My Family and the 1939 Filipino Brussels Sprouts Strike
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Workers picking Brussels sprouts in the Salinas Valley. Climatic conditions in a coastal belt from the Salinas Valley north to Half Moon Bay are ideal for Brussels sprouts and this is where 90% of Brussels sprouts consumed in America are grown. Presently, Brussels sprouts plants are generally topped, producing plants like these that are a shorter but more productive than those in earlier years of California Brussels sprouts farming. (Photo courtesy of Hitchcock Farms, Inc., Salinas, CA)
Negotiations and the Growers' Response
In the fall of 1939, a Stockton-based Filipino medical doctor named Maurico Bautista assumed the task of negotiating with growers on behalf of FAWA. Dr. Bautista’s task was hopeless. The growers had pledged not to recognize any union representing Brussels sprouts pickers. Instead, they began kicking Filipino workers out of grower-owned housing and importing Mexican laborers from Stockton to take over the Filipinos’ lodging and jobs. An article in the November 9, 1939, issue of The San Mateo Times highlighted the arrival of approximately 100 Mexican field workers from Stockton. They were transported in grower-owned vehicles and placed in homes from which Filipinos had been displaced. This created tension within the community. Anticipating violence, men in Pescadero began carrying firearms. The growers were represented by two of the most prominent among them, Louis Barisoni and John de Benedetti.
Personal Connection to the Strike and to the Sprouts
My father was Nicolas Concepcion Tenaza (1905-1995) and his cousin—my Uncle Fred—was Federico Tubera Mangrubang (1902-1991). Dad’s maternal grandmother and Fred’s paternal grandfather were sister and brother. Besides their blood relationship, Dad and Uncle Fred had grown up together in Pugos, Sinait, Ilocos Sur, and they were best friends. I was less than a year old when Dad, Uncle Fred, and 500 other Filipinos were striking so I knew nothing about it. My earliest memory of Brussels sprouts came two years after the strike. I was walking behind my father as he picked sprouts in a field five or six miles north of Half Moon Bay. The field was situated just across the two-lane coast highway from the small farm where my mom, dad, sister, and I lived in a one-room cabin belonging to the farm’s owner. Like other farm worker shacks we lived in, it lacked electricity, plumbing, and indoor water supply. We left that farm when the government took it over to make a WW2 military airstrip. Now it’s the Half Moon Bay Airport and the Louis Iacopi family farm.
Nicolas “Nick” Concepcion Tenaza. My dad.
Born Decemeber 5, 1905, Pugos, Sinait, Ilocos Sur
Died September 18, 1995, Wapato, WA
Photo taken in 1938, when Nick was 32
The sprout plants were in parallel rows spaced a yard apart. I was too short to see over the plants, which turned the field into a dense, damp, and mysterious forest. My three-year-old mind savored the experience. As my father advanced through this "forest," he plucked the little sprouts from the upright trunks and placed them into a brownish shoulder bag he wore for this purpose. I loved Brussels sprouts and occasionally wrested one from its stalk to munch as I followed my father. As a three-year-old, I couldn't comprehend that my Uncle Fred had been shot during a dispute over picking sprouts just like these. (Due to the practice of “topping,” modern commercially-grown Brussels sprouts plants tend to be about 1/3 shorter than they were when I was a child, when Dad and Uncle Fred were harvesting them in the fields.)
Economic Hardships and Foraging for Survival
Life was tough during those times. My dad, Uncle Fred, and the other Filipino farm workers struggled to make ends meet on their 30 cents per hour wages. To keep food on the table, they foraged for wild plants and animals. I loved foraging with them. I think they enjoyed it too but even if they didn’t, foraging was essential for their health and survival. The Central California coast, with its abundance of tide pools, beaches, sea cliffs, streams, and green hills, was a bountiful foraging environment.
The Pinoy hunter-gatherers collected seaweeds, turban snails, octopus, eels, and rock crabs from tide pools, and they handlined surf perch and striped bass from the waves breaking and receding over sandy beaches. Intertidal boulders and rocky sea cliffs yielded mussels, abalone, and seaweeds. Freshwater streams joining the sea provided salmon, steelhead, crayfish, and watercress, while the hills offered rabbits, mushrooms, wild mustard, and other tasty plants. But during the six-month harvest season, picking Brussels sprouts for 30 cents an hour was the mainstay that paid for the sacks of rice, petrol, coal for cooking and heating, and other store-bought goods.
My Resilient, Charismatic, Uncle Fred
Federico “Fred” Tubera Mangrubang. My Uncle Fred. Wearing sunglasses.
Born July 17, 1903, Pugos, Sinait, Ilocos Sur
Died January 22, 1991, Half Moon Bay, CA
Photo taken in 1986 when Fred was 83
Uncle Fred’s legendary fighting skills, scars, and the leaden projectiles embedded under his dermis captivated my imagination. Two buckshot pellets beneath the skin of his chin and the bullet in the back of his neck were sources of pride—and grim reminders of his resistance to the economic exploitation of Filipino field workers. Fred told me about being shot in the neck with a police caliber .38 during a Salinas Valley lettuce strike in 1930 but he never explained the buckshot in his chin. I loved rubbing my fingertips over the old wounds, feeling the bullet and buckshot. Fred loved it too, swelling with pride at my boyish adoration of the manly metallic badges of resistance imbedded in his flesh.
How Uncle Fred Got the Buckshot in His Chin
It’s ironic that the buckshot in Fred’s chin kept me puzzled for seven decades because the story of how it happened appeared in newspapers all over California on the same day it transpired. I learned about it in March of 2018 when I found a detailed description of the incident in the Redwood City Tribune of December 19, 1939. It told of how a Half Moon Bay rancher named Don T. Campbell had fired three rounds of buckshot into a crowd of striking Filipino sprout pickers, wounding two of them. The paper identified the wounded as Fred Mangrubang and Apolonio Ordona, both of Pescadero. It said Uncle Fred was hit in the face, Apolonio in the lower right leg. The strikers urged Deputy Sheriff Leland Quinlan to arrest Campbell for the shooting, but he wouldn’t do it. Sheriff Quinlan said that when Mr. Campbell fired the shots he was only following his (Sheriff Quinlan’s) instruction to defend himself. Mr. Campbell originally admitted firing buckshot at Uncle Fred and Manong Apolonio but later he said it was birdshot. The pellets I palpated in Fred’s chin were considerably bigger than birdshot.
By Shooting Uncle Fred & Manong Apolonio, Mr. Campbell Handed Victory to FAWA
When Mr. Campbell shot Uncle Fred and Manong Apolonio with the sheriff’s approval, it infuriated the strikers which, in turn, worried the growers. Fearing mob retaliation, anxious growers drove post-haste to the Department of Labor in San Francisco to seek help. US Labor Conciliator Walter G. Mathewson agreed to mediate, to satisfy the pickers’ demands, quell their anger, and get them back to work. Because the growers refused to recognize FAWA, in lieu of a union contract, Mr. Mathewson drafted a memorandum agreement between the growers and workers. It stipulated that (a) the pickers would return to work the following day, (b) growers would rehire workers, not discriminating against any for striking and (c) the wage for picking would increase from 30 to 33 cents per hour. Some of the striking were members of CIO, and CIO reps were there to support them. But the growers snubbed CIO just as they snubbed FAWA. Mr. Mathewson predicted the pickers would immediately accept the offer and he was right. On the morning of December 20, 1939, one day after Fred was shot, FAWA representatives signed the Memorandum Agreement. At 2 o’clock that afternoon, Sheriff James McGrath phoned his office at Redwood City to announce that the Pescadero Brussels sprouts strike was over.
The growers’ refusal to acknowledge FAWA should not be allowed to obliterate the Filipinos’ victory from the history books.
Larry Itliong and the AWOC in the Brussels Sprouts Fields
The 1939 Filipino strike may have been the first Brussels sprouts strike but it was not the last. Twenty-two years later, on October 18, 1961, Larry Itliong led a strike to force eight Brussels sprouts farmers in the Santa Cruz area to recognize his Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) as the bargaining agent for field workers. The growers’ response was to replace the strikers with men brought in from Texas and Watsonville. On November 1, 1961, AWOC canceled the strike two weeks after it started. It had included a demand that the wage for picking be increased 14%, from $1.10/hour to $1.25/hour. Growers increased the wage by 9%, from $1.10 to $1.20/hour, but probably not because of the strike. Prior to the 1939 FAWA strike, the wage for picking Brussels sprouts had been constant at 30 cents per hour for several years. After the 1939 strike got a 10% increase in the picker wage, growers raised the sprout picking wage an average of 9.7% per year without union intervention.
AWOC’s 1961 Brussels sprouts strike failed but the drums were rolling. In May of 1965 Larry Itliong and the AWOC—with its majority Filipino membership—called a strike against grape growers in the Coachella Valley, CA, demanding a minimum wage of $1.40/hour for vineyard work. The strike was strategically planned to coincide with the season when the essential thinning and girdling of the grape vines was underway. Though the growers refused to recognize AWOC, they honored the workers’ demand to increase their minimum wage to $1.40/hour (11, 12). Four months later, on September 8, 1965, Larry Itliong and AWOC launched a strike against Delano area grape growers during another critical season, the harvest. They demanded that wages for picking grapes be made equivalent to the federal minimum wage. This was the strike that shook the world and made “Itliong” a Filipino American household word.
These events are a testament to the courage, tenacity, and bayanihan spirit of Filipino farm workers in their fight for fair wages, and healthy living and working conditions. This cooperative temperament predisposed them to joining the Filipino Agricultural Workers Association in order to improve conditions by collective bargaining with Brussels sprouts growers. Though the growers refused to recognize FAWA, in the end FAWA and its members were victorious. This fact must not be lost to history.
Family Legacy
On December 21, 1941, Congress amended the Selective Service Act to allow Filipinos to join the regular U.S. Army for the first time. On October 5, 1942, at the age of 39, Uncle Fred enlisted in the U.S. Army in San Francisco for the duration of the war plus six months. He continued to embody resilience and determination until his death in Half Moon Bay, CA, in 1991 at the age of 88. Fred had a military burial at Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo, CA. He is survived by his son, Federico Tubera Mangrubang, Jr, of Half Moon Bay, CA, and also by grandchildren and great grandchildren.
The other wounded striker, Apolonio Ordona Ordona, was an Ilocano from Agoo, La Union. He passed away in the Philippines in 1997 at the age of 90. Apolonio arrived in San Francisco aboard the SS President Taft on July 25, 1928. He was a legal resident of the US for more than 65 years but never became a citizen.
About the same time Uncle Fred joined the military, my dad went to work as a machinist at the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard in San Francisco helping to build warships. When WWII ended so did Dad’s job at Bethlehem and we went back to the fields, but around Stockton, French Camp, and Lathrop rather than the coast. After my parents split up, Dad moved to Washington State where he eventually became a successful independent farmer in the Filipino agricultural community at Wapato, in the Yakima Valley. He is survived by three children, ten grandchildren, and eleven great grandchildren.
I developed such a fascination for animals during my early food foraging experiences that I became a wildlife biologist, studying the behavior and ecology of animals the planet over. Along the way I labored in fields, warehouses, and freight yards, as well as in classrooms, laboratories, and nature. I loved it all. I have four wonderful daughters and eight magnificent grandchildren.
References:
(1) San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, December 17, 1939
(2) San Mateo Times, Saturday, November 9, 1939
(3) Redwood City Tribune, Sunday, December 19, 1939
(4) Redwood City Tribune, Wednesday, December 20, 1939
(5) Sacramento Bee, Wednesday, December 20, 1939 du
(6) Santa Cruz Sentinel, Thursday, November 2, 1961
(7) The Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, November 7, 1939
(8) Redlands Daily Facts, Thursday, December 21, 1939
(9) Half Moon Bay Review and Pescadero Pebble, Thursday, November 9, 1939
(10) Stockton Evening and Sunday Record, Thursday, November 2, 1961
(11) Valley Times (North Hollywood), Thursday, May 13, 1965
(12) The Fresno Bee, Tuesday, May 2, 1965.
Richard Tenaza, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, and a Board Member, FANHS Museum, Stockton. You can reach him at rtenaza@aol.com.
