Japanese Immigrant Farmers and California Alien Land Laws: A Study of the Walnut Grove Japanese Community

Abstract

dation.2 To support this latter contention, a careful analysis of Japanese immigrant sources recently demonstrated the oppressiveness of the laws from a Japanese immigrant perspective.3 Still, the ques tion of whether the laws adversely affected all Japan ese farming communities in the same way, or whether they had a distinct impact on each, remains open. To answer this question, more studies of spe cific farming communities will have to be under taken, with special attention to local economic conditions that influenced Japanese immigrants. The Walnut Grove Japanese community offers an excellent illustrative example. Japanese immigrant farmers settled in Walnut Grove in the late 1890s, established a unique Japanese-white relationship, and coped with the alien land laws within the con text of the local political economy. Walnut Grove is situated in the Sacramento River Delta. Known as kawashimo, which means down stream in Japanese, this rural community includes the vast acreage of Grand, Andrus, Tyler, Staten, and Ryer Islands. Preceding the influx of Japanese immi grants, Chinese laborers had come to the area in the 1870s to work on the construction of the levees around the inland islands. With the completion of reclamation, the Chinese then entered agriculture as farm laborers and tenant farmers. White landown ers, who controlled the local political economy, relied upon Chinese immigrants to do the back breaking work of reclamation and farming, a rela tionship that set the basic pattern of race and class relations in the Delta.4 When the Japanese arrived in the region, they became a part of this exploitative relationship with white landowners.