This is the second report from Reedley, where the Reedley Peace Center at First Mennonite Church is sponsoring a public speakers series called “In the Struggle.” The speakers are presenting information about past and present attempts to promote a better agricultural system in this valley, and will conclude with prospects for the future.
The second speaker in our series (Friday,
Sept. 30,) was Dan O’Connell, whose doctoral dissertation forms the core of the
series. His research covered the public contributions of 6 California scholars
who examined the social, economic and political costs of our industrialized
agricultural system. Friday night he
discussed three of those scholars, now deceased: Paul S. Taylor, Walter R. Goldschmidt, and
Ernesto Galarza.
Paul Taylor, professor of economics
at UC Berkeley, began his academic career researching farm labor, and ended it
documenting the ways agribusiness giants prevented the enforcement of the
acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law. He also advocated for enforcement of the law
and worked politically to prevent its demise.
He supported research efforts demonstrating the importance of the
acreage limitation, such as the studies documenting the community development impacts
of large-scale farms and the positive contributions of small-scale farm
cooperatives. He also supported non-profit
groups such as Fresno’s National Land for People, led by George Ballis and
individuals like Ben Yellen, M.D. in Imperial Valley, who were working
politically and through the courts to get the law enforced.
Paul’s early efforts documenting
Mexican farm labor in Imperial Valley (1920’s) transitioned to documenting the
in-migration of Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930’s. Like their Mexican predecessors, the Okies were
former farmers-turned-farm laborers when they were swept off the land. With his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange,
Taylor documented the terrible conditions of these refugees and then helped
create government labor camps and resettlement programs to begin to alleviate
these conditions.
Paul’s work in the field of farm
labor was followed by the heroic efforts of Ernesto Galarza, who documented the
Bracero Program and worked to organize a union for farm laborers. Through this work Galarza recognized
first-hand that the Bracero Program, which was begun during WWII to provide
Mexican farm laborers for California’s farms while Americans were away at war
or occupied in the arms factories, was being use to prevent union organizing
efforts from succeeding. Galarza’s
efforts to create a union failed, but he succeeded in bringing the Bracero
Program to an end in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of WWII. Shortly thereafter, the United Farm Workers
under Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta began, as well as efforts to provide the
legislation needed to make union protection of farm workers possible in this
state.
Paul Taylor’s research on farm
laborers, Mexican and Okie alike, took him to his work on the acreage
limitation provisions, which, if enforced, could have provided the doorway for
those laborers to return to their real occupation as farmers. During the battles in Congress to authorize
and make appropriations for the Central Valley Project, which California’s
large farmers claimed should be exempt from the acreage limitation provisions,
he helped construct and then supervised the examination of the effect of farm
size on rural communities, which became known as the Arvin-Dinuba Study. The study was conducted by a young
anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, who determined that small farms created
communities that were much healthier economically, socially and politically
than the towns surrounded by large-scale (and often absentee) farm
operations. Goldschmidt, whose career
as an anthropologist included studies of multiple indigenous tribes and
cultures on three continents, was called back to testify at Congressional
hearings on the results of this study from the beginning of his career until a few
years before his death at age 96.
What we see, looking at the active,
engaged scholarly careers of Taylor, Goldschmidt and Galarza, is that the hidden
impacts of our industrialized agricultural system cover the entire range of
concerns in this valley, from the development of the towns to the conditions in
the fields and back into the towns again.
In the next two talks, we will see how other scholars have continued
this work, from Don Villarejo’s research to document the increasing
agricultural concentration of power and wealth and farmworker advocacy (Oct. 7th)
to Dean MacCannell’s extension of Goldschmidt’s community research at the
macrosocial level, examining the influence of farm size on 70 San Joaquin
Valley towns (Oct. 14th.)
Come join us. For more information on the series, visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on
“calendar.”
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural community researcher and advocate who writes. You can read last week’s column below. Many thanks to Chris
Brewer for his lifelong devotion to the history of our region.
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