Friday I flew home from work, changed my socks, grabbed the potluck plates, and jumped in the truck to haul it to Reedley for the third presentation in the Peace Center’s speakers series, ”In the Struggle.” Don Villarejo, who formed and directed the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis where I was employed before moving to Lindsay, was scheduled to speak on the question “Can we achieve an ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just agriculture?” I didn’t want to miss one minute of it.
The truth is, anyone living here in
the San Joaquin Valley with even one eye open can see that the answer is
“no.” Too much would have to change, it
seems. Too many bolts holding the
current system in place would have to be loosened and removed, and there’s no
guarantee that chaos would not overtake us before that new, beautiful and right
thing would take hold. Housing
developments gobbling up farmland, bullet trains delivering commuters to their
concreted plots, mechanization replacing workers and farmers faster than we can
count – these things are already pushing the margins of the old system toward
extinction.
But there he was, eating from his
plate of homemade salads and hot dishes, preparing to speak to a mixed, mostly
hopeful crowd of friends and strangers, bringing a message that no one could really
imagine. Almost 80, Don’s smile and
laugh are as disarming and infectious as the first time I met him. And his 60-year story of inviting people to
join him in this struggle, that stretches well beyond one lifetime, delivered
this message: we can change.
He himself went through several
transformations in order to become the change agent he is. Son of a single-mother labor organizer, his
childhood was spent frequently living under other people’s roofs and sets of
rules. Don’t ask me how, but he went to
college anyway and graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from Chicago, a big enough
life change for most people. Then, while
teaching physics at UCLA, he found himself drawn into the student politics of
change. There, at one critical moment
before 12 TV news station cameras, with the whole country watching and most of
the university’s administration waiting to hear calming words of conventional
reason, he tossed that life aside and
said “Strike! Shut this place
down!” His mother must have known then
that he was a chip off the old she-block.
But what Don brought to the world of
social change was a tremendous respect for facts and figures and the truths
they represent. In his talk he told
stories of discovering the untruths told with shoddy facts and figures, and how
he amassed data, over and over, to uncover the truths the old numbers
belied: the numbers and sizes of farm
ownerships and operations in the state, the public subsidies and financial
returns to farms in federally-supplied water districts and the family structure
of most operations. He documented the
outcomes of various attempts to get laws changed governing farm labor, noting
the victories within apparent defeats.
He named names of people who contributed their lives over the years, the
tiny but critical roles they played at just the right moments. By the end we could see that our view of the
unchangability of our current agricultural system is obscured by fear – or,
perhaps, by lack of faith.
The questions people brought to the
microphone afterward were mixed with awe and appreciation for what we had just
learned, still sinking in. One person
thanked Don for including farmers and their unpaid family members as two
categories of farm labor, his own hands showing the work of his life. Another queried Don’s opinion on the recent state
legislation increasing farm workers’ compensation, including overtime, to which
he replied that it’s 70 years overdue, although he has no idea how it’s going
to work out.
But the last question took my breath away. A man, a newcomer to the group, described the dilemma we face with the drought-driven explosion of deep-well pumping of groundwater, of the extraction for private purposes of a precious resource held in common, noting the lack of legal recourse. Although Don had been standing for almost two hours, it was as if he jumped to his feet. “We can change that,” he said firmly. “We can change the laws. People like us in this room, we can change that.”
I give him the last word on that subject.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer and remedial change agent who lives in Lindsay, once the Olive Capitol of the World. You can send her your thoughts on change c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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