Every grower—all of agriculture—can be proud of this accomplishment.”28 Union organizers tried to attribute the outcome to the $2.5 million budget that fueled the growers’ intense media campaign, though in the end the UFW spent a substantial sum of its own, $1.3 million.

Support for Kubo’s message manifested common ground between growers like him and voters concerning the sanctity of private property in California. The electorate’s decision was consistent with an entrenched preoccupation with the rights of property owners, perhaps most clearly articulated in 1964 in the repeal of the fair housing law known as the Rumford Act. Amidst the civil rights movement, the California State Assembly had passed the law, named for William Byron Rumford, the fi rst African American elected offi cial in Northern California. It prohibited discrimination in most privately fi nanced housing and out- lawed racial discrimination by home lenders. In response, a coalition consisting of the California Real Estate Association, Home Builders Associ- ation, and Apartment Owners Association organized a successful campaign to overturn the law by way of an initiative—coincidentally, also Propo- sition 14—that passed by a two to one margin. Racism clearly played a role in the vote, though many voters also expressed their opposition to what they perceived as the state interfering in the management of private property (Lipsitz 2006, 114; Elinson and Yogi 2009, 148–149; HoSang 2010, 70–71).

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 109

Kubo’s role as spokesman also signaled an important turn in the growers’ political strategy. Prior to their victory, they had attempted to discredit Chávez as a false prophet, the UFW as a social movement rather than a union, and the Teamsters as the superior choice for workers. None of these strategies worked. In Kubo, however, they found a life story and a sympathetic character whose experience successfully countered the appeals of the UFW on behalf of poor farmworkers. By 1976 much of the public accepted the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as an injustice and saw Kubo as a victim of the misguided Executive Order 9066. Indeed, within two years, the Japanese American Citizens League believed it had enough public sympathy to launch a reparations move- ment. In 1983 a congressional committee issued the report Personal Justice Denied, recommending compensation to the victims, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, offering $20,000 in redress to surviving detainees. Kubo’s personal history and the growing sentiment in society regarding the mistake of internment gave him increased cred- ibility with the public and enabled him to articulate a political position that questioned the state’s right to determine who could enter private property. Perhaps the most enduring and effective image of the “No on 14” campaign was a poster of Kubo standing in front of his home with the following message in bold letters: “34 years ago, I gave up my personal rights without a fi ght . . . IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.”29 Such an evocation of the internment paid tremendous dividends for large and small growers alike who, ironically, now relied on a man of color and an act of racial injustice to stem the momentum the UFW had gained since ARLA’s passage.

In the wake of the growers’ success, Kubo enjoyed a level of celeb- rity unique among Japanese Americans that provided him a platform to advance his conservative viewpoints. In the same election in 1976, Mill Valley resident, former San Francisco State University president, and fellow Japanese American S. I. Hayakawa won a seat in the U.S. Senate as a Republican candidate and appealed to Kubo to run for public offi ce. Kubo declined, though he continued to serve the Nisei Farmers League as an effective lobbyist for growers in Sacramento and became a member of the Parlier school board, happily leaving the responsibility of farming to his brothers and children. As a public fi gure, he espoused a political message of racial uplift consistent with an emerging colorblind ideology that chal- lenged racial minorities to avoid making excuses for their problems and

110 • matthew garcia

to take responsibility for their own lives.30 In his oral history, Kubo shared his philosophy: “If you have a chip on your shoulder and you’re going to feel sorry for yourself, you will never get ahead in this life. . . . I’ve seen too much of that, because you are an ethnic minority, you have lived under poverty, the government owes you a living, that is not an attitude Japanese-American people have; we’re going out and trying and this is what we did.”31

Kubo identifi ed both farmworkers and African Americans as the largest and most signifi cant groups carrying such a “chip.” He labeled farm- workers a “unique” people whose unpredictable nature made them unde- serving of anything more than the minimum wage. According to Kubo, “some come early, some won’t show up at all,” but on average, “they’re not responsible enough in a lot of instances to call up and say I won’t be there tomorrow.” Kubo reserved his harshest criticism for African Americans, whom he called a “handicapped people” for their presumed dependence on welfare. According to Kubo, in providing African Americans welfare, “you destroy any incentive or desire [for them] to work on their own and to persevere.”32 Kubo contrasted these groups and others interested in gov- ernment subsidies with Japanese Americans, who, he testifi ed, pooled their resources and labor to become successful farm owners. Kubo believed that “if the Japanese-American can do it under these handicaps, the alien land laws, the fact that our parents couldn’t be naturalized and the incarceration during the war years, and they could still come back and have enough perseverance and determination to try, then anybody in this country could own a piece of land if they really wanted to.”33

Such beliefs went well beyond the property rights position advocated by the growers, though Kubo’s thoughts on a range of issues, from worker responsibility to welfare and the assumed culture of poverty among many racial minorities, provide a window on the conservative politics of a grower class that now made room for Japanese Americans. For former detainees of the internment camps, the postwar shift in racial attitudes did not earn them an immediate spot among their grower peers, though Kubo fondly remembered those in the San Joaquin Valley who assisted them in their reintegration into society. When the Kubos left the camp at Tulare Lake, they landed as tenant farmers with an Armenian family, the Peters, living just outside Fresno. Kubo appreciated the “similarity between the Armenian[s] and Japanese,” though this perception of belonging to what George Lipsitz called “a family of resemblance” had more to do with the

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 111

sharing of food, child care, and the duties of farming than with a con- sciousness about the two groups’ parallel histories of pursuing whiteness in U.S. courts during the early twentieth century (Lipsitz 1990, 150). Kubo acknowledged how instrumental the kindness of others had been in his family’s road back to society, at one point emphatically stating, “I don’t ever recall any acts of discrimination, prejudice, [or] uncomfortableness” after the war.34

Kubo’s focus on his own story of triumph and the generosity of neigh- bors, however, fostered an ignorance concerning the differences between the period of his ascendancy in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the 1960s and 1970s, when Mexican and Filipino workers butted up against new challenges such as undocumented immigration, stagfl ation, the growth of corporate farms, and the continued upheaval in the Mexican and Philip- pine economies, which fed the postwar stream of poor itinerant workers into California fi elds. These blind spots did not stop Kubo from compar- ing his struggles to those of contemporary farmworkers. In a speech to a local seventh-grade class, for example, Kubo told his mostly Mexican audience, “I’m one of you, too,” referring to his life as a son of immi- grants, though he could not help but broaden the comparison to “Indians,” “Germans,” “Armenians,” and “probably thirty or forty ethnic groups in this country.”35 For Kubo, the struggles of farmworkers in the 1970s rep- resented an earlier version of his own life, albeit without the corrosive power of the state restricting their movement and ownership of property.

Kubo’s thoughts manifested the shift toward “neoconservativism” during the late 1970s that Omi and Winant identify in Racial Formation (1994, 128–132). Their description of this political philosophy, however, relies primarily on an analysis of the backlash against the black civil rights movement and President Reagan’s repeal of civil rights legislation in the 1980s. Ethnic studies scholarship since the publication of Racial Formation allows us to evaluate the particular experiences of ethnic minorities in this moment of transition, including the life of Harry Kubo.

It is tempting to see Kubo’s history as an example of the familiar model minority, which frequently casts Asian Americans as the alternative to other minority groups that demand that the government play a more serious role in leveling the societal playing fi eld. While elements of Kubo’s story correspond with this interpretation, Vijay Prashad has recently observed that a mélange of racial theories existed throughout the twentieth century, especially after the Immigration Act of 1965, when immigration from all

112 • matthew garcia

corners of the globe increased the diversity of U.S. society. The model minority concept, Prashad argues, stood alongside competing theories of liberal pluralism and multiculturalism, all designed to manage and incor- porate this diversity within a nation now clinging to white supremacy (Prashad 2006). In many respects Kubo served this purpose, though seeing him primarily as a model minority denies him agency in the construction of his own message of racial uplift. Moreover, Kubo spoke not only for Japanese Americans but also for growers, a largely non-Asian group that chose him as its spokesperson.

More recently, Peggy Pascoe has argued that the period after the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, ending the ban on interracial mar- riage, initiated another shift in thinking about race that is relevant to Kubo’s success (Pascoe 2009). Pascoe’s careful tracing of the erosion of racial classifi cation prior to the Loving decision and the rise of a colorblind ideology in the years following it provides a powerful context for under- standing Kubo and his appeal. Although it took fi fty-four years—from the prosecution of boxer Jack Johnson in 1913 for his sexual relations with white women, to the Loving decision—the majority of Americans eventu- ally adopted the position advocated by those Pascoe calls “culturalists,” social scientists who challenged the biological foundations of race. As her study of the 1921 Arizona Supreme Court case Kirby v. Kirby shows, these scholars held “not that there was no such thing as biological race but that race was nothing more than biology” (Pascoe 2009, 125). This intellectual precursor to colorblindness gained acceptance among many, if not most, Americans by the mid-1960s, Pascoe tells us, after Martin Luther King Jr. shared “his famous dream of being judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character” (301). Ironically, during the 1970s, conservatives, who had been among the most stubborn on this issue, became the strongest advocates for a meritocracy in which people in the United States would be measured by their abilities. Colorblindness, in other words, did not ignore racial difference; it simply disregarded its importance and wanted social policy to follow (302–303).

Kubo and his fi ght for property rights demonstrate colorblind politics in process of formation—what we might call proto-colorblindness. As a public fi gure, he espoused a political message of racial uplift consistent with an emerging colorblind ideology that challenged racial minorities not to make excuses for their problems and to take responsibility for their own lives. In the years following his victory, Kubo criticized both farmworkers—

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 113

including by extension Mexicans and Filipinos—and African Americans as two groups who, he argued, asked for government handouts and assistance based on their racial identities. He labeled farmworkers a “unique” people whose unpredictable nature made them undeserving of anything more than the minimum wage (cf. Pascoe 2009, 23).

Kubo assumed his right to speak as a man of color and for people of color, and reveled in the credibility he assumed his identity gave him to address such issues as welfare, immigration, property ownership, and labor. Although he did not disavow the harsh experience of internment or slavery and discrimination, he argued that a colorblind American system based on merit in the postwar period allowed anyone, regardless of race, to succeed. Rather than deny the importance of their identities, Japanese Americans like Kubo drew on those identities both to extend their reach over society and to appeal to people with whom they felt an affi nity. Thus, during the anti-14 campaign, Kubo frequently honored Chávez’s hard work by admitting “César Chávez has done some good things,” but he saw Chávez’s request for state intervention in managing labor relations as unacceptable.36

The paths toward assimilation and acceptance from white peers differed among Armenians and Japanese Americans due to the relative “Asian- ness” of each group and the usefulness of their identities to the wider grower community. Both Armenian and Japanese immigrants attempted to challenge “the racial state,” as Omi and Winant termed it (1994, 81), by proclaiming their whiteness in court; however, only Armenians suc- ceeded. Armenians retained their whiteness by claiming not that Armenia falls within the boundaries of Europe, but rather that their “homeland,” northeast of Baghdad and north of Tehran, became such after their migra- tion from the West. The establishment of the “common knowledge” litmus test for Asians with the Thind decision placed South Asians and Japanese Americans on the outside of whiteness. Such ideologies infl uenced their access to U.S. citizenship, which remained off-limits until passage of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 allowed for their naturalization.

In the end, the acceptance of Japanese Americans by white growers depended on the activism of Nisei farmers who, like Harry Kubo, espoused political positions useful to all growers regardless of race. By the time Kubo initiated his “No on 14” campaign in the name of private-property rights, the racial ideology of California society had shifted from a belief in skin color as a determinant of intellect and ability, to a notion that these

114 • matthew garcia

markers had little consequence in the trajectory of “minority” groups. Kubo served as the ideal representative of this idea, having overcome the internment to become a successful farmer and a valued member of the agribusiness community. His value was partly predicated on his willingness to articulate a “model minority” perspective that challenged Mexicans, Filipinos, and African Americans to be more like Japanese Americans and allowed growers not to take responsibility for the poor health and inad- equate education of their workers. His embrace of colorblind conservatism, according to which anyone could succeed in the United States regardless of race, offered Kubo an additional ideological pillar that propped up not only his fortunes but also those of white growers much richer than him. Ultimately, Kubo’s life illustrates how, at least for Japanese Americans, the path of acceptance by society now came by way of identifying with a history of racialized oppression. For many who profi ted from agricul- ture and whiteness, Kubo’s personal success in the face of such injustice proved the inherent equality of the U.S. system and the perseverance of the American dream.

notes

1. Pawel 2009; Ganz 2009; Shaw 2008. Recent books on the topic include Bardacke 2011; Pawel 2009; and Garcia, forthcoming.

2. Marshall Ganz, interviewed by author, March 26, 2008. 3. See Almaguer 1994. Almaguer draws on Omi and Winant (1986) for analysis

of California’s racial history. 4. United States v. Cartozian, 6 F.2d 919 (U.S. District Court, D. Oregon,

1925). 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.; Tehranian 2000. 7. Jendian 2001, 176. Matthew Jendian, in his interesting study of Armenians

in Fresno entitled “Assimilation and Ethnicity” (italics in the original), makes the important point that assimilation and the retention of ethnicity are processes that are not mutually exclusive.

8. Harry Kubo, interviewed by Sam Suhler, Fresno County Library, October 13, 1978, p. 6.

9. Ibid., 10. 10. “Who Is Harry Kubo?” Fresno Bee, February 22, 1976; Harry Kubo inter-

view, 32–33. With additional satellite groups in Stockton, Los Angeles, and San Diego County, the total membership of the league topped out at 2,200 in 1976.

growers, farm workers, and colorblindness • 115

11. Harry Kubo interview, 29; Gilbert Padilla, interviewed by the author, January 11, 2010.

12. Larry Kubo, interviewed by the author, January 6, 2010. 13. Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1976. 14. Ibid. 15. Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1976. 16. Ibid. 17. César Chávez to Supporters, September 1976, UCLA Political Literature

Collection. 18. Harry Kubo interview, 33, 36. 19. “Who Is Harry Kubo?” 20. Harry Kubo interview, 36. 21. Council of California Growers Newsletter, September 20, 1976; October

4, 1976, in Scrapbook April 16, 1975–August 20, 1976, Table Grape Negotiating Committee Papers, Fresno State University.

22. Council of California Growers Newsletter, September 13, 1976; November 1, 1976.

23. Coalition for Economic Survival to CES Members and Friends, November 2, 1976, UCLA Political Literature Collection.

24. National City Star-News, September 19, 1976, UCLA Political Literature Collection.

25. Flyers, n.d., UCLA Political Literature Collection. 26. Fresno Bee, September 6, 1976. 27. San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 1976; Fresno Bee, November 3, 1976;

Council of California Growers Newsletter, November 8, 1976. 28. Council of California Growers Newsletter, November 8, 1976. 29. Poster, n.d., UCLA Political Literature Collection. 30. For the emergence of a colorblind ideology, see Pascoe 2009, 287–306. 31. Harry Kubo interviewed by Sam Suhler, Fresno, CA, October 13, 1978, 18. 32. Ibid., 27–28. 33. Ibid. 23. 34. Ibid., 2–3, 18–19. 35. Ibid., 44. 36. Flyer for Citizens for a Fair Farm Labor Law, n.d., UFW Information

and Research Collection, Box 26–11, Archive of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.