In 1887, Henry, James, Benjamin, and Robert Oxnard sold their Brooklyn sugar refinery and moved to California to capitalize on the growing agricultural economy of the late nineteenth century.
The WACC regularly refused to pay laborers in cash and instead compensated them with credit for company stores which often sold goods at unreasonably high prices.
As a result, a large group of Japanese farmworkers and labor contractors organized a meeting at the beginning of February 1903 where they discussed their outrage at the working conditions and low wages under the WACC.
[4] Overcoming obvious language barriers between the two constituent groups, they immediately elected Kosaburo Baba (president), Y. Yamaguchi (secretary of the Japanese branch), and J.M.
The strike came at a serendipitously precarious time in the sugar beet season, the staple crop of Oxnard Plain agriculture, since the labor-intensive and yield-defining work of thinning the seedlings needed to be done within the scope of a few weeks.
By refusing to work through the WACC during the thinning of sugar beet crops, the JMLA challenged the backbone of financial operations in the Oxnard Plain.
Outside of their own membership and other local Mexican and Japanese residents, the JMLA found little support from the white community in Oxnard outside of a few opportunistic merchants who saw the strike as a chance to disrupt WACC operations.
[4] Despite the outcome of the coroner's inquest, the WACC continued their striking efforts, bringing organized laborers from outside of town as well as intercepting potential strikebreakers.
The Ventura Free Press reported on an incident in which members of the JMLA confronted a group of strikebreakers headed to a local farm and successfully convinced them to join the union's cause.
With the WACC as their common enemy, Japanese and Mexican farmworkers recognized their primary struggle as an issue of class conflict.
[5] The racial dimensions of the JMLA victory against the WACC brought several issues to the attention of the mainstream American labor movement which traditionally refused to integrate minorities and agricultural workers into unions.