NOTES
- Authors' Note:
- This article is partially based on primary research done by Leung for the project of Chinese Farm Laborers in the Sacramento River Delta—An Oral Documentary History on Locke: 1910–1960. The secondary research and most of the writing for this article was contributed by Dr. Ma. The project was supported in part by grants (#3881 and #4545) from the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of California at Davis. The authors would like to express particular thanks to Professor Mark Pilisuk, and Professor O. E. Thompson, Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences for their support of this project, and also to Dorothy Suhr for the preparation of this manuscript.
- Levi Varden Fuller, “The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1939.
- Joseph A. McGowan, History of the Sacramento Valley. Vol. 2 (New York, 1961) 307–309. Other groups that worked as agricultural laborers in California prior to 1940 include Blacks and East Indians.
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor”; Leigh Kagan, “Chinese in California (1850–1894): Migrant Laborers or Immigrants?” Paper, Hamline University, 1977; and Carey Mc Williams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (New York, 1969).
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 97.
- Ibid., 97–98; and George Chu, “Chinatowns in the Delta: the Chinese in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, 1870–1960,” California Historical Quarterly 47: 1 (March 1970), 21–37; and interview with Edward Dutra.
- United States Senate and House of Representatives, Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (Washington, 1877), 436–443, 504–509.
- Daniel Arreola, “Locke, California: Persistence and Change in the Cultural Landscape of a Delta Chinatown.” M.A. thesis, California State University at Hayward, 1975; L. Eve Armentrout Ma, “The Big Business Ventures of Chinese in North America, 1850–1930,” in The Chinese American Experience (San Francisco, 1984); Jack London, Valley of the Moon (New York, 1916).
- Arreola, “Locke, California”; Ma, “Big Business Ventures”; Sucheng Chan, “Chinese Livelihood in Rural California: The Impact of Economic Changes, 1860–1880;” Pacific Historical Review, 1984. See also Sucheng Chan, This Bitter-Sweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley, 1986).
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 94–98, 131–132; Sylvia Sun Minnick, “The Chinese in San Joaquin County, 1850–1880,” Bulletin of the Chinese Historical Society 18: 3 (March 1983); and McGowan, History of the Sacramento Valley 1 and 2 (New York, 1961). See also Minnick, Samfow: The San Joaquin Chinese Legacy (Stockton, 1987).
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 131–135; and Thomas H. Chinn, H. Mark Lai and Philip Choy, eds., in A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco, 1969), 58–59.
- Most Chinese in the Delta came from the rural districts of Zhongshan and Taishan, southwest of Canton.
- Arreola, “Locke, California”; Chu, “Chinatowns”; and L. Eve Armentrout Ma, “Chinese Politics in the Western Hemisphere, 1893–1911: Rivalry between Reformers and Revolutionaries in the Americas.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Davis, 1977, 350.
- Minnick, “Chinese”; and Sucheng Chan, “The Occupational Structure of Rural Chinese Immigrant Communities in Nineteenth-Century California.” Paper presented to the National Conference of the American Historical Association, 1981.
- Charles R. Shepard, The Story of Chung Mei (Philadelphia, 1938); interview with Howard Ah-Tye, Alfred Jung.
- John Thompson, “Settlement Geography of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, California.” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1957, 10–13; McGowan, Sacramenta Valley. Vol. 1, 324–329; Louise Simoni deWing, “The Forgotten Town of Vorden,” River News-Herald, 75th anniversary edition (1965); interviews with Ping Lee, Ming Ma.
- Interview with Jack Chew.
- Betty Lee Sung, Chinese American Manpower and Employment: Report to the Manpower Administration, United States Department of Labor (New York, 1975).
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor”; Lloyd H. Fisher, The Harvest Labor Market in California (Cambridge, 1953); and McWilliams, Factories; and Chan, This BitterSweet Soil (Berkeley, 1986).
- An exception to all three of these statements is a brief passage in Arreola (1975), which also discusses Chinese commercial agriculture for the Locke area during parts of this century.
- Leung, Peter C.Y. “When a Haircut Was a Luxury: A Chinese Farm Laborer in the Sacramento Delta,” California History (Summer 1985).
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 75–82.
- Chan, “Occupational Structure.”
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 131–133, 233; McGowan, Sacramento Valley 2, 307–309; and interviews with Ping Lee, So Yung Ng, Ming Ma. We extrapolated these general figures from the works cited in the following fashion: Most of the Delta lies in Sacramento and San Joaquin Counties. By the mid—1890s, most Chinese had been driven out of San Joaquin County. Throughout the period 1910–1930, the proportion of Chinese in Sacramento County involved in the Delta's agricultural work remained relatively constant. We then took the proportion (expressed as a percentage) and applied it to the total Chinese population of Sacramento County for the period under question, and added one hundred for San Joaquin County. Figures for the 1930–1940 period were supplemented by interviews with various former farm laborers. (The published censuses for this period do not distinguish Chinese from “other non-White” such as Japanese and East Indians when treating rural areas.)
- McWilliams, Factories, 70–75; and James Wright, “Thomas Foon Chew—Founder of Bayside Cannery,” in Gloria Sun Hom, ed., Chinese Argonaute (Palo Alto, 1971), 19–25. These crops were not all important at the same time, or even in the same part of the Delta; nor were they the only crops raised in the Delta.
- Interview with Sam Sun, Tom Chow King, Hoy Cheung, Po Jang, Wong Yow; and Fuller, “Agricultural Labor.”
- Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971).
- President's Special Committee on Farm Tenancy, Farm Tenancy: Report of the President's Committee (Washington, 1937).
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 133–134.
- Payroll statement and employment contract between Chong Chan and Meyer's ranch, 1916.
- Interview with Chau Chow, Wong Yow, and payroll statement of Chong Chan (Refugees from the Dust Bowl, who depressed wages in many of California's agricultural districts beginning in 1921, do not seem to have entered Delta agriculture in significant numbers.)
- Interviews with Sun Choi, So Yung Ng, Wong Yow.
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 133–134.
- Leung, Peter C.Y., edited by L. Eve Armentrout Ma, One Day, One Dollar: Locke, California and the Chinese Farming Experience in the Sacramento Delta (1984).)
- Diary of Wong Yow; payroll statement of Chong Chan; interviews with So Yung Ng. It bears pointing out, however, that the work day was broken by two breaks and a lunch period. The breaks (one in the morning, one in the afternoon) were quite short, usually about fifteen minutes. The lunch period lasted for one hour or an hour and a half (interviews with Alfred Jung, Tom Chow King).
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 99–100; Shepard, Chung Mei; Chan, “Chinese Livelihood”; and interviews with E. Dutra, Jack Chew.
- Interview with Wong Yow.
- “Washing” the trees was a term described by Wong Yow in his diary. It refers to applying insecticide. It was done largely by manually operating a spraying post during this period, and had to be done five to six times a year.
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 99–100; interviews with Howard Ah-Tye, Wong Yow, Ming Ma, So Yung Ng.
- Diary of Wong Yow; interviews with So Yung Ng, Henry Wong, and Chau Chow.
- There was also a Japanese tenant farmer (George Shima) in the Delta who earned the reputation of being a “potato king.”
- London, Valley, 420–425; Wright, “Thomas Foon Chew;” interviews with Lincoln Chan, Him Mark Lai.
- Interviews with Lincoln Chan, Henry Wong, Joy Low.
- The amount of land usually ranged between 150–300 acres, although it could be larger and was at times as small as sixty-acres. Sixty-acre farms were operated by family rather than as a partnership.
- Interviews with So Yung Ng, Joe Young, Henry Wong.
- Interviews with So Yung Ng, Joe Young, Joy Low, Henry Wong, Wong Yow.
- Interviews with So Yung Ng, Henry Wong.
- Interview with Henry Wong.
- Interview with So Yung Ng.
- This law prohibited “aliens ineligible to citizenship”—focus on Japanese—from owning land in California. Since the nineteenth century, Chinese were denied the right to become naturalized citizens (a law not repealed until 1943). Lum Bunn Fong circumvented the law by claiming to have been born in San Francisco. (Loss of records during the 1906 earthquake and fire made such claims hard to disprove.)
- Interviews with Joy Low, Joe Young.
- Interviews with Wong Yow, Henry Wong, Jack Chew, Sun Choi.
- Interviews with Jack Chew, So Yung Ng.
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor”; McWilliams, Factories, 49–80; Fisher, Harvest Labor, 20–41.
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 100; interview with Wong Yow, Bob Suen.
- Fisher, Harvest Labor, 23.
- Interview with Jack Chew.
- Fuller, “Agricultural Labor,” 100; interviews with Jack Chew, Tom Chow King, Hoy Cheung, Chau Chow, Bob Suen.
- Interviews with Henry Wong, Alfred Jung, Sun Choi, Po Jang, Joy Low.
- Shepard, Chung Met; interview with Alfred Jung, Steven Chan, Jong Ho Leong, Joe Chow, Howard Ah-Tye.
- DeWing, “Vorden”; Wright, “Thomas Foon Chew”; interviews with Steven Chan, Jong Ho Leong, Joe Chow.
- Interview with Jong Ho Leong; letter from Sylvia Sun Minnick, 1982.
- Interview with Frank Quan.
- Wright, “Thomas Foon Chew”; letter from Sylvia Sun Minnick; Ma, “Big Business.”
- Interview with Henry Wong; L. Eve Armentrout Ma, “The Role of the Chinese Merchants,” in American Chinatown (San Francisco, 1982).
- Interview with Henry Wong; Mrs. Dale Yee, “Remembering ‘Tai Han’ or ‘Locke’.” East-West (19 February 1975).
- Interviews with Wong Yow, Jack Chew; Ma, “Chinese Merchants”; Chinn, Lai and Choy, History of the Chinese; Arreola, “Locke, California”; Chu, “Chinatown”; Yee, “‘Lockee’.”
- Interviews with Wong Yow, with So Yung Ng; Arreola, “Locke, California”; Ma, “Chinese Merchants.”
- Interviews with Jack Chew, Alfred Jung; Yee, ‘“Lockee”'; Chinn, Lai and Choy, History of the Chinese. Some of those interviewed felt that the segregated grammar schools helped prevent racial violence: “When I was young, I remember some older [Chinese] boys fought with white boys. They didn't fight in school but outside of it. In the Delta there were few actual fights but in San Francisco there were many confrontations…. But in the Delta the clashes were few because in grammar school the two factions were separated [segregated] and didn't come into contact with each other. When the children went home, they were also out of touch with each other….” (Interview with Jack Chew.)
- Chinese tenant farmers were found on the outskirts of most of California's cities in the mid to late 1800s. In the early twentieth century they were still important in the Salinas Valley, the Santa Clara Valley and a few other places.
- McWilliams, Factories, 197; Joseph E. Baker, Past and Present of Alameda County, California (Chicago, 1914).