ABSTRACT
The Pacific Electric’s electric cars were to be an important part of the festivities, not only carrying thousands of spectators into the downtown area, but also serving as elaborately decorated floats in the fiesta parade—a parade that was to be reviewed by President Theodore Roosevelt. Thus began the Pacific Electric strike of 1903, one of the first major labor disputes between Mexican workers and Anglo employers in the United States. The strike occurred at a time when the first great wave of Mexican immigration was sweeping into the Southwest. The 1903 strike itself is only briefly covered in Spencer Crump’s Ride the Big Red Cars and Grace Heilman Stimson’s Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles. Crump’s book is a nostalgic history of the Pacific Electric, and while he grants some justice to the workers’ cause, his general viewpoint is sympathetic to company management.
