"Independent of the unskilled Chinaman": Race, Labor, and Family Farming in California's Santa Clara Valley

CECILIA TSU

This study of boosterism and everyday agricultural labor practices in the Santa Clara Valley during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries reveals how the presence of Chinese immigrants in rural California forced white growers to reconceptualize the cherished family farm ideal in a new racial framework.
IN A THICK, EXTENSIVELY ILLUSTRATED BOOK that combined promotional writings for Santa Clara County with a history of the region and biographies of prominent citizens, editor Horace S. Foote featured a piece on Andrea Malovos, a prosperous Austrian immigrant who owned the Light-house Farm on Alviso Road north of San Jose, where he lived with his wife and nine (eventually ten) children. In this 1888 account, Foote noted that Malovos grew a variety of orchard fruits, grapes, asparagus, hay, and grain on his 286-acre property with the assistance of "from ten to sixty men, as the exigencies of the season require." Foote claimed that Malovos, "a man of intelligence and enterprise," hired "none but white labor," and opposed workers who did not "enrich and build up the country of [their] adoption," presumably those who were not white.1	1
Figure 1. Andrea and Maria Malovos and family at Light-house Farm on Alviso Road, five and a half miles north of San Jose, ca. 1890. Photo courtesy of the California History Center, De Anza College, Cupertino, California.
As Foote and his readers may have been dismayed to discover, Malovos was apparently not so strict about his "white labor only" rule. According to the Santa Clara County recorder's office, in January of 1883, Malovos leased two parcels of land, twenty and twenty-four acres each, to four Chinese growers, Yuk Lun, Peh Yee, Ah Yee, and Ah Jim, to cultivate asparagus and grapes on a sharecropping basis for terms of six and ten years. After Malovos died, his widow Maria continued to lease land to Chinese for asparagus growing under an 1899 sharecropping arrangement with Hi Loy, with net proceeds divided equally between them and expenses for canneries and com-missions shared.2	2
Whether Foote suffered from a case of sloppy fact-checking or knowingly included false information to appeal to would-be settlers, it is clear that inherent in portraying the Santa Clara Valley as an ideal fruit growing region and place of settlement was an insistence on the whiteness of those who worked and lived there. Though white boosters like Foote tried to erase and downplay the significance of the approximately 2,700 Chinese residents of Santa Clara County from promotional tracts, Chinese immigrant farmers and field hands, who made up 7 percent of the county's population in the 1880s and 1890s, unquestionably shaped the ways in which white residents and growers defined themselves and their agricultural pursuits.3 The disjuncture between Foote's assertion that only whites operated a flourishing Santa Clara Valley farm and the reality of the Malovos family's dependence on Chinese tenant farmers and laborers reveals the contest over constructing and reconstructing racial ideology in California agriculture.	. . .