How Farmworkers Fought for Their Rights in OC's Last Orange Groves
The Pressel Orchard is one of the last remaining orange groves in Anaheim, and also where the 1936 Citrus War began, a little-remembered, crucial moment in Orange County's history.
On June 11, 1936, about 2,500 Mexican naranjeros representing more than half of Orange County's citrus-picking force dropped their clippers, bags and ladders to demand higher wages, better working conditions and the right to unionize. Wages had recently dropped from $4 to $3 a day. The labor was already so difficult that an orange picker could be identified by his single drooping shoulder, deeply scarred from the strap of the bag he was required to fill with fifty pounds of oranges while perched on a precarious ladder.
In 1936, four days into the strike, at the break of dawn, about two hundred Mexican women gathered here on strike. California's citrus industry at the time was organized by gender as well as race: Mexican American men generally picked oranges in the fields while Mexican American women sorted them in the packinghouses. In 1936, all went on strike together.
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Twenty Anaheim police officers confronted the women here, but they refused to disperse. At some point, there was an altercation and 29-year-old Placentia resident Virginia Torres bit the arm of Anaheim police officer Roger Sherman. Police arrested Torres along with 30-year-old Epifania Marquez, who had tried to yank a strikebreaker from a truck by grabbing onto his suspenders. The Santa Ana Register described the two hundred Mexican women who participated in this labor action as "Amazons with fire of battle in their eyes." Torres and Marquez received jail sentences of sixty and thirty days, respectively, while Orange County responded with organized wrath.
Growers enlisted the local chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion to guard fields. They evicted families of strikers from their company-owned houses. The English-language press became a bulletin board for the growers. Orange County sheriff Logan Jackson deputized citrus orchard guards and provided them with steel helmets, shotguns and ax handles, instructing them to "shoot to kill."
The new deputies arrested strikers en masse, arraigning more than 250. When that didn't stop the strike, they reported workers to federal immigration authorities. When that didn't work, out came the guns and clubs. Mobs of citrus farmers and their supporters attacked under cover of darkness. After a month of striking, the workers got a nominal raise but no union — and created a fear of radicalized Mexicans that Orange County has never been able to shake off.
Legendary progressive journalist Carey McWilliams described Orange County's response to the strike as "one of the toughest exhibitions of 'vigilantism' that California has witnessed in many a day . . . a terroristic campaign of unparalleled ugliness" and "fascism in practice." McWilliams was "astonish[ed] in discovering how quickly social power could crystallize into an expression of arrogant brutality in these lovely, seemingly placid, outwardly Christian communities."
