Terminal Island: The Women Who Built the Tuna Canneries, and the Three Hammers That Took Them Out

The Star-Kist Main Plant still stands on Terminal Island, in the Port of Los Angeles, as of this writing. The building is empty. In 2021 the Harbor Department approved its demolition. In 2022 the wrecking ball was held off. Walk past it and you are walking past a factory that at its height, according to Random Lengths News, employed as many as 10,000 workers of all nationalities across the run of its life.

That is the closing frame. Start here instead.

Fish Harbor, 1920s: a company town inside a harbor

Terminal Island is a man-made island in Los Angeles Harbor. By the 1920s its eastern end, Fish Harbor, was a fully built industrial village. The first cannery, the California Fish Company, had opened on the island in 1893 under Albert Halfhill, initially canning sardines. In 1903 Halfhill worked out how to can albacore commercially and the tuna industry on the Pacific coast was born. Van Camp Seafood, later the owner of the Chicken of the Sea label, arrived in 1914. French Sardine Company, founded in 1917 or 1918 by a Yugoslav immigrant fisherman named Martin J. Bogdanovich, later became StarKist.

By the mid-1920s Fish Harbor ran on roughly 1,800 cannery workers, most of them women, and 4,800 fishermen. The fishermen were largely Japanese, from Wakayama Prefecture. They were the ones who had taught commercial tuna fishing to the rest of the Pacific coast. Pacific Fisherman magazine, the industry's own trade press, wrote in 1917 that "the Japanese taught the Americans and all the others how to catch tuna in commercial quantities."

By the early 1940s nearly 3,000 Japanese and Japanese-American residents lived on the island. They had built their own commercial strip on Tuna Street, their own Buddhist temples and Baptist church, a Shinto shrine, a judo hall, and a public elementary school. The children spoke a hybrid dialect that mixed the Wakayama fishing slang of their fathers with the English and Spanish of the harbor. Fish Harbor was not a camp. It was a town. The women of that town worked under contracts with Van Camp, French Sardine, White Star, California Fish, and the rest. Their labor was the condition that made everything their husbands and sons did at sea into a business.

February 1942: forty-eight hours

The FBI began arresting Issei fishermen and community leaders the night of December 7, 1941, the hours after Pearl Harbor, on the grounds that their knowledge of the California coastline constituted a security risk. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. The government gave Terminal Island's Japanese residents, alone among West Coast Japanese-American communities, 48 hours to leave. The government then sent most of them to the Manzanar concentration camp in the Owens Valley.

After the evacuation, the Navy demolished the village. The houses went. Tuna Street went. The Shinto shrine went. Terminal Island is distinct among West Coast Japanese-American communities in that its physical fabric was erased, not just its population. A visitor today finds a monument and very little else.

The canneries did not close. The fleet did not stop. What happened next is a story the American tuna industry has never told straight: a workforce was removed and replaced. Van Camp, French Sardine, and the other operators kept canning. The Long Beach Post, reviewing the history of the harbor, notes that "Slav, Filipino and Mexican communities" took over the lines, working alongside Long Beach residents who had not previously been in the cannery workforce. The state took the first workforce away. The companies sorted the replacements themselves.

This is the first hammer. Federal order removed roughly 3,000 people from their homes, and the same companies that had contracted their labor for thirty years kept canning without a visible break in production. That is what happened.

1939, before the hammer: what Mexican women had already proved

While the Japanese fishing village was being built on Terminal Island, a separate cannery-labor movement was rising across Southern California, mostly Mexican women, mostly in the plants inland from the harbor. This is the movement that would, after 1942, supply the replacement workforce on Terminal Island. Understand it first.

The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, UCAPAWA, was founded at a Denver convention in July 1937 as a CIO international union, with Donald Henderson as its first president. Within months it had more than 120,000 workers in 300 locals. Women were roughly half the membership. That was not accidental. The cannery and packing industries in the West ran on women's labor, and UCAPAWA, unlike older craft unions, organized the line as it actually was.

In August 1939, roughly 430 workers walked out at the California Sanitary Canning Company, Cal San, in Los Angeles. The strikers were overwhelmingly Mexican-American women. Dorothy Ray Healey, a UCAPAWA vice president, did the lead organizing. Luisa Moreno, the Guatemalan-born labor organizer who had been born Blanca Rosa López Rodríguez in 1906, came in to reinforce. The strikers picketed the Cal San plant, they picketed the grocery stores carrying Cal San cans, and they picketed the private homes of the Shapiro brothers who owned the plant. Children of the strikers carried signs. One read "I'm underfed because Mama is underpaid." The Shapiros settled. Cal San's UCAPAWA Local 75 became the union's second-largest local in the country.

In 1941 UCAPAWA elected Luisa Moreno its national vice president. She was the first Latina elected to high national office in an American trade union. She had already spent a decade organizing garment workers in New York, tobacco workers in Florida, pecan shellers in San Antonio, and cannery workers in Southern California. Vicki Ruiz's Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, the foundational monograph on the subject, names Moreno as the central figure in the transformation of food-processing organizing in California in the 1930s and 1940s.

Cal San is the pride. Name Healey. Name Moreno. Name Local 75. These women won.

The second hammer: 1950 and the purge

UCAPAWA renamed itself FTA, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers, in 1944. In 1949 and 1950 the CIO expelled eleven left-led unions over alleged Communist domination, including FTA. FTA was gone. The cannery contracts it held did not go to the workers. They went to other unions that had not built them and, over the next two decades, would not fight for them the way FTA had.

Moreno herself was driven out of the country. In 1950 she accepted, in the formal language of her federal warrant, "voluntary departure under warrant of deportation" rather than testify against International Longshore and Warehouse Union president Harry Bridges, who was facing his own decade-long deportation fight. Moreno never re-entered the United States. She died in Guatemala in 1992.

Across California, the Teamsters absorbed cannery bargaining through the 1950s. By the 1970s, the Northern California cannery bargaining unit alone covered roughly 65,000 workers, which made it the Teamsters' third-largest unit in the country. On Terminal Island and in the LA Harbor, the public record on which specific locals held which specific cannery contracts is thin. Cannery-floor workers at the Terminal Island plants appear to have been organized, by decade and by plant, under Teamsters and ILWU locals, with coverage shifting across the 1950s through the 1980s. The oral history record held by the ILWU on Local 26's warehouse organizing in Southern California covers the broader context. The plant-by-plant detail lives in archives that are not on the public internet.

What is not in dispute is that by the time the third hammer came down, the union of record at the cannery was not the union Luisa Moreno had built.

The third hammer, part one: Alaniz v. California Processors

In December 1973, a class action was filed in the Northern District of California under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 42 U.S.C. Section 1981. Alaniz v. California Processors, Inc. named roughly 74 defendants: the food-processing companies and the unions that represented their workers. The class was defined, in the language of the Ninth Circuit's later opinion, as past, present, and future applicants who were "Black, Asian-American, Native American, Spanish-surnamed, or women."

The Northern California cannery workforce in the early 1970s was majority non-white and majority women. The permanent, year-round jobs, the warehouse and maintenance classifications, were overwhelmingly white and male, and those permanent jobs were a small fraction of the workforce. Everyone else worked two to three months of seasonal line work per year and then got laid off. The union contracts in force treated this as normal.

Two of the named plaintiffs, Connie Barrios and Louise Lopez, had been seasonal employees at Contadina Foods' Woodland cannery since the 1940s. They had been categorically denied "regular" employee status for three decades because until 1971 the company excluded women from off-season warehouse work, citing California Industrial Welfare Commission Order 17, which prohibited assigning women to jobs that required lifting more than 25 pounds. Thirty years of permanent employment, denied on a lifting rule.

The 1976 consent decree established a $6 million Affirmative Action Fund. It required job training and upgrading programs for minority and women workers and it ordered revised seniority lists so that women and workers of color could cross from seasonal into permanent classifications.

The rank-and-file caucus that had pushed the suit, the Cannery Workers Committee, reported in a 1979 period pamphlet that the settlement covered about $5 million of the roughly $6 million in worker claims, and that in practice only about 10 percent of worker claims were actually compensated. Read that sentence again. The women won in federal court and the implementation delivered a fraction of what the court ordered. That is period testimony from inside the caucus and it should be read as such.

The point of Alaniz for this story is not the dollar figure. The point is who the defendants were. The unions were on the defendant list. When the Teamsters and the other unions of record refused to fight the canneries on racial and gender segregation, the women sued the unions alongside their bosses. That is the line between Luisa Moreno in 1939 and the Alaniz plaintiffs in 1973, and that line is the thesis of this piece. A militant union built by women in 1939. A purged successor in 1950. A defendant in 1973.

The third hammer, part two: 1984

The Star-Kist Main Plant was completed on Terminal Island in 1952. At the time it was described as the single-largest cannery in the world. H.J. Heinz acquired StarKist in 1963, and that same period, according to the Government Accountability Office's 2020 report on the American Samoa tuna canning industry, StarKist opened a second cannery in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Think about that sequence. StarKist was building the infrastructure for the move off Terminal Island two decades before it announced the move.

In 1984 Star-Kist closed Terminal Island. The same year, Ralston Purina gutted Van Camp's San Diego operations and moved Chicken of the Sea production to American Samoa. The GAO record gives the reasons as lower labor costs and proximity to fishing grounds in the central and western Pacific. Federal minimum-wage rules in American Samoa were, and remain, lower than the federal mainland minimum. That is the legal architecture that made the flight worth making. StarKist had also built significant production capacity in Puerto Rico over the preceding decades. From the early 1960s, Mayagüez became a major tuna canning hub for the United States; at peak, according to the Wikipedia "History of Mayagüez" entry, the StarKist plant there ran three daily shifts with some 11,000 workers. That plant held on longer than Terminal Island did. According to the Puerto Rico Herald's 2002 reporting, StarKist closed the Mayagüez cannery on May 15, 2001, and roughly 1,300 workers lost their jobs.

Pan-Pacific Fisheries held out. According to the Los Angeles Conservancy's tuna-industry history, Pan-Pacific closed in 1995. Chicken of the Sea's Terminal Island cannery, the last cannery on the island, closed in 2001.

The closures did not sit in isolation. The LA Harbor region, San Pedro and Wilmington and the surrounding Harbor Area, lost roughly 30,000 blue-collar jobs by 1990 according to Random Lengths News. Those jobs did not come back. Terminal Island today is a container-handling facility, a federal prison, and the bones of the canneries.

This is the second cold section, and it rhymes with the first. In February 1942 the federal government removed a workforce of thousands by executive order and the canneries kept running. In 1984 the companies removed themselves, and an entire harbor stopped running. Different actor. Different pretext. Same move.

What it means, today

The story of Terminal Island is the story of how American capital learned, in real time, the trick it still uses every day. When workers become too organized, too costly, or too brown and female to be disciplined the old way, you relocate the factory. Star-Kist's 1984 flight from San Pedro to Pago Pago is not a historical curiosity. It is the verb that emptied auto plants in Flint, textile mills in the Carolinas, and meatpacking in the Midwest. It was rehearsed, in the specific form it took, on the bodies of cannery women who had just won a $6 million Title VII consent decree.

The cannery women of Terminal Island did not lose because they were weak. They lost because they were strong enough to make the old arrangement intolerable to the people who owned the canneries, and the people who owned the canneries had somewhere else to go. Any worker watching a "restructuring" announcement today is watching a verb that was conjugated fluently in Fish Harbor forty years ago.

The Star-Kist Main Plant is still standing on Terminal Island, emptied of the women who ran it, because the company found somewhere cheaper to do the same work. That is what the word "efficiency" has always meant.

Sources

The spine of this piece comes from three kinds of records. The Japanese-American cannery workforce before 1942 is documented by the Los Angeles Conservancy's Terminal Island features and the Densho Encyclopedia's peer-reviewed entry on Terminal Island. The Mexican-American cannery workforce's organizing is documented by Vicki Ruiz's Cannery Women, Cannery Lives (University of New Mexico Press, 1987), the San Diego History Center's 1995 journal treatment of Luisa Moreno, and Smithsonian Magazine's biographical coverage. The 1973–1986 Alaniz litigation is documented by the Ninth Circuit's published opinion at 785 F.2d 1412, with rank-and-file context from a 1979 Cannery Workers Committee pamphlet preserved on the Marxist Internet Archive. The 1984 closure and the American Samoa flight are documented by the GAO's 2020 report on the American Samoa tuna industry, with local context from the Long Beach Post, Random Lengths News, The Real Deal, and the Los Angeles Conservancy's historic-places entry on the Star-Kist Main Plant. Every factual claim in this piece traces to one of those records. The full list is in the frontmatter.