This is the
fifth report from Reedley, where we are holding a speakers series on people,
land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.
Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed
to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the
industrialization of agriculture.
Twenty-three years ago, in the first
days of my residence in Lindsay, my life was interrupted by a clogged sewer
line. It was four-thirty on a Friday
afternoon; the next morning I was due to speak at a conference in Los Angeles and
needed a shower before leaving at the very least. I grabbed the Yellow Pages and called a
plumber who came from Ivanhoe.
We talked as we searched my new
property for the non-existent clean-out valve.
Nervous, I babbled a little about my presentation the next day on this
weird study that no one here in the Valley seemed to know about two nearby
towns, Arvin and Dinuba. Studied in the
forties, the two towns then appeared so different from each other that any ordinary
observer would have thought Arvin was smaller and poorer than Dinuba, though
they were the same size in population, with the same dollar-value in farm
products from their land bases.
Just as I was about to mention the study’s
conclusions, that the different size of farms surrounding each town caused the radical
differences between them, my new plumber friend says “It’s the people. It’s the people in those towns that make the
difference. It’s the people.”
In another time and place, I might have
argued, or at least worked to show how farm size determines what people are
able to accomplish. But I heard the
truth of his words in the conviction with which he said them, and they lodged
in my heart. Friday night at the Reedley
Peace Center we heard from a man who has invested his entire academic career on
that truth.
Isao Fujimoto is a huge
consciousness inhabiting a small body, with less to pack around than most of
us, perhaps thanks to the high caloric requirements of his ceaseless mind. I once heard him described as a hummingbird,
which fits. Only a few more silver hairs
showed among his typically Japanese black ones than when I knew him in Davis,
though I detected a slight frailty in his walk now from eight decades on the
planet. Still, he stood and talked for
more than an hour, then answered questions until we could think of no more.
He began his talk with the painful
contradiction we live with here, that our region has the highest rates of
poverty amidst the greatest agricultural abundance nationwide. Isao then gently unfolded another, less
obvious contradiction: although each wave of ethnic immigrants is put through
the wringer here, welcomed only as a source of cheap farm labor and scorned
until they disappear into the acculturation process, our great agricultural
diversity has been built on and spurred by this ethnic/cultural diversity. Fujimoto sees cultural diversity as a
resource, as important as land and water.
He sees it as the third leg in our pyramid of abundance.
The importance of cultural diversity
became easier to see as he unfolded stories of cooperative efforts and
organizations in this state, which arose to meet immigrants’ survival needs as
well as to overcome constrictions placed on them by the existing power
structure. Isao learned these things
first-hand in childhood, as the oldest of 13 in a farming family prohibited by
state law from owning land, later as occupants of an internment camp during
WWII. His personal story makes his
passion and perspective a little easier to understand, but what’s most
important is that it did not keep him from seeing other groups’ distress or the
structural forces behind those facts of life.
It opened him.
Isao’s contribution has been to take
that deep understanding of the importance of cultural difference and to encourage
others to own it. He advocates and
enables people to join together to work for the changes we need in this
society, whether that be farmers markets and food co-ops to re-unite those who
work to grow our food with those who eat it, or innovators developing
appropriate technology for sustainable living.
He understands that co-operative effort itself is the solution to the
problems spurred by our industrial society, which holds individual effort as
paramount. He knows that getting people
to work together for their own benefit and the good of all is the most radical
act, one that he paid for dearly, career-wise, early on. Now, however, his genius for helping others
learn to help themselves (helping us all in the long run) is finally being
recognized.
We live in this terrible
contradiction: we produce huge
agricultural abundance, but it comes with a high-poverty price tag. The industrial structure at the root of that
unhappy relationship dominates more farm land annually, seemingly
unstoppable. But people can do something
about that. It’s the people, folks; it’s
us. We’re the people.
Next week I’ll be the speaker,
describing my history with the previous speakers and how that’s led me to be a
farmer of men, trying to plant seeds for that effort. Join us.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a fourth generation failed family farmer who writes. You can send her your hopes for a more
sustainable future c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below. Thanks to Fred Smeds for
submitting his piece “Why Farm” for our forthcoming book, A Little Piece of Land.
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