Abuelita Instincts

Published April 18, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette in slightly edited form

     Tim Z. Hernandez was a featured writer at last weekend’s Book Festival at the Visalia Public Library.  He spoke about the history of his project to restore the names of 28 Braceros who died in 1948 when the plane crashed that was deporting them back to Mexico, a crash made famous in Woody Guthrie’s song known as “Deportee.”

           

     This project’s history has been beautifully rendered in Tim’s book All They Will Call You (2017), one of two books which were chosen by the Tulare County Public Library for this year’s Book to Action program.  The title comes from the last lines of Guthrie’s song:  “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane.  All they will call you will be deportee.”

           

     As I listened to Tim’s story, I remembered how my friend Sylvia Ross, another author featured in Saturday’s festival, once described Tim as “eye candy.”  He is delicious to look at, but at least half of his attractiveness is the energy inside his body and words, unified by the task of conveying the message inside his project.  What I heard is that Grace stands on the side of humane compassion, and you can, too. 

           

     Tim was born in Dinuba, went to Redwood High School and COS in Visalia.  He identifies himself as a poet, but his role as a story gatherer and re-interpreter is clear.  When he found the news article that first informed him of the 1948 plane wreck, still considered the worst in California’s history, he was actually working on another book, Manana Means Heaven, about Bea Franco, the person known only as “the Mexican girl” in Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road.  But the story of the nameless farmworkers captured his attention, and he began to follow their lead while still rewriting Bea’s story.

           

     Restoring names, restoring identities to people from his culture that white culture sees only as a category is a fine mission in life.  It restores dignity and presence to the people themselves, and it helps reduce the ungainly hubris and ignorance of white culture for those of us stuck on this side of the line.  But more than that, it gives credibility to a form of truth – and power – that many of us suspect, even reject.  And that is the form of knowing that comes from our guts, the accumulated knowledge of culture passed down and built up through the generations, what Tim called “abuelita instincts” in his talk Saturday.

           

     That term came out when he was telling the story about finding the first list of names of the 28 Braceros buried in a mass grave in Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno.  The priest in charge of the cemetery had a list, apparently from the list of “passengers” on that flight prepared by the U.S.  government.  Tim went down the list and noticed one mistake after another in the spellings of common Mexican names, mistakes which told him – through his “abuelita instincts” – that there was much more to this story than anyone knew.  The missing stories led him on a journey to find what wasn’t there, a brave move that most people would have avoided for fear of failure if nothing else.

           

     On Tim’s website (www.timzhernandez.com) I stumbled onto a photo he’d posted of two farmworkers in a field, bent over, working.  One has an infant on its back, legs dangling, facing the camera.  It is Tim.  He writes of the photo:

           

     “It was taken in the fields of Wyoming in 1974, the year I was born.  I am on my father’s back while he and my mother are working.  They were only 20 years old at the time.  Neither had ever made it past the 9^th grade.  They were young and scared, but driven by fierce ambition.  I like to think that while they were looking forward, into the future, I was there, bound to them, with my eyes on the past.  And it only occurs to me now, as I write this, that maybe this is how I ‘ended up here.’”

           

     In restoring the names and identities, the stories, of people who our culture has wanted to keep nameless, unknown, Tim’s work healing the past has made us a better present.  From that point we all can work together for a better future.  God bless his abuelita instincts, and his willingness to follow them.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial poet who doesn’t always like hearing from her grandmothers.  You can send her your thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

Sources of Power

Published April 4, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “There are two kinds of power,” a man once told me, a black minister from South Africa I met in Davis.  He’d come to speak about peace at a conference we were holding through the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and so I listened carefully to what he said.

           

     “The kind of power we normally think of is ‘power – over’:  the power of one person or group over another.”  That helped me understand why I automatically recoiled at the word.  Power Over is the greatest source of pain I can think of, for what it causes us to do to ourselves in defense of the threat of being overpowered by someone or something as much as the actual fact of it.

           

     “The other kind is ‘power – with,’” he continued, laying before me pictures of movements of peoples across continents and across centuries.  It is the power of unions, of co-operatives, of student groups and racial minorities.  In fact, it is the power of militaries as well: people committed to working together at risk of self for the benefit of something bigger than themselves.  Having just mentally walked through the Last Supper, that not-so-good cross of Good Friday, and the mysterious disappearance from the tomb of Easter, it’s not hard to see Jesus’ ministry as another form of Power With.

           

     Another man once told me of a third kind of power:  Power Under.  As a small farmer and a member of this community, he practiced this kind of power as a means of survival.  Many of us do.  It’s that “under the radar” form of self-protection and maintenance, staying out of harm’s way from those with plenty of Power Over.  So many of our undocumented neighbors have been practicing this form for so long, it makes it difficult to imagine another way.  It also makes it dangerous.

           

     As our young people have taken to the streets and the legislatures to protest our inability to protect them from gun violence in their schools, I have both cheered and wondered.  As the recent shooting of Stephon Clark by police in his grandma’s Sacramento backyard illustrates horribly, once again, our young black men aren’t safe anywhere.  Neither are the DACA students and their parents, whole families flying under the radar for years.

           

     Do we have the power to fix any of this?  I think we do, together.

           

     In a New York Times editorial last week, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated repealing the Second Amendment.  His arguments were sound and based in the constitution.  Perhaps in the face of losing all gun sales, the NRA’s backers would be divided and weakened into allowing our legislators to pass regulations against the worst weapons, the ones we do not need in our closets much less on the streets.  Perhaps if fewer guns were in our closets and on our streets, our police officers’ fingers would be less itchy.

           

     Our undocumented neighbors, however, need another solution.  They need us to come forward into our public forums and speak for them, we who do not need papers, who do not face having our lives ripped apart by speaking.  We need to advocate for legislation to be passed in Congress to make legal pathways to citizenship for people who are operating as citizens but flying under the radar.  We need to be walking with them in spirit while they stay low.  It’s what our citizenship allows – and calls us – to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who often feels powerless but for words.  You can send her your ideas for reform c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Wading That River

Published Mar. 28, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“My father’s own father, he waded that river...”  from Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee”

           

     In last week’s column I mentioned discovering Tim Z. Hernandez’s book All They Will Call You at the Lindsay Public Library.  It was being given away as part of this year’s Book to Action project of the Tulare County Library.  Wednesday Mar. 28^th, the day this paper will hit the newsstands, the Exeter Public Library will hold a book club meeting on it at 7 p.m.

           

     The book’s title comes from the Woody Guthrie song “Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos,” commonly known as “Deportee.”  The song is about that 1948 plane wreck carrying 28 Mexican nationals being deported from California at the end of their official stays courtesy of the Bracero Program.  Everyone died in the wreck, including the three crew members.  The last lines of the chorus came from the newspaper reports of the accident, and the truth of our tendency to keep farm laborers nameless, identity-less:  “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane; all they will call you will be deportee.”

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     I have loved this song since I first heard Joan Baez’s recording of it, probably in Berkeley, probably sometime in the 1970’s.  When I met Tim Hernandez as part of the planning group for the Kaweah Land and Arts Festival in 2009 and later learned of his project to restore the names to those dead deportees buried in a mass grave in Fresno, I was in awe.  Tim’s project seemed so huge on one hand, and yet so perfectly focused, a laser beam that, in healing this one wound, could start the healing process for a problem so massive it blinds us.

           

     The book is fantastic. It starts with stories of people who witnessed the crash: the landowners, the first responders, the photographer and editor of the Coalinga newspaper, whose report hit the AP wires that night.  Then it moves to stories from the lives of a few of the men who were being deported:  their girlfriends and wives, their dogs and horses and grandparents left behind, their little farms whose lack of water and the need to drill wells drove these farmers from their land to do farm work up North.  Their villages and families become real; the treks become real; the distances become real.  Most of all, they leave the nameless stranger category and become neighbors.

           

     And on some very important level, we can begin to wade that river with them, back and forth, ride boxcars and buses, dodge la migra, stand in line waiting for jobs we hope will provide enough money to send home.  I can’t think of anything more important for us to do at this moment in time than learn what it means to be on the receiving end of that terrible vulnerability.  Roll up your pant legs, friends: we’ve got work to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer with a mean poetic streak who sings, mostly in the shower.  You can send her your wading stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

Unhidden Figures

Published Mar. 21, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A miracle occurred at last Tuesday’s Lindsay City Council meeting:  people came.   The largest percentage of them came because there were issues on the agenda which they wanted to address:  two resolutions asking for official support from our town, one on DACA, the other on moving Eagle Mountain Casino from the Tule River Reservation to some land the tribe owns near the Porterville airport.

           

     A third group, however, came to address an issue from the Council’s previous agenda Feb. 27^th:  the transfer of grant monies from the project of upgrading the town’s baseball facility, the Olive Bowl, to the new project of demolishing the city’s public golf course and building new soccer fields there.  Eight teenaged girls stood behind their little league coach as he demonstrated their need for community support.

           

     The overall effect, in my mind, was to disprove a theory long held by many in this town:  that no one cares.  Often here in Lindsay, as in small towns everywhere, people are reluctant to express their opinions, especially if their opinions appear to be at odds with the powers that be.  They can be reluctant to seem different, which is more difficult in small towns than in urban centers.  But when things matter, when things really matter, people will – and do – step up to the plate.

           

     Councilwoman Laura Cortes brought the DACA resolution to the Council’s agenda.  It says, in part, that “the City Council of the City of Lindsay stands in strong support” of the thousands of people affected by the pending loss of the DACA program.  It also urges “the swift passage of (S. 1615) and (H.R. 3440) Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act - of 2017. . .a bill that will allow thousands of young students that have lived in the United States for years, and call it home, to realize their education dream and give them a path to legalizing their immigration status.”

           

     As our newest council member, Cortes’ action was bold.  It was rewarded by passage 4:0, with Councilman Watson abstaining.  But the real value was seeing the youth of this town step forward to the microphone and tell the Council what it wanted:  relief for themselves and their neighbors from the terrible prospects imposed by the current U.S. ICE deportation efforts.  I was in awe of them and their leaders.  Our teenagers were every bit as eloquent in speaking up for the realities of their lives as those students from Parkland have been about theirs.  Their issue is no less threatening.

           

     Friday I stopped by the library and found a book at the front desk that was offered to me for free, part of a program to generate interest in reading.  It was Tim Z. Hernandez’ book All They Will Call You, published last year, about his project getting names on the graves of the unnamed deportees killed in a plane crash in 1948.  The crash – and the namelessness of the deportees – was memorialized in a song by Woody Guthrie titled “Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos Canyon” but known by many simply as “Deportee.”  The last two lines of the chorus say “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane.  All they will call you will be Deportee.”

           

     As I took the book home, I realized that one of the beauties of this current movement to staunch deportations is that we are working, as a people, to protect against this namelessness, this loss of identity.  With students like ours, we are likely to succeed at least at that.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who always has a song in her head.  You can send her your concerns about Lindsay or other small towns c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Unite & Conquer

Published March 7, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
 
     It’s been a sad week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted home town.  Last Tuesday, Feb. 27^th, the City Council voted 3:2 to demolish the historic public resource known as the Lindsay City Golf Course and build 5 soccer fields on the property instead.  We’ll be seeing bulldozers there very shortly.

           

     At the Council meeting there were 20 or 30-some little soccer players shepherded there by a few mothers and their coach, Mr. Faustino Perez.  The three women who spoke on behalf of the soccer players are employees of the City, and they spoke confidently of the need for greater access to playing fields for this burgeoning youth activity.  Mr. Perez followed their comments with a description of the hardships these youth were experiencing for lack of places to play.

           

     Four adults representing Lindsay’s youth baseball teams were also there, because the money for “repurposing” of the golf course is coming from a grant recently acquired to upgrade the Olive Bowl (our historic baseball facility) and Kaku Park, an adjoining triangle of ground with facilities for children in an area where there is very little for children to do.  These coaches were not as prepared to defend against the “repurposing” of the money granted to support their efforts; their day jobs don’t give them direct access to the powers that be.

           

     There were some silent majority types sitting in the audience, too, adults from the boomer generation for whom the destruction of the golf course feels like destruction of their personal history, not to mention golfing future.  “I feel like crying,” one woman said to me after the meeting, though she did not address the council when it came time to speak.  When the bulldozers arrive, I imagine a lot of us will feel like crying.

           

     With the little soccer players standing there behind the podium, it was hard to question the rightness of Bill Zigler’s decision to propose this change, promoting one sport (soccer) to the detriment of two (baseball and golf.)  Councilman Velasquez did, however, providing multiple reasons why destruction of the golf course should be reconsidered, and lodged one of the two No votes.  Mayor Kimball also expressed regret about the loss of this public resource and concern about the hastiness of the decision, casting the second No.  Councilman Salinas argued that at least it will remain open space rather than being developed with housing, while Councilman Watkins expressed hope for the resurrection of active use of this public land (he golfs in Exeter.)  Councilwoman Cortes was adamant about the importance of supporting soccer in this community.

           

     I agree with all of them, but I question whether this decision is fiscally responsible.  The City owns a facility with two indoor soccer fields, which were built entirely with public funds that were garnered on behalf of serving the underserved.  Building new soccer fields which will compete with our indoor facility, while continuing to neglect the baseball park (long overdue for maintenance) and demolishing one of the last remaining public golf courses in Tulare County, seems like just another bad decision in a long stream of bad planning.

           

     But to challenge this decision, it will take the residents coming together to support all the recreational needs of the community.  It will require us to take back our voice as the represented public, and tell them what we really need:  a city government responsive to its citizens, not the bulldozers.

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Trudy Wischemann is a bulldozer-averse rural advocate who writes.  You can send her your uniting thoughts c/o P. O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Senseless Violence

Published Feb. 28, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     For two weeks now, if we watch the news, our eyes and ears have been riveted to the multiple outcomes of the latest school shooting in Parkland, Florida.  As before, we review the mass shootings that preceded this one, looking for clues about why this keeps happening and what we might do to prevent another.

           

     One TV program about church shootings put this effort under the title “what we can do about senseless violence.” Hearing it advertised repeatedly broke my mind open to the definition of that term, wondering if there’s such a thing as violence that isn’t senseless, and where to draw the line between violence and something lesser, like petty theft.

           

     Surely the violence in Syria right now is as senseless as it gets, as was the violence in Viet Nam or any of the other countries we’ve sent troops.  I have a little less trouble seeing the violence of WWII as necessary, if also senseless on a spiritual level.  Did the world really need an Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin?  Did it need Pol Pot?  Did it need George Custer?

           

     See what happens when you start asking questions?  I’m sure I’ve already stepped on a few toes with that last name.  But I learned an interesting definition of violence from a book by Fr. John Dear:  violence is anything that divests a person of his or her true identity as a child of God.  The whole effort to eliminate the red skin threat to white settlement as Americans (many of them recent immigrants) pushed westward in search of free land, a place to live, certainly falls into the category of violence.  Was it senseless?  If not, was it any less violent?

           

     I won’t touch the rhetoric of our current commander-in-chief.  Someone might decide to divest me of my true identity.

           

     On a more human level, I’m wondering about the technological advances currently ongoing in our region, everywhere from the groves and fields to brick-and-mortar work environments where jobs are being eliminated faster than we can count.  One particularly attractive “advancement” displayed at the farm show two weeks ago was GUSS, “the world’s first unmanned orchard sprayer.”  GUSS “removes the operator from the tractor, thus eliminating the chance of driver exposure to the products being applied.”  It also, by the way, “eliminates” operator error and 10 minute breaks, lunchtimes, Sundays, and quite frankly, jobs.  When faced with the choice of being exposed to pesticides or not working at all, people have for years chosen exposure over unemployment.  But now they will not have to choose.

           

     We are a violent people.  If we’re going to find ways to stop senseless violence, we’re going to have to look at all the ways we accept violence as necessary, even when there’s a better way.  May someone brave lead us in that direction.

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Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte Quaker who writes.  Send her your suggestions for becoming a non-violent culture c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beyond Boswell

Published Feb. 21, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I was just catching my breath last week from the news that Boswell had withdrawn their proposal for Yokohl Ranch when I heard that Mark Arax would be interviewed on KVPR.  The subject was his article “A Kingdom from Dust” on Stewart and Lynda Resnick’s operations just published Jan. 31^st in the California Sunday Magazine (https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust).

           

     Once known as Paramount Farms, renamed to Wonderful, Inc., these operations now exceed those once farmed by Boswell.  Although there’s a difference in levels and kinds of philanthropy, like the clinics and schools being built in Lost Hills and Delano, there’s great similarity to the Boswell empire in control over water and land, which we learned in Arax and Wartzman’s  The King of California:   J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003.)  The Resnick article just published is also part of a forthcoming book by Arax, hopefully to be released next year.

           

     Getting this Resnick story now rather than later, however, may help us face the need to take back the decisions over land and water that belong in the public’s sphere.  “Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the United States,” Arax wrote early in the piece, “a fact he has tried to keep hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed California’s landscape, and ruled entire towns.”  Arax also writes of Stewart’s partnership with his wife, Lynda, as unique and portentious.  With their influence over the entire citrus industry, we who live in the Sun-Gazette’s readership sphere are already feeling the effects in lost navel markets and acres of replants to mandarins no longer packed in our towns.

           

     Wonderful’s crop production through the drought was remarkably high, a fact that led Arax to track down their water supply.  One thing he discovered was a “private, off-the-books pipeline” that was taking water “from unsuspecting farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County 40 miles away.”  Learning that a land developer from Santa Clara Valley named John Vidovich was the wheeler for that water provides clues about what we’ll need to prevent in the future.

           

     Writing about the Wonderful Citrus complex sited along Hwy 99 just south of the Tulare/Kern county line, “with its four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo mandarins, (the complex was) conceived by Lynda, cost one fortune to build and a second fortune to light up.  I doubt the Resnicks have any idea,” Arax continued, “of the fester that eats at this place, the shame piled on shame.”  I think one layer of that shame is that we seem unable to bootstrap our public power high enough to make these guys realize who they’re taking from and how they’re damaging the future they’re trying to make with their charitable contributions in the communities of Lost Hills and Delano.

           

     This is just a taste of what’s available in Mark’s article.  If you’re interested in the future of this part of the Valley, it’s worth starting here – and now.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher who writes.  You can send her your thoughts on the Big Boys c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.