Satake Family
Like many farm families who had not yet acquired their own land, Mr. Satake's family moved regularly to follow job opportunities, a common rural lifestyle amid legal discrimination against Japanese Americans.
First, like many farm families who had not yet acquired their own land, Mr. Satake's family moved regularly to follow the job opportunities of his father. This was a common rural lifestyle. Catherine Gasich's father, Louis Paviso, for example, began working for a winery in Healdsburg before coming to work for Leland Stanford. For a number of years, Japanese-American families had little choice but to follow jobs because they faced legal discrimination. California law in the early decades of the twentieth century forbade Japanese not born in the United States from owning property in the state. However, as this interview notes, beginning in the 1920s Japanese-American parents began to purchase property in the names of their American-born offspring...