Program Two - Segment Three: Asians in Agriculture
Asians have farmed in California for more than one hundred years. The Chinese worked in the fields as well as mining gold and building railroads. And when the first wave of anti-Asian sentiments expelled the Chinese, Japanese immigrants took up their places in the fields. They eventually found opportunities to work for themselves, buying up small plots of land to establish family farms. But, Internment, the forced removal of Japanese and Japanese Americans to camps during World War Two, separated many families from their land. Only some of those properties like that of Harold Tamano’s family survived until their owners returned.
Acknowledgements:
Farmers Harold Tamano, Harry Yokoyama, Andy Yokoyama. Professors Wayne Maeda, Isao Fujimoto.
Cheng, Lucie and Edna Bonacich, Eds. Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the US Before World War II. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
Fujimoto, Isao. "The Flower Industry." Nekkei Heritage Foundation, Volume XIII, Number 3, Summer 2001.
Japanese American Resource Center. Regenerations Oral History Project: Rebuilding Families, Communities, and Civil Rights in the Resettlement Era, Volume 4: San Jose. Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 2000.
Mori, Toshio. Unfinished Message: Selected works of Toshio Mori. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2000.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers From a Different Shore. Boston: Back Bay Books, Little Brown Inc., 1989.
Asians have farmed in California for more than one hundred years. The Chinese worked in the fields as well as mining gold and building railroads. And when the first wave of anti-Asian sentiments expelled the Chinese, Japanese immigrants took up their places in the fields. They eventually found opportunities to work for themselves, buying up small plots of land to establish family farms. But, Internment, the forced removal of Japanese and Japanese Americans to camps during World War Two, separated many families from their land. Only some of those properties like that of Harold Tamano’s family survived until their owners returned. 
