When you don’t own any land, all you can do or the best you can do is to share crop with a landlord and you pay your rent through the crops that you grow. What I can recall was that the sharecropping was with a Swiss family, a Giatanini family in Salinas. They’re Swiss immigrants, but they controlled some of the land.
Together with about six or seven Issei Japanese, so about nine of them together formed a partnership to go into the farming business to grow and to ship vegetables. My father felt that there was no way that you could prosper at any way or accumulate anything unless you were not only a grower but also a shipper. And so therefore at an early age, that’s why he never finished his education. To grow and ship vegetables.
Date: March 22, 2018
Location: California, US
Interviewer: John Esaki
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
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