<Begin Segment 15>

SY: And can you sort of give us an idea of how, percentage wise, like how many were Japanese American and how...

NG: Okay, so all the laborers, 'cause they, at the beginning there was, like, sugar beets, but at the peak, when I think about it, it's, the main crops were potatoes, asparagus. Those were the two main. And also too, whenever we finished work we all -- the kids used to work, after you got to be a certain age -- we would go to the other islands to do some other work, but mostly potatoes and asparagus, and then we planted celery. I used to like that. You sit on this little tractor thing and this thing would come rotate, and you just put the little seedlings in there and it would plant. That was kind of neat. But so there were Mexican, there were illegals, 'cause every once in a while there'll be a raid and they would come and they'd be hiding in the ditches and everything.

SY: Really? Wow.

NG: And then they would have, they would, they would have women come for the men every so often, to, for these...

SY: Bachelors.

NG: For the men.

SY: So they never, but they never had families that you know of?

NG: No, no families. And the only, there was one Mexican mother and daughter who was a classmate. Never, I don't know who her father was. Probably -- but she worked, we knew her. She was our friend. And then there was one Mexican American man who was sort of like a foreman, and he was our next closest neighbor. He was maybe a mile or two miles away. And he had a Caucasian wife, really pretty, and we thought, we liked her 'cause she was different. But other than that there was, that's it. And then because it was seasonal, like asparagus season, they would cut, if the price was not good then they would not be cutting. If the price, market price was high it would be, it's a twenty-four hour job, and my mom, working in the warehouse, would just come home for a couple hours and go back. I mean, it was, they just needed to get out. And that wasn't, there weren't enough workers, so they would get women from the city somewhere. They did this kind of work. All the cutters were Filipino men that did the asparagus, and they would come and they didn't live there. They just came in during that season. So of course, as a kid you see all of this goings on, sexual goings on with all these workers... [laughs] 'cause it's all seasonal, it's just gonna be, just for that time they all had families, I'm sure.

SY: They, and there were women that came in as well as men who came in during the seasonal?

NG: Yeah. I guess they, yeah, I guess that was their life.

SY: So the ones that you remember, the Mexican American, Mexican, well, they were the illegal ones, were they living there year round?

NG: Yeah, they were living in the bunkhouses and the big camps.

SY: Year round, but then they'd bring in seasonal workers from time to time.

NG: Right. They definitely brought in for the asparagus. And they were not, they were, to me, more skilled. I mean, they knew what they were doing.

SY: So what kind of interaction was there between the Mexican American laborers and then these Japanese American families? I assume, how many Japanese American families were there, do you think?

NG: Gee, I don't know. At the beginning there seemed to be a lot. Like, I don't... in fact, 'cause yeah, maybe each camp would have like ten families. Like ours was just us.

SY: There were bigger camps. You were --

NG: Yeah, but the camps, I would, three main camps, I would say those three camps at the outset maybe had like ten families. But I know at the end most, many moved out very quickly.

SY: So you were one of the ones that stayed there longest, longer than the others.

NG: Right.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.