Regional History Project Oral Histories

José Galvan Amaro, a Mexican-American fieldworker in Watsonville, California, was interviewed in June 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project, as part of a series on local agricultural and ethnic history. This oral history, conducted in Spanish on June 2 and June 6, 1977 at Amaro's home in Watsonville, California, focuses on Amaro's extensive experience as a laborer in California from the 1920s to the 1970s. The interview was conducted in Spanish and is provided here both as a verbatim transcript in Spanish and in English translation.

José Galvan Amaro, a Mexican-American fieldworker in Watsonville, California, was interviewed in June 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project, as part of a series on local agricultural and ethnic history. This oral history, conducted in Spanish on June 2 and June 6, 1977 at Amaro's home in Watsonville, California, focuses on Amaro's extensive experience as a laborer in California from the 1920s to the 1970s. The interview was conducted in Spanish and is provided here both as a verbatim transcript in Spanish and in English translation.

Melendy served as a Santa Cruz County Farm Advisor with the Agricultural Extension Service for thirty years, including ten as County Director of the Agricultural Extension Service, an administrative position. His duties also encompassed being a youth or 4-H advisor and a poultry/livestock/field crops advisor.

In this oral history conducted in 1977, John Melendy discusses changes in agriculture in Santa Cruz County from 1940s through the 1970s-- how rising land prices affected the types of crops grown, the effects of mechanization, farm size, pest control and controversies over pesticide use that were only beginning to come to light at that time. A substantial portion of the interview is devoted to a detailed discussion of the rise and fall of the poultry industry in the Live Oak area.

In addition to providing a history of agriculture in Santa Cruz County, Melendy's narrative contributes to the institutional history of Agricultural Extension Service itself, particularly the position of farm advisor. In 1975 the Extension Service (by then called Cooperative Extension) merged with the Agricultural Experiment Station and became the Division of Agricultural and Natural Resources, which also oversees the University's Natural Reserve System.

While Melendy's oral history is useful for its detailed descriptions of the methods and practices of farming in the mid-twentieth century on the Central Coast of California, it also documents the tremendous changes that swept Santa Cruz County from 1946 to 1976, as it transitioned from a largely rural, to the urban or suburban landscape it is today.

John Melendy retired in December 1976, and at the time of this oral history interview in 1977 was enjoying operating a Christmas tree farm on San Miguel Canyon Rd. Oral historian Meri Knaster conducted three interviews with him at his home in Soquel, California as part of the Regional History Project's Agricultural History series. Melendy was fifty-six years old at the time.

Porter Chaffee's oral history offers valuable primary source documentation on the labor struggles of the 1930s, particularly from the point of view of a Communist labor activist and WPA writer. This interview is part of the Regional History Project's Agricultural History Series conducted in 1977.

Porter Myron Chaffee was born on November 26, 1900 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. He was one of six children. His father, Grant Chaffee, was a miner and also a cook in mining camps in places such as the Anaconda copper mines. As a man with a strong working class consciousness, Grant Chaffee grew impassioned about the Knights of Labor and later the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Eventually he married and moved to Oakland, California, where he worked in lumber yards. A few years later he inherited a substantial amount of money from his father, the elder Porter Myron Chaffee (for whom the narrator of this oral history is named), who had owned substantial amounts of property in Oakland. This inheritance thrust Porter's father out of the working class and into a crisis of conscience and ideals. He still identified as working class, but his wife (Porter's mother) cherished middle class aspirations. This family conflict eventually led to the family's purchase in 1909 of a ranch in Napa County on Monticello Road, where they lived for a few years. But soon they returned to Oakland, where Porter finished grammar school and then attended Oakland Technical High School.

Instead of finishing high school, the restless Chaffee dropped out and joined the Merchant Marines, and spent the next three years at sea. It was there that Chaffee developed a respect for the intelligence of working class people and was exposed to Communist ideas. In 1921 Chaffee returned to California, where he harvested prunes and grapes at the Admiral Miller Ranch in Napa County. There he suffered a shoulder injury, developed tuberculosis, and almost died. In search of treatment, Chaffee, who then weighed and alarming 97 pounds, took a bus to Oakland, where he sought care from a chiropractor who may have been engaged in medical quackery. He spent that time fraternizing with Yugoslavian and Russian immigrant patients whose radical ideals further stimulated his interest in the Communist movement.

After his recovery from TB, Chaffee joined the Communist youth group Friends of the Soviet Union. In 1925 he moved to Santa Cruz with his family, where he attended Santa Cruz High School at age twenty-five. There he was relentlessly teased for his hump (a result of the TB) and after a few months he walked out of Santa Cruz High, and left Santa Cruz for what he called "the hobo part of [his] life", journeying across the United States and eventually ending up in New York City in 1926, where he wrote for the leftist The New Masses magazine. He wrote an unpublished memoir about this period entitled "The Journal of a Hungry Man", which is on deposit together with Chaffee's other papers at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

Unable to work because of his fragile health, Chaffee returned to Santa Cruz County, where his parents provided him with minimal support. There he continued to be active on the Left, and founded a branch of the Communist Party in Santa Cruz in 1929. He shares his recollections of some of the socialists in Santa Cruz County, many of whom were of German heritage. He recalls organizing a hunger march up Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, past the Santa Cruz County Court House. He also describes fascist reprisals against Santa Cruz socialists.

In 1933, Chaffee returned to Oakland, where he became involved in organizing for the Unemployed Councils. During this period he forged friendships with radical luminaries such as the muckraking journalist and editor, Lincoln Steffens, and the writer Kenneth Rexroth.

It was at this time that Chaffee became an organizer for the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), whose offices were headquartered at 81 Post Street in San Jose, California. The CAWIU was a project of the Trade Union Unity League of the Communist Party (TUUL).

After a slow start, the CAWIU organized several successful strikes, including a strike in the peach orchards at Tagus Ranch near Tulare, California, which resulted in a wage increase for workers. The chief organizer was Pat Chambers. Chaffee worked closely with Chambers and discusses his recollections of him. He also talks about Sam Darcy, who was the California District Organizer for the Communist Party in the early 1930s, and organizer and speaker Caroline Decker [Gladstein], who served as secretary of the CAWIU during that period. Chaffee helped to organize a strike among the apple pickers of Watsonville in 1931 and 1932, and also founded a unit of the Communist Party in Watsonville at that time.

In 1936 Chaffee decided to leave the Communist Party because he was struggling economically. He went on to write a history of the CAWIU for the Oakland office of the Federal Writers Project. According to Anne Loftis, Chaffee's history was never authorized by the WPA or published. It is preserved in the Bancroft Library and on microfiche. This oral history does not cover Chaffee's years with the WPA, but instead focuses on the rich details of his colorful life and his years with the CAWIU.

This oral history, conducted with Mary Ann Borina Radovich on June 7 and June 22, 1977, focuses on Radovich's extensive experience as an apple farmer in Watsonville, California from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is also a significant contribution to the ethnic history of the Croatian community in the Pajaro Valley of California.

In this oral history Radovich discusses her family's history and their emigration to the United States. She describes the early apple industry in Watsonville, and the changes that took place over the years in terms of labor, mechanization, irrigation, crop varieties, pest control, harvesting, and land use. Her detailed and reflective narration makes this oral history a singular contribution to the agricultural history of Central California.

Radovich owned Borina Orchards from the 1940s through the time of this interview in 1977, and beyond. For many of those years her husband, Rafael Radovich, was her business partner, and in fact beginning in 1957 he was primarily responsible for the apple business. They had no children. In 1977 the orchard was about one hundred acres, mostly planted in dwarf apple trees. They grew Pippin and Delicious apples.

Alvin C. Richardson was born on Beach Road in Watsonville, California on October 5, 1908. His grandfather had arrived in the Pajaro Valley in 1858, where he began the family farm on Beach Road. This is the place where Richardson's father was born. In the late 19th century the family raised potatoes on Beach Road. In 1890 Richardson's grandfather began to grow apples on a hundred-acre ranch along Green Valley Road. In the 1920s Richardson's father raised sweet peas on the Beach Road property, and Alvin remembered fondly the decorative tubs of sweet peas that his father provided him with on his wedding day in 1929.

Richardson grew up in Watsonville, attended Watsonville High School, and spent his entire life in the Pajaro Valley. At the time of this interview in 1977 he had lived at his farm on Buena Vista Drive since 1934. Except for a brief stint at Permanente in Moss Landing during World War II, Richardson completely devoted himself to farming. He primarily raised bush berries.

In this oral history conducted on May 6, 1977 at Richardson's home on Buena Vista Drive, he discusses in detail varieties of berries grown throughout the years, the labor and capital requirements of farming, and the challenges of marketing and distribution. Finally his older sister, Ruth Johnson, joined the interview to share her remarkable early recollections of the family farm, as well as describe some of the diaries and ledgers still in the family's possession.

Frank Barba, a Filipino resident of Aromas, California, was interviewed in 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project, as part of a series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic history.

Frank Barba was born in 1898 in San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte, northwest of Manila, on the largest of the Philippine islands. His family owned some land on which rice was cultivated by sharecroppers; another portion was reserved for home use. Barba received a high school education during the period when the Philippines were a U.S. possession. He learned English and some American history in a school with an American principal.Barba came to California in 1924 via a short stay in Hawaii, where he joined his aunt and uncle working in the sugar cane fields. After working briefly as a busboy in San Francisco, and as a night clerk in a Stockton hotel, Barba arrived in Watsonville in 1927 to take over the management of a Filipino labor camp that had already been established by his aunt Apolonia Dangzalan. Dangzalan's oral history is also published by the Regional History Project as part of this Agricultural History Project series.

Barba worked as a labor contractor from 1927, at first independently, and then for the Birbeck Company of Aromas, which grew lettuce, string beans, broccoli, and sugar beets. When the company went out of business in 1967, Barba purchased from them the property he lived on, the original site of the labor camp. At the time of this interview in 1977 Barba was 78 years old, and semi-retired, supervising school children in the fields for various growers in the area.

Apolonia Dangzalan, a Filipino resident of Watsonville, California, was interviewed on April 27, 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project, as part of a series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic history. Dangzalan was born in February 1896 in San Nicolas, Ilocos Sur, northwest of Manila, on the largest of the Philippine islands. Her family owned some land on which rice and corn was cultivated by sharecroppers. Her uncle was the president of San Nicholas. Dangzalan attended school for five years but was unable to continue due to illness. Her father died when she was five years old and her mother died when she was seventeen. In 1923, at age 27, she married. A year later she and her husband immigrated to Oahu, Hawaii. Her husband worked in the sugar cane fields and Dangzalan began a small business in her house sewing clothes for the Filipino community. This was the first of many small businesses she would run throughout her long life. In 1925 she and her husband moved to San Francisco, and then to Stockton, California, where her husband worked as a laborer in the asparagus fields.

Dissatisfied with her marriage, in 1926 Dangzalan divorced her husband and moved to Marysville, California, where she bought and managed a pool hall and restaurant frequented by Filipinos, Mexicans and Anglo Americans. Although she enjoyed this work, business was not too good. She heard that Watsonville and Salinas were much better places to be in business because they attracted a large Filipino community that came to work in the fruit orchards. So after five months in Marysville, Dangzalan joined her nephew, Frank Barba, in Watsonville, California. (Frank Barba is also the subject of an oral history published by the Regional History Project.) Dangzalan opened a boarding house for Filipino agricultural workers on Bridge Street in Watsonville, California, where she became known as "Mama" Dangzalan. After a few years, her nephew, Frank Barba, took over the Watsonville boarding house and Dangzalan opened another boarding house on Salinas Road in 1930. Most of the workers she housed were working for the Gary Company, and Dangzalan also served as a labor contractor, hiring men to work in the company's fields. Dangzalan was one of very few women engaged in labor contracting.

Dangzalan engaged in diverse business activities besides labor contracting. She also opened a liquor store, dancing club, and pool hall on Main Street in Watsonville in 1936. During World War II she owned a house of prostitution on Union Street in Watsonville. She hired an American woman to manage it for her.

In 1950 Dangzalan stopped working as a labor contractor and went into business for herself as a farmer, primarily growing strawberries. After four years of this she was tired. In 1952 Dangzalan was operated on for kidney cancer. She withdrew from all of her businesses except for the International Groceries and Liquors store on lower Main Street, which she was still running at the time of this oral history interview in 1977. At age 81 Dangzalan was still working in the liquor store until 2:30 in the morning. In her field notes, interviewer Meri Knaster described Dangzalan as "a very spry and active eighty-one year old". Dangzalan continued to operate the liquor store until 1982. She died in 1992, at the age of 96.

In 1977 the Regional History Project interviewed Ray L. Travers, a native of Watsonville, California, and a major figure in Pajaro Valley agriculture, as part of its series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic history.

Travers was born in 1921 into the thriving community of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, who began settling in the valley during the 1870s. His paternal grandparents arrived in Boston about 1875, where they met and married. They traveled by train across the country and settled in Green Valley in Santa Cruz County in 1876, where a distant relative lived. They bought some land, planted an apple orchard, and eventually farmed 200 acres while raising a family of 13 children. Travers's maternal grandfather was a whaler and his grandmother a Monterey native.

Travers's recollections begin with a description of his family's early history in the Pajaro Valley during the 1870s. He gives the details of family farming practiced by his grandfather's generation when the whole family worked side-by-side in the orchards. He discusses the many apple varieties which were then grown and how they changed over the years according to the dictates of the market. He also speaks about the Portuguese community's food, customs, and festivals in the valley and throughout the state.

Travers's father was an apple grower, and one of the first farmers in the valley to grow lettuce in the 1920s. In 1939 he became partners with the Sakata family and established an apple packing shed. When a fire destroyed the shed he sold out to Sakata, who continued growing lettuce. After World War II, he rebuilt the storage plant and farmed 27 separate parcels of land, including 130 acres of apple orchards. Travers describes his father's farming practices, and the use of pesticides, which included lead, sulphur and oil sprayed with hand guns. He also discusses the various ethnic groups who have worked in valley agriculture during the twentieth century. After Travers's father and mother died he continued apple orchard farming, eventually farming 250 acres.

In his narration he describes “old style” apple storage when the fruit was packed in wooden crates and stored in the shade in redwood groves. This practice was replaced in the 1930s when orchardists began storing apples in cold packing sheds. During this period, researchers at UC Davis and elsewhere attempted to find ways to maintain the quality of the apples in storage over an extended period. Experiments focused on temperature control and the sealing of fruit in poly liners. In 1935 several Watsonville growers stored 20,000 boxes of Newtown Pippins in poly liners at forty degrees but this commercial test failed to prevent spoilage.

In 1956 Ray Travers was the first apple grower on the West Coast to introduce controlled atmosphere storage for apples, a technique originally pioneered in England. This was a sophisticated, scientifically-based development in preserving apples, which extended their storage life by four to six months beyond what had been possible in cold storage and eliminated browning and rotting.

The Agricultural Research Department of the Gerber Products Company, purveyor of baby food, wanted to retain the peak quality of apples during a long period of processing and was interested in finding a storage method which would achieve this. The company worked with Travers and in 1956 they stored 18,000 boxes of Newtown Pippins in a gas-tight room in Travers's Watsonville cold storage house. This new technique required having a low temperature in the storage room, and maintaining a low oxygen and high carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. As they experimented with this new kind of commercial storage, they established the optimum temperatures and gas concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide, which eliminated internal flesh browning, and retained the nutritional value of the apples over an extended period. Subsequently, this technique has become standard in the industry.

Travers's narration also includes his overview of apple farming, the introduction of dwarf apple tree varieties, and the vicissitudes and economics of farming in the 1970s-- the need for substantial capital investment, the high price of land, and the nature of the highly competitive agricultural market. His views on the growing suburbanization of the Pajaro Valley are prescient in describing the real estate trends in California where agricultural lands are at risk, being bought up for housing developments.

Grace Palacio Arceneaux, a Mexican-American resident of Watsonville, California, was interviewed in 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project, as part of a series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic history.

Arceneaux was born in San Martin de Bolaños, Jalisco, Mexico, in March 1920. She came with her family to San Juan Bautista, California, in 1923 during the havoc of the Mexican Revolution. The family lived on a little ranch and eked out a living farming and doing field work. Her mother died in childbirth when she was a young girl, and shortly thereafter her father died, leaving Arceneaux to care for her nine brothers and sisters. As she said, she always had a child to carry on her hip, wherever she went.

Not only did her parents not speak English, they did not want it spoken in the house; Arceneaux and her siblings translated for their parents, for their father's business deals and jobs. She attended school through the fifth grade and returned to school many years later, when she was in her forties, to obtain her high school diploma at Watsonville night school, and earned a degree at Cabrillo College. Knaster wrote in her notes of these interviews: “All those years of no schooling are not manifested in either her manner of speaking or vocabulary-- she's a very articulate woman.”

After her father died, Arceneaux hired out her family as a unit, working in the fields around San Juan Bautista whenever possible, and doing whatever else was available, keeping the county from separating her siblings and putting them in foster homes. Because of serious, recurring bouts of tuberculosis, she spent several years in sanitariums and was no longer able to do fieldwork due to the permanent damage to her health.

Her narrative is rich in recollections of local history, of the Mexican and Filipino communities and their customs and inter-relationships. She was married at one time to a Filipino farmworker and so became a member of that community, as well. She also discusses the life of field workers, harvesting garlic and various other crops, and the role of labor contractors in agriculture. The period she spent among Filipinos is rich with details about a side of Watsonville life that is not well documented-- Chinatown, gambling, and prostitution.

Her spirit of grit and determination shines through her descriptions of chronic hard times and poverty as she worked unremittingly to raise her siblings and to make a life for herself. Her life story shows how she made the transition from illegal immigrant farmworker to middle-class social activist.

She speaks movingly of her marriages, work life, her precarious financial situation, and the importance of her Catholicism, as she her evolved from an unquestioning Catholic into her own self-defined understanding of her religion as it embraced activism and equality.

As a mature woman she returned to school, and discovered the world of books and ideas, and gained confidence in her abilities to speak and think critically about the condition of her community, and its political and cultural marginalization. This in turn led to her involvement in community issues during which she became one of the first Mexican-American women in the Pajaro Valley to fight for bilingual education, outreach services for poor women, victims of domestic violence, and those seeking to gain educations for themselves.

Knaster noted many small, telling details of Arceneaux's life when she interviewed her in her home in Watsonville. She wrote: "there is a nice back yard, where she hung laundry on her clothesline after one interview. We met in the kitchen, a remodeled expanded, large room, with a view of the yard through sliding glass doors, a room full of light, spacious. Grace always kept her hands busy-- she's one of those women whose work is never done because she does so much and is so industrious, never wasting a moment. She would wash and dry the dishes, pair socks that she had removed from the dryer or fold cloth napkins. Another time she worked on a quilt she had gotten from someone who had died. It was too big for their bed so she removed the trim and sewed as we talked."

Knaster noted that in the background of the tape recordings you can often hear a tea kettle whistling, or water running as she washes dishes, as Grace's voice moves back and forth according to the activity she is engaged in. Sometimes she would get up from the kitchen table to demonstrate something-- how she used to work in the garlic fields, or how she would carry a little brother or sister on her hip. She would unabashedly let tears flow when relating especially emotional episodes in her life, lifting up her glasses as she wiped away the tears.

Knaster characterized Arceneaux as a wonderfully warm, sharing, open person, and extremely informative as well. Despite the hardships in her life, her narration is not bitter or resentful. As her conversation reveals, she has a realistic understanding of ethnic and gender discrimination as it is manifest in the Mexican, Anglo, and Filipino communities, having experienced them herself as a single woman, a Mexican, and later as the wife of a Filipino with a Filipino/Mexican child. Her observations of ethnic and class distinctions in the agricultural communities of San Juan Bautista and Watsonville are a real contribution to the social history of this region.