Community memories of the 1930 anti-Filipino race riots differ from the story that Evening Pajaronian tells. While Evening Pajaronian focuses heavily on creating a heroic storyline for the police officers, and absolving one for Tobera’s murders, parts of the community in the Pajaro Valley remember police officers as being unhelpful and sometimes even perpetrators of racism. The short documentary Dollar a Day Ten Cents a Dance, directed by Geoffrey Dunn and Mark Schwartz (1984), follows the story of Filipino laborers who settled along the Pacific coast and their experiences living and working in the U.S.. This section examines behind-the-scenes footage of interviews conducted by the documentarians with Filipinos who lived in Watsonville during the riots.
This is a clip from behind the scenes footage of Dollar a Day, 10 Cents a Dance. It is an interview with Filipino farm worker Jacinto Sequig, who talks about police stopping the transit of weapons to Watsonville to aid Filipinos against rioters.
[“And, um, what the Filipinos did was they bought some guns and got some mobile trucks to transport them to Watsonville. But, while they’re on their way to Watsonville, the highway patrol sheriff deputies stop there right on the highways.”]
In this clip, Jacinto Sequig, talks about how Filipinos had put weapons on trucks and transported them to Watsonville so that the Filipino community in Watsonville could be better armed to defend themselves against rioters. He recounts, however, how the trucks were stopped on the highway by highway patrol. According to this person, the police acted as a hindrance rather than an aid to the Filipinos, stopping any supplies that would help Filipinos defend themselves against mob violence. While there is no way to definitively know the motives of the police, blocking weapons to aid Filipinos hindered their ability to defend themselves against mob violence. This clip also highlights actions taken by the Filipino community to fight against rioters, a history that is missing from Evening Pajaronian. This showed the lack of support from law enforcement and contradicts the narrative that Evening Pajaronian created in their reporting of the events.
This is a clip from behind the scenes footage of Dollar a Day, 10 Cents a Dance. In the clip, Anna Agbalay and her daughter speak about discrimination they faced by police.
[“In Watsonville. Watsonville gave more difficulty if they would stop them on, you know, a routine, you know, like speeding violation. They would imagine that he, he was taking her up and being he was a pimp and she was, he was prostituting her, you know, simply because she was white and he was dark. They accused him of that?”]
Another clip from the b-roll footage of Dollar a Day, 10 Cents a Dance, shows Anna Agbalay, a white woman who was married to a Filipino man, and her daughter. In this clip, her daughter recounts a story of her mother and father being stopped by Watsonville police. This clip, while not connected to the race riots, shows how the police could act as perpetrators of racism against Filipinos, reinforcing salacious fears of Filipinos paying for white women at dance halls. This clip indicates how ingrained these fears were in the Pajaro Valley, as police could not believe that a white woman was willing to be with a Filipino man out of her own free will.
The Palm Beach Dance Hall, owned by Edward and Charles Locke-Paddon, was a primary site of racial violence during the race riots. As discussed in the previous section, the Evening Pajaronian recounts that police arrived to quell rioters, but the memories of the owners of the dance hall who were there during the mob attack differ greatly from this narrative. In an oral history interview with Kenneth Lock-Paddon, son of Charles, Kenneth recounts memories relayed to him around the riots. According to Kenneth, police officers did not arrive to disperse the mob. Instead, his father and uncle armed themselves with shotguns and Filipino residents with axe handles and had to fend off the mob.
This is an oral history clip of Kenneth Locke-Paddon in which he shares how his father and uncle, owners of the Palm Beach Dance Hall, dealt with mob violence directed at the establishment during the race riots.
[He said that Watsonville, you know, the police. They wouldn’t come out because there were too many people. And so Watsonville called Santa Clara for reinforcements. And so—this is the story I heard— is that they came as far as Hecker Pass, and they could look down and see this torchlight parade from there and they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t come. And I don’t know if it was— what you call it? Anyway, it was out of their territory— jurisdiction. But they, they stopped up there. They were afraid to come. And so he didn’t have any help. It’s just him and his uncle—him and my uncle and, and the Filipinos, you know.]
Published on February 8 in Evening Pajaronian, this is an opinion piece, concerning the violence perpetrated against Filipinos in Watsonville. [click here to view enlarged version]
While Evening Pajaronian created a narrative around the police as a helpful and supportive group to the Filipinos, public opinion did not always share these sentiments. In a letter from a reader and sent to the paper, published on February 8, 1930, a white farm owner discusses the lack of police authority during the riots, admonishing, “We blame your police force for not having squelched these riots the first night! A little firmness on the part of your officers, a few of the leading rioters thrown into jail for say, twenty-four hours for cooling off, would have stopped all that foolishness, saved much fright to timid people, and would have prevented the cowardly murder of that sleeping Filipino.” The frustration with the lack of police control over rioters is reiterated multiple times throughout this opinion piece. However, it is important not to take these words at face value and instead consider the interests of the farm owner, who employed Filipino labor and had land and product he didn’t want destroyed by mobs. While he was critical of police involvement, or lack thereof, during the riots, he still perpetuated prevailing racial stereotypes and viewed Filipinos as passive victims.
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