1903 Oxnard strike

The 1903 Oxnard strike was a labor rights dispute in the southern California coastal city of Oxnard between local landowners and the majority Japanese and Mexican labor force. The strike arrayed sugar beet growers, the American Beet Sugar Company, the grower-controlled Western Agricultural Contracting Company and local law enforcement against the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA), a union of betabeleros, or sugar beet workers, in league with independent labor contractors and boarding student activists. The interethnic organizing of the strike would presage Oxnard Mexican and Filipino sugar beet worker participation in the California agricultural strike of 1933 and later the efforts of the United Farm Workers. The union would dissolve shortly after the strike, withdrawing their charter request made to the American Federation of Labor, with Mexican workers rejecting AFL President Samuel Gompers' demand for Japanese exclusion.