New published article, “To Rest Beside Another” in RHR 154
My new article, “To Rest Beside Another: Filipino Migrant Worldmaking and the California Labor Camps, 1930s - 1970s” thinks through the Filipino migrant bunkhouse and California labor camp as spaces necessary for localized systems of capitalist exploitation, but at the same time, places of worldmaking, care, and possible utopia. It is published in the latest issues of Radical History Review 154, a special issue titled “The Rest is Political: Radical Histories of Repose” (https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/the-rest-is-political-radical-histories-of-repose/) edited by Amy Chazkel and Anup Grewal.
You can access my article at this link or you can email for a copy.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Camp as a Scene of Flourishing Life
On January 23, 1930, a lifeless body was found in a workers’ bunkhouse on the outskirts of Watsonville, California.1 The body was that of Fermin Tobera, a transient worker who had migrated from the Philippines just two years earlier in hopes of earning income to send back to family in the American colony. Lying in bed, Tobera died from gunshot wounds. The Colusa Herald determined that the wounds were a result of roving “white race-rioters” who “shot up the place.”2 It is not clear whether Tobera was in bed when he died or moved to it after he was shot, but that his final resting place was defined by rest, sleep, and intimacy greatly shaped formal and informal narratives of his death for several generations afterward.3 The “Watsonville Riot,” as it would eventually be publicly known, was a coordinated wave of mob violence that unfolded over four days, a series of night attacks against Filipino workers in their labor camp’s sleeping quarters. Law enforcement was present at the time, not to protect Filipinos but to ensure that property damage did not spill out into the surrounding orchards or reach the commercial areas of the town nearby. Some saw the event as a continuation of the turn of the twentieth-century Philippine–American War, with many military veterans deputized by police to guard ranch properties.4 Within a few months of the Watsonville Riots, Tobera’s murder would become an “international imbroglio” when his body was transported to the Philippines and paraded through crowds that Manila journalists described as both sorrowful and enraged.5 For many in the Philippines, Tobera’s murder, and the broader anti-Filipino violence in the “mainland” United States, dramatically highlighted the systemic indignities of white supremacy and inequalities under US sovereignty, adding fuel to the fire of various local anticolonial movements.6 As other Filipinos who lived through the Great Depression recalled, it would greatly shape much of the discourse of the broader anti-Filipino migrant movement during the Great Depression.7
In the twenty-first century, public and academic scholarship has explored Tobera’s murder specifically, and the Watsonville Riot more generally, in variegated ways. First and most recently, because of the publicly perceived intensity of anti-Asian violence during the 2020 pandemic, Tobera’s murder has appeared more frequently in writings about the longer history of anti-Asian violence in the United States. In these narratives, Tobera’s murder and the Watsonville Riots are usually framed as a result of irrational xenophobic ignorance toward the hard-working immigrant.8 Another approach has been through the imperial lens, which properly places anti-Asian violence as a consequence of the US colonization of the Philippines throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Some scholarship tends to emphasize the willful amnesia or suppressed haunting of US colonization in the Philippines. Others have generatively reframed Filipino migration as a result of the interlocking violent logics of US imperialism, settler colonialism, and industrial capitalism. And finally, others have fruitfully examined the intimacies of Filipino migrants, reading against the grain of the quotidian and domestic to reveal complex relations of power and pleasure.9
All of these studies have expanded scholarly understandings of what activists and scholars have termed the Manong Generation. Manong, in Ilokano, is a term of endearment for an older brother, (and Manang, a term of endearment for an older sister). Overwhelmingly male and young, the Manong Generation were the first major critical mass of Filipinos to migrate to the continental United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Working primarily low-wage and unprotected jobs in the agricultural industry, later generations of Filipino migrants have conventionally narrated their experiences as a sojourn of hardship and perseverance. One local California chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), arguably the foremost public steward of the history of the Manong Generation, describes them as those who
endured the hardships of stoop labor and made many sacrifices. If they married and had families, many would settle in small rented houses in town or stay in farm labor camps. . . . Now, most of the “manong and manang” generation are now largely deceased. . . . We will never truly know the pain, sadness, and joys that the Filipino pioneers experienced in coming to this country. They paved the way for those today who benefit from the equal opportunities in the workplace and professional careers they are able to pursue.10
This article hopes to contribute to a historiography of the Manong Generation by examining a less-explored environment that profoundly shaped the conditions of anti-Filipino violence and Filipino struggle: the bunkhouse and labor camp. In contrast to previous studies, however, I want to consider the place of rest not as a retreat from the world, but as a place of worldmaking. In thinking along this path, I am inspired by queer and feminist thinkers who challenge us to think about life building and worldmaking as experimental, superfluous, and perhaps even utopic.11 In this way, I think of rest not as a respite from, or slowing down of, the hardships and struggles of life, but as a scene of flourishing life, or a cleared-out space for rehearsals for possible lives beyond mere survival. By approaching the resting place of the Manong Generation in this way, I hold a more ambivalent position that refrains from romanticizing the Manong struggle, but also resists the idea that the Manong struggle should simply be considered a sacrifice for some future time or place. Instead, this article explores how the place of rest was part of the racial capitalist world of exploitation and dispossession that conditioned Manong life.
Bunkhouses and labor camps were highly charged spaces: politically, economically, and socially. Constructed to satisfy agribusiness owners’ need for worker housing proximate to crops and orchards, employers intended labor camps as spaces of rest to fulfill the biological necessity of repairing the itinerant laborer for the next workday. Akin to tenement housing, the bunkhouses were a form of residency built to enable capitalist exploitation and the accumulation of mainly transient and migrant labor populations in rural regions. Bunkhouses were often segregated according to race and nationality, with different racialized communities separated so as to reduce possibilities of organizing or conflict, either of which would slow down production. During the booming California agricultural industry of the early twentieth century, the labor camp became a critical part of the infrastructure and logistics of capitalist production and reproduction. I examine how during the late 1920s and 1930s, especially during the economic crisis of the Great Depression, it became a primary target of white supremacists who claimed that white male workers were victims of displacement by Filipinos. I also explore how bunkhouses and camps, although perhaps intended to be resting places of alienation and isolation, were also scenes of hospitality, kinship, and, perhaps, utopia. Through the examination of recently published oral history testimonies from the Watsonville Is in the Heart: Community Digital Archive—a research initiative led by a partnership between the Watsonville community organization, The Tobera Project, and the University of California, Santa Cruz—this article thinks about the Manong worlds of the labor camps as possible rehearsals for the present.
