Paul's Camera

Published Nov. 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Two weeks ago I wrote about the loss of a camera that had been given to me by Paul Taylor 35+ years ago.  I called it “Dorothea’s” camera because I believed it had belonged to his wife, Dorothea Lange.  It matched photos of one she used in the field when the two of them documented the stream of immigrants into California who’d been displaced from their land in the Dust Bowl.

     The camera was returned to me last week, intact.  The story of how it was returned will have to wait until the case of the other missing items is resolved, but it’s one I will chalk up to Lindsay’s inherent goodness when the time comes.  Our town is still a place where love can do its work.  Make no mistake about that.

           

     Before it reappeared, I was searching for people who might be able to ID the camera and establish its worth.  I found Elizabeth Partridge, author of Restless Spirit:  The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (1998).  She’s also the daughter of Rondal Partridge, who had been Dorothea’s field assistant.  When the camera came home, I saw that it was a Zeiss IKON, not the Zeiss Jewel shown in her book.  I emailed her to report the distinction and the good news.

     She wrote back instantly on her iPhone, but referred to the camera as “Grandpa Paul’s.” Then she reminded me of his photographic work before he met Dorothea:  “Paul’s early work, though no great shakes in terms of beautiful photos, was so brave and thoughtful of him to dare to do.”

           

     The revelation that it might be Paul’s camera rather than Dorothea’s riveted me.  It sent me back to the one book I own where his photographs are shown, a book of farmworker photographs by Ken Light, Roger Minick and Resa Tansey called In The Fields (1982.)  Paul had written the introduction with labor historian Anne Loftis and included some of his photographs from his extensive study of Imperial Valley farm labor conditions in the late 1920’s.  But they also included a shot of a billboard for Tagus Ranch advertising for cotton pickers in 1927, just five years before the cotton strikes in Pixley and Corcoran. Paul had been here in our valley, too.

     What was really brave about Paul was not so much that he took and used photos, but his whole approach, which could be called “ethnographic” in academic terms.  Economics, his field, was becoming so statistical that it is almost unrecognizable as a social science today.  But Paul asked questions of the people he studied and wrote down what they said, and he photographed the places they lived and worked, a form of shorthand notetaking that carried these conditions 90 years into the future.  His economic analysis of the Imperial Valley is now highly esteemed.

           

     I’m keeping Paul’s camera with me until I’ve finished the work he sent me to do.  Onward, friends.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial researcher who writes to stay sane.  Thanks to John Kirkpatrick for his sympathetic phone call last week.  Send your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247or leave a comment below.

 

 

Dorothea's Camera

Published in edited form Oct. 25, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

"I had to get my camera to register the things that

 were more important than how poor they were -

their pride, their strength, their spirit." 

    

Dorothea Lange, as quoted in Elizabeth Partridge's book

Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange, 1998

     “Do you know my wife, Dorothea Lange?” the old man asked me in the present tense, although the woman, best known for her Dust Bowl portrait “Migrant Mother,” had been dead more than 10 years.  It was the summer of 1976.  The man was Paul Taylor, professor emeritus of Economics at UC Berkeley, and I had walked across campus to his office with him at his request instead of studying for a meteorology midterm.  When I said “No,” he began showing me her photographs that he kept in his file drawers.  Thus began my lifelong relationship with Paul, although he has been dead now for almost 35 years.

           

     One Sunday he called me to come to his home in the Berkeley hills.  I was preparing to update the Arvin-Dinuba study originally undertaken by one of his graduate students in the 1940’s, Walter Goldschmidt.  Paul had supervised the original study and kept it alive by citing it continually in his efforts for enforcement of the acreage limitation provisions of federal reclamation law.  An update was overdue.

           

     When I arrived, Paul handed me a black leather box that, when opened, contained one of Dorothea’s cameras.  The lens slid out on a track followed by accordion-like bellows attached to a square box which she held while she squinted through the rangefinder on top.  When it wasn’t mounted on a tripod, she balanced the extended camera on her knee.  It is the camera most often shown in the documentaries about her career, which started in the bread lines and street protests on San Francisco’s wharf during the Great Depression, moved to the streams of migrants coming into California from the Dust Bowl, then the evacuation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II.

           

     That her hands had made use of this camera to capture what her heart and mind saw through her eyes was powerful, even a little intimidating.  I protested, knowing I would never have the nerve or the expertise to use it.  He insisted I take it.  That camera, and the memory of the gift, have kept me inspired over the intervening years, when I might have allowed doubt to wipe away the importance of the work Paul and I did together.  I have long thought it was the most important possession I owned.

           

     A couple of weeks ago I heard myself think that I didn’t need to keep it with me anymore.  Now that I’m finishing the book on Paul’s contributions, I realized that I might be able to give it to a museum where others could be similarly inspired.  Just days later, on the weekend of Oct. 7-8, it was stolen from my house, along with my flute and autoharp, my jewelry box full of earrings from Long’s Drug and some family treasures, as well as my HP All-in-One printer that I bought at Target on sale for $35 four years ago.  They took all my other cameras as well, including my grandfather’s Brownie and my Aunt Hazel’s Argus rangefinder in the red plaid camera bag she loved.  It was painful.

               

     But, in looking for the proper description of the historic camera, I found this quote of Dorothea’s, one she used often.  “The camera,” she said, “is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  Dorothea’s images have taught us how to see for years, and continue teaching us today.  That camera did its work well past its useful life.  I just pray that it’s somewhere teaching someone to see again.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial documentary photographer who writes.  You can send her your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

Report from Reedley

Published Sept. 28, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


For the next few weeks I will be reporting on a speakers’ series called “In the Struggle” being held at the Reedley Peace Center, a program of the First Mennonite Church.  The idea for the series came from the Cornell dissertation of Dan O’Connell, who served as Sequoia Riverlands Trusts’ conservation easement officer in Visalia.  He transferred to a similar position with American Farmland Trust, working out of Fresno where he also helped start Food Commons, a non-profit linking small producers with local consumers.  Dan’s dissertation portrays the contributions of a handful of California college professors who, despite the resistance of their academic institutions, lack of research funds, and political opposition, documented the need for a more sustainable agricultural system in this state. The series goes beyond academic contributions and includes some of those workers in that field today.
 

     We drove to Reedley on the first cool Friday night of fall, through the clouds of dust from walnut harvesting, past vineyards with stacks of brown paper sheaves at the ends of the rows, ready to make raisins from grapes.  The evening light reflected lightly off water in furrows between rows of trees getting their last drink, through the fine mist of sprinklers running, the produce of our lands looking secure despite the drought.

           

     The peacefulness of the scenery contrasted with the subject of the presentation we were headed to hear: the struggle over the past 80 years to make sense out of the great contradiction we live with in this Valley, that we are the most agriculturally productive region of the world with the nation’s highest rates of poverty.  In many places, among many people in this precious valley of ours, just speaking that contradiction will either clear the room or provoke hostility. Yet we live with its consequences daily, whether we consciously recognize it or not.

           

     The first speaker in this series was from Cornell University, Dr. Scott Peters who served on Dan’s dissertation committee.  His field is history, with expertise in the public mandates of the land grant colleges, which range from Ithaca, NY where he teaches to the west coast locations of UC Berkeley and Davis.  We learned a great deal about the development of these institutions and the men (largely) who shaped them.  His understanding about the evolution of education in this country was mind-opening.

           

     But it was his understanding of the different types of history that helped me most.  Historical narratives, he called them, the storylines that lead our thinking, the storylines that shape our lives as individuals and communities.  He began with his own story, a son of two people who grew up on small farms.  That’s a critical thread we hear in many lives: how many generations you have to go back to get to the ancestors who farmed.  Many in this valley don’t have to go back.  I have friends who farm on small portions of land.  Our best Valley writers can still taste the peaches they raise or feel the handle of the hoe their grandfather used to run furrows and chop weeds.

           

     According to Dr. Peters, the first kind of history we write is the heroic one, the one where only good comes from human efforts.  We came, we ploughed, we dug, we built.  See what we accomplished.

           

     The second kind (he called the counter narrative) responds to the omissions in the first.  Yes, we came, and we took, we trampled, we depleted, we abused, and then we reinforced the pattern so that it takes an act of Congress (or God)  to change.  See what damages we have wrought in our fervor to build.

           

     The third kind Dr. Peters named as “prophetic,” and it is the one I identify as my own part of this history-making.  What could it have been like if we’d done it differently, and what can that imagination tell us about how to proceed? 

           

     In my own history in this struggle, following Paul Taylor’s indomitable lead, carrying his baton, the question is this.  What if we had enforced the acreage limitation of federal reclamation law on the Central Valley Project, not to mention the Kings-Kern Army Corp dams and the State Water Project?  What if we could now find some way to revoke the power we’ve given those large landowners far too long by delivering them water courtesy of the pubic treasury and the rightful, common claim we all hold to that resource?

           

     Join us for these discussions at the Reedley Peace Center.  Visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “Calendar” for the speakers schedule and descriptions or call (559) 994-4297.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Incontinent Divide

Published May 25, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     In Saturday’s Fresno Bee, Andrew Fiala, Director of the Ethics Center at Fresno State, wrote a whole-hearted column defending the place of enlightenment in our nation’s constitution and educational system.  Although I have worked hard to become a reputable and responsible product of that system, his column left me feeling torn, like someone standing with the Great Continental Divide running between each foot.  

           

     I admire and like Dr. Fiala:  he came to speak at Lindsay’s Cultural Arts Center last fall about the cultural roots of violence, and his research appeared to me to be useful and important.  In writing a regular column for the Bee, Fiala is spreading that usefulness beyond the university’s bounds, much like what I try to do with my column in this paper.  I see him as an ally. 

           

     But Saturday’s piece traced a fault line that runs through this country’s mentality between the so-called enlightened and the so-called unenlightened, a strike-slip fault like the San Andreas where each side inexorably moves in the opposite direction of the other, tearing up the zone between them.  In defining and defending “enlightenment,” Fiala was trying to describe the sometimes invisible place of liberal values in this otherwise conservative region.  But knowledge, that hoped-for product of enlightenment thinking, does not always lead down a liberal path, or even a progressive one.

           

     Over the last 100 years some of the world’s greatest political tyrants have been highly educated (Cambodia’s Pol Pot, for example.)  Universities have produced some of the hardest-line conservatives the world has known, and not just in the area of national defense.  Decades of promulgation of the Green Revolution and the structure of agribusiness around the world have destroyed native cultures and ecologies whose knowledge bases and ways of living were sustainable.  They were replaced by what is not sustainable at great cost to people, places and the future of the world.  The hope I once had for enlightenment thinking has been replaced by a giant suspicion of academics not unlike that of the Trump followers.

           

    “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day,” Fiala quoted Thomas Jefferson.  I love to quote Jefferson and often do, despite being chastised by the politically-correct foes of racism who apparently remind Fiala as well as myself of Jefferson’s ownership of slaves.  But enlightenment of people does not eliminate the source of tyranny and oppression, which as often comes from someone who considers himself (or herself) more enlightened than the people referred to above.  It might prepare them better to resist or eventually conquer tyrants and oppressors, but it certainly does not erase those evil spirits from our days.

           

     Four decades ago, when I was a 26-year-old student new to UC Berkeley (notably a land grant college,) I was escorted by an elderly, retired economics professor to the north side of the campus to read the inscription on the ag building, Hilgard Hall.  His name was Paul Taylor, and he’d devoted his life and his career to defending both the family farm and the rights of farm laborers, protecting the acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law until they were decimated by enlightenment thinking and politics in 1992.  

           

     The inscription reads “To rescue for human society the native values of rural life,” a sentiment which bridges the leaking divide between two ways of knowing.  It is academic acknowledgement of the value of those who might not be seen as ‘enlightened.”  It is an intention, a statement of purpose and responsibility, not just a declaration of virtue.  

           

     It also expresses understanding of a potential danger – that human society might become torn from its sustaining roots – as well as indicating the tonic needed.  Forty years after reading the inscription, I still think it shows the way to become continent again.

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Trudy Wischemann is an agrarian advocate who is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Jim Likins and Ronald Abee for their comments this week.  You can send your stories of rural life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Land Theology

Published Sept. 23, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!  Isaiah 5:8

     Last week I wrote about land tenure and its importance, not just in the book I’m working on but also in our individual lives and in our communities.  What I didn’t fully understand when I began this book project, however, was that concerns over land tenure go all the way back to biblical times, particularly concentrated, absentee land ownership.

     Before Jesus, before Isaiah and Jeremiah, concentration of control over the best, most productive agricultural holy lands by a few individuals created impoverished conditions for the rural peasants and the mass of urban dwellers.  That’s what made those prophets cry out.  They were crying out not just against the injustices created, but also for the covenant broken, the one the Israelites made with God before they crossed the River Jordan to occupy the Promised Land.   These are the roots of what has come to be known as “land theology.”

     Up to a point, I may be excused for my ignorance 25 years ago.  My parents were suspicious of bible thumpers, and that carried over to the text itself.  Up to a point, you who have read the Bible all of your lives may also be excused, because most theologians over the last 2000 years have also missed that message.  In that scholarly vacuum, I guess our preachers may also be excused.  After all, in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church itself was a large landholder and the source of permission for European explorers to seize the land of natives in the New World, creating landlessness and injustices we still have not lived down. 

    In 1977 an Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann published a book called The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith.  In it he laid the foundation for what would become “land theology.”  My Methodist preacher friend John Pitney picked up that ball and carried it to the Forum on Church and Land in Fresno, where I first heard the message in 1992.  Another Old Testament scholar, Marvin Chaney, presented his research there on the land tenure conditions in 8^th Century BC Palestine, providing a framework for us to compare with California’s state of large-scale, industrialized agriculture.  I left that event physically, emotionally and intellectually transformed, i.e., converted.

     But I think what made that conversion possible was a moment 14 years before, in the office of a retired Berkeley economics professor, Paul Taylor.  I was there to learn about federal reclamation law from him, and to help his efforts in any way I, as an untutored 28-year-old, could.  He’d been invited by Cornell historian Paul Wallace Gates to publish his collection of law journal articles on California water and the 160-acre limitation.  His task that day was to start to write the introduction to this volume of works that spanned more than 20 years, a culmination of his passion and his scholarship.  I was there to help type.

     He got a few sheets of yellow unlined paper, got his pen, and began to think.  Then he looked up at his bookshelf which spanned the entire wall, floor to ceiling, and said “Where’s my Bible?”  At Berkeley I’d never heard an academic ask that question, and had no idea why he wanted it, but joined him in the search until he realized it was at home.

     The next day he returned to the office with Isaiah 5:8 written on a 2x2 yellow Post-it.  I typed it at the top of the page, followed by two other quotes he’d chosen, a passage from the 1902 Reclamation Act and a sentence from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958.  His eyes asked for my approval, but I still didn’t understand what it meant, particularly Isaiah.  He looked at me kindly then and said “Laying house to house, field to field – that’s when people buy up all the land.”  That was my real introduction to land theology, there in the UCB Department of Economics at the knee of a gentle genius from Iowa.

     And now I carry the torch myself.  The truth will not only set you free:  it can set you on fire.  Run the course.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your flaming visions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Property Rights and Community Wrongs

Published Sept. 16, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

            “Search for a congenial relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relation between man and man.”  Paul Schuster Taylor, 1979

 

     “What’s your book about?” people ask when I tell them I’m working on one.  I usually say “agriculture and the common good,” sometimes adding a few items lodged under that umbrella like “small farms,” “water,” and “sustainability.”  But the thread running through it all is land tenure.

     “Land tenure” is not a term most people use, although it applies to every single one of us.  It means the system that determines peoples’ access to land, which is the source of all wealth as well as subsistence, and the subcategories of relationships determined by that system.

            In this country, the system of private property determines individuals’ access to land except where government control has interceded (like school grounds or Yosemite National Park, for instance.)  The subcategories in our system are “landed,” “tenant,” and “landless” or “homeless.”  The concept of private property is so important to our entire socio-political-economic system that we take it for granted, almost god-given.  To criticize private property here, even if the intent is to help, is like burning the flag.  

            What’s good about private property (i.e., individual ownership,) particularly when we’re talking about land, however, isn’t always good for the community. One of the worst things for any given community is when some of its land (or most, or all, as in "company towns,") is owned by people who do not live within it, often referred to as “absentee ownership.”  What’s wrong about it is that decisions for the land’s use by the absentee owner are made in a vacuum of knowledge about the community’s needs and beyond the community’s ability to influence those decisions, to encourage or coerce the owner to care about the effects of those decisions on people within the community or the community as a whole.

            Last week’s paper carried a wonderful example of the importance of land tenure in a beautifully written letter to the editor by Chris and Sally Brewer regarding the closure of Exeter’s True Value Hardware.  The letter pointed to a cause the previous week’s news article had skimmed over lightly:  the landowner’s decision to raise the rent 40%, with two weeks’ notice.  It’s the kind of action landowners take when they want to remove the tenant and do not have cause to evict. 

            The Brewers then went on to suggest a motive - to get a tax write-off for having an empty building - and to flush out the implications of that for the community (lost sales tax revenues, the impacts on other businesses of having a large empty building downtown) as well as for the business owners themselves (lost source of income and community identity.)  They then went on to express the hope that “the building owner who started this self-centered and thoughtless action realizes the extent and harm his actions have caused good people and a good community.”

            That last sentence might have some impact if the current owners are local.  The Brewers’ letter did not name or identify the location of the current owners, only that the former owners (who also had owned the hardware business housed there) sold the building several years ago.  This is simply to say that I do not know if the current owners are absentee, or simply acting like it.  My experiences here in Lindsay document that local owners can be as oblivious to the community’s welfare as absentee owners can.

            But it’s a question we should ask.  Who will look out for the needs of the community when the landowners of its spaces live too far away to know or care?

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Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send your empty building nightmares to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247