Watsonville California UP.
January 23rd, 1930, Salinas Index Journal.
The race riots between whites and Filipinos in this vicinity
today had cost the life of one Filipino.
Fermin Tovera, 22, was found dead in bed
in a bunkhouse on the John Murphy ranch
six miles from here.
A bullet through his heart.
I hate technology.
Most recently, I've been looking at the race
riots in Watsonville in 1930, which in short resulted
in the shooting of lettuce picker Fermin Tovera
by a gang of white residents of the town.
The violence erupted because Filipino laborers regularly
socialized with white women, at taxi dancehalls.
The mobs rioted in January of 1930.
One posse driving four miles east to a Filipino labor
encampment, shooting up a bunkhouse, and killing Tovera.
The incident led to congressional hearings on quote
unquote the Filipino problem.
America wanted the labor, but no families.
Filipinos had no clear racial category
for existing miscegenation laws, and women from the Philippines
were all but excluded from migrating to the US.
The murder was an international issue.
It was so big it led to the Tydings McDuffie
Act, which limited immigration to as few as 50 Filipinos
a year.
Eventually, it led to the independence
of the Philippines.
That is to say Philippine sovereignty was not
granted based on some moral awakening by the US.
But rather because industrial interests
in the West Coast agriculture found Filipinos
more of a social problem than a solution to labor.
Specifically, Philippine independence
became manifest as a virtually direct result
of the murder of Tovera.
The white community in Watsonville and California
had projected their sexual and economic anxieties
onto this 22-year-old worker, and dancer, and dandy.
The killers were convicted, but never jailed.
A few years ago, I'd been deep in an epic study of Philippine
and Filipino American history.
And I didn't know how far it was going to pull me in.
I was often irritable.
Not just cranky, but angry inner storm or something.
Sometimes I would just cry when I was home alone
or shout cruelties at myself.
Other times, I had fits of laughter.
I would burst into dance.
I even got myself a shrink again.
That work is ongoing.
But I started to wonder if all that something was history.
And not just history and the fact or artifact
or encyclopedic record, but in its spirit or more accurately
in its spirits.
This has got to be crazy I thought.
Was there a spirit of history that could materialize?
More specifically, could I in my living time on Earth
access the sound and feeling of people who had lived before me?
And now, I'm learning, after me.
Were they knocking at my various doors?