Episode 51: Rural Socio-hydrology
“The Reclamation Law stipulated if you owned more than 160 acres of land and you signed a contract voluntarily to receive publicly subsidized federal water, you have to sell all excess land above 160 acres at pre-water prices, because when you bring water to a place that is doing raisin or dryland wheat—you can now produce strawberries, almonds or houses.”
A conversation with Dr. Daniel O'Connell (Central Valley Partnership) about land, water, and community development in the CA Central Valley. Released May 5, 2023.
guests on the show
Daniel O’Connell
Dr. Daniel O’Connell is executive director of the Central Valley Partnership, a regional nonprofit organization and progressive network of labor unions, environmental organizations, and community groups spanning the San Joaquin Valley. Trained as a multidisciplinary ethnographer, he holds an MS in International Agricultural Development from University of California, Davis, and a PhD in Education from Cornell University. In 2021, Dr. O’Connell published In The Struggle: Scholars and the Fight against Industrial Agribusiness in California. As a politically engaged scholar, his work is dedicated to achieving social, racial, environmental, and economic justice in California.
TRANSCRIPT
Sam Sandoval
Bienvenidos a Water Talk. In today's episode, we will have a conversation with our guests Daniel O'Conner, who is the Executive Director of the Central Valley Partnership. Daniel is the author of In the Struggle: Scholars in the Fight Against Industrial Agribusiness in California. This book describes the work of politically engaged scholars. Their intertwined relationship between the establishment of industrial agribusiness policies for subsidizing water infrastructure, and the repercussions of social inequity. And this book also talks about the commitment and passion of these scholars for social justice, economic equity, and democratic governance in the San Joaquin Valley.
I came across this book about six months or a year ago. To me, it was one of those books that really resonated in different ways. Daniel brings three different perspectives. So, the perspective of eight scholars that he writes about and what were their struggles, then the specific facts of food production, water, land, and labor in this area. And then the other one, he also provides a lot of lessons, or he was able to distill a lot of lessons. And for me, it was important to reach out to him and invite him. And I think these are very relevant issues to talk about. And also, to put it in perspective to understand where we are. I remember Kristin Dobbin that mentions that typically we look forward or we have a more brief historic perspective. I hope that he will bring a historic perspective from even the Reclamation Act in the 1900s. So anyways, Mallika, Faith, tell me, what are you expecting? What are you interested in about talking with Daniel O'Connell?
Faith Kearns
I think it's always interesting to talk with other scholars, particularly very engaged scholars and see how they've been able to navigate these very often complex and controversial topics that they are working on. So, I just think there's always a lot to learn there, because all of these situations have their own nuances and there's really no one way to approach the kind of work that I think we all kind of aspire to do.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, I think that this work seems really interesting. I like how he has described this book as a guidebook, that it maps a battlefield across four generations of organizing and research. And I'm especially interested in the later generations I think maybe just because I remember when I was starting here, I think I'd read a lot of like news articles and stuff about the work that Janaki Jagannath, who was the last scholar that he talks with a lot, was doing so I've kind of been interested in that work. But I'm also really interested in the work that he's doing with this Central Valley Partnership.
So, it's kind of neat to see somebody who focuses on history and rural development in the Central Valley and then goes on to be greatly involved with the Central Valley Partnership. So, I'm curious to learn more about that. I don't think this was planned. But I feel like season four, we've visited with a lot of experts and leaders in the Central Valley. And that's been really fun to just hear about these different organizations in that area and what they're up to and how they complement each other.
Sam Sandoval
I also identify with some of the authors, some of the people that he describes. Ernesto Galarza, Don Villarejo, Isao Fujimoto. A lot of them were either from my background, the work that they do, and so on. So a couple of times, almost a tear came out of my eyes because it was really close. Many of the issues that they face or how they face it. One other thing that I have to say is this also really reminds me of Faith’s book, in terms that it is not only a passive description of facts, but it comes with key questions. It comes with some guidelines; it really comes with the synthesis of what others provide to the practitioners. And in that one I really enjoyed it as much as I also enjoyed Faith’s book.
As we're going to talk with Daniel, this will be a conversation with many different policies and facts that throughout history play out, and that's the realization that we have now in the San Joaquin Central Valley. So, the Reclamation Act that will be 1900's, later, we will have the Bracero Labor Act, and that will be in the 1940s 1930s. Then we have the later the Reclamation Reform Act, and that will be in the 80s. And that is just to give you a timeframe for the things that we will be talking about. And since when there have been social scientists looking at these problems, and stepping up raising their voice for things that they have found in the Central Valley. And as our audiences traveling through I-5 or California 99, as they are passing through all these different towns and seeing the agriculture, they will be able to relate between the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and the east side of San Joaquin Valley. So, without further ado, let's talk with Daniel O'Connell.
Bienvenidos, Daniel.
Daniel O’Connell
Such a great, great pleasure to be here, Samuel. And as you know, I'm a huge fan of Cooperative Extension and Ag and Natural Resources and the University of California. The book is to a certain extent about a history of what's happened at the university and in California and in the valley.
Faith Kearns
Welcome, Daniel to Water Talk. We're super excited to talk with you today. And we're wondering if we could just open with you sharing with us a little bit about your work and how you got to where you are, and particularly what motivated you to write your book and what you were hoping that writing would accomplish.
Daniel O’Connell
So, when I finished high school and went to University of California in San Diego, I politicized a lot around the issues of the border. Also, US Imperialism. I was a ferocious activist. And for years, organized around the environment, and around peace and nonviolence. And so, the book is premised on a dissertation that's titled: In the Struggle: Pedagogies of Politically Engaged Scholarship in the San Joaquin Valley. Pedagogies. What we do as scholars is inherently designed to affect change. And there's a political overlay, which I'll just say values, over that.
So, the book has enormous pedagogical intent. It's to invite other activists, a very unique sort of activist, into being scholars. I'm constantly serving young folks and those that I think fit. I chart their path and I even help them get into the university. The book revisits an empirical scientific and historic critique of agribusiness, industrial scale agribusiness. They dominate the narrative so much that it's hard for people to even envision that it's not correct. It's just a given, especially with San Joaquin Valley. This lays that out over 100 years. The book is an outgrowth of me wanting to have relevance or actually trying to make change and realizing the limitations of what I was doing.
Sam Sandoval
So, I think it's good that you bring the intent and the bigger picture because of the Reclamation Act of 1902. It was an act to reclaim the land, and they reclaim the land by building the infrastructure. So, families can reclaim the land and then develop a good living. But the idea of this good living was on the premise that it will not be accumulated into the hands of the few, that it was accumulated or distributed with a certain acreage limitation and also with residency. I think in your book and the scholars that you mentioned, they talked about the importance of those two requirements, because distribute the wealth, but also make the people that live there an active member of the community. I think that is something that these scholars mentioned, that was the intention, right?
Daniel O’Connell
So the 1902 Reclamation Law, it is utterly important. First of all, Republicans were progressives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt is bringing this forward. So, it's a law that's based in a progressive era coming out of the reaction to the industrial revolution in the United States. It's applying to the development of water infrastructure in the western United States. The law is anti-speculative, it doesn't want to gift wealthy folks more money. But it's embedded in reclamation law, and this is why you just want to pick up the flag and march with it, is a lesson on democracy, and it's the core of a lot.
The reclamation law, in its structure, did three things. It required that if you're going to get federal water, your farm had to be 160 acres or less, later interpreted with a wife to 320. You had to live on the farm that was on the land that was receiving the water. Now imagine just the commonsense nature of those two things. The other enormously powerful part of reclamation law, one that is land reform. Land reform was codified in federal law in the United States of America. Because the laws stipulated if you own more than 160 acres of land, and you signed a contract voluntarily to receive publicly subsidized federal water, you had to sell all excess land above 160 acres at pre water prices.
Because when you bring water to a place that's doing grazing, or dryland wheat, you can now produce strawberries, or almonds or houses on it–it raises the speculative value. So, they said, for 10 years, we'll give you the subsidy on your land, but then you have to sell all the excess land. And remember, in a place like the San Joaquin Valley, the land was already extraordinarily unequally distributed. This plays out in a series of research that was done.
The federal government knows they're going to, now, 30 to 40 years after the original law was passed, build dams across the western United States. There was a big contest between whether the Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers was going to build those dams. But eventually even the dams built by the Army Corps had to have reclamation values. So, if you are going to bring federal water during the great [depression], it's a jobs program too during the 30s and 40s to bring water here, but the big ag interest didn't have the capital to build their infrastructure. So, they have a works program in the middle of the depression to build dams. And they do. And all of those farmers here in California, signed contracts to receive the water and then didn't follow the law.
And so I sometimes say that In the Struggle, people know the movie, Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson, which is on the Owens Valley and bringing water to LA. I sometimes say In the Struggle, the narrative here is Chinatown on steroids. The corruption that starts happening within the federal government. What does it mean when you cannot implement actual federal law? That's happening for 40 years, they never implemented the law, and then basically legalized the crime when they were forced to do it a few years later. There's a series of research that then the federal government is going to bring this infrastructure, so they hire the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. And it comes to Walter Goldschmidt to do the study to determine, should we implement the law here? So, they use Arvin and Dinuba. And then the politics starts, the pressure on Goldschmidt is in the book, he's telling us what happened to him, the suppression of the data, the censorship that starts happening.
Sam Sandoval
Daniel, yes. When one of the things to bring the audience is that what Goldschmidt does is to compare what is the social issue, what are the components of these two different towns? And he basically analyzes the schools, if streets are paved, what is the type of schools education, churches, civic centers? And as they are comparing the two of them, it really brings the evidence into the paper, which is that they are very different. And that's what we're talking about, this comparison between Arvin and Dinuba. And I agree; the people that live in Arvin, while conditions may be more difficult, we're talking about people that want to live a happy life, that they have good in their heart, is not to diminish the people there.
Daniel O’Connell
Those folks in Arvin are being oppressed. And I did want to come back. Arvin and Dinuba are similar size towns. Arvin is surrounded by DiGiorgio farms, a large-scale agribusiness, huge land holdings. Dinuba was surrounded by smaller scale farms. And the research basically said, there are metrics and measures of community wellbeing. How many doctors are in the town? How many churches? What's the economic output. The retail businesses were producing twice as much in Dinuba as in Arvin. And there was more community, PTAs, more civic structures. So empirically, you can measure community wellbeing and how many sidewalks, how many parks, etc. Arvin was unincorporated, Dinuba was incorporated. And he does this thoroughly, almost boringly for 300 odd pages. Walter Goldschmidt himself did his dissertation in Wasco. So, he knew the valley heading into it.
So, I will say there's other reasons why Arvin and Dinuba might be different. Case studies have methodological problems. So, regression statistics is a much more rigorous and scientific measure. And in the late 1940s that was not allowed. And here, we start entering into politics. The University of California still to this day, has never had a department of Rural Sociology. The state itself chose never to ask questions, because they think they knew the answers, is a monopolized economy and enormous landholdings beneficial to society? Well, it's not. And this is shown in the book in a series of research studies that's done. After Goldschmidt, 30 years later, went into an opening during the 1960s, heading into the 70s, the University of California with Jerry Brown as governor, and with Carter as president. And with more and with the university I think especially Davis becoming a broader institution, allowing the space to ask these questions.
These questions were asked by a series of scholars that came out of Cornell's Rural Sociology Department. Isao Fujimoto first, and then Dean McCannell. In the book, we got into McCannell first, because quickly, we want to revisit the Goldschmidt retest. McCannell sets up a series of research studies through macro social accounting. He uses the method of an agricultural economist to determine the values and the benefits of a firm or corporation and applies that macro socially on society, using the same basic measures of community wellbeing that Goldschmidt did, but he expands those. And now again, you see in the book, the enormous pressure that's happening that's put on Dean McCannell through especially the San Joaquin Valley agribusiness interests.
So over 10 years McCannell does basically the Goldschmidt retest. First in 83 towns in the San Joaquin Valley, not the 25 that Goldschmidt first premised. And then he does it specific to the west side of the valley, and the Westlands Water District. And later 10 years on, he does it in the Sunbelt states of Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. I will say the book doesn't head towards the geography that we need to contest now: the Midwest. Because by the time the candle is stopping his study, the Midwest is now exhibiting the same crises that California had in transforming very rapidly during the late 70s and 80s due to bankruptcies that were happening, because of the increase in interest rates and other structural problems. The Reagan administration allowed small farmers to just be annihilated. And now the Midwest is characteristic of the problems that you saw in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1940s. And I will say that In the Struggle now needs to go to the Midwest and this knowledge and organizing needs to happen there, now. I feel very sure that San Joaquin Valley is going to be just fine, and things are going well here.
And then finally, Don Villarejo. He picks up this baton tossing that starts with Goldschmidt, and then goes to McCannell. And after the crime is legalized with the overturning of Reclamation Law and the federal government in 1992, and 1983, by Democratic Senators in California and Reagan, they overturn this democratic law. Paul Taylor lived to know that the law was overturned. Imagine the heartbreak that he felt when he knew that we had lost the fight that he was warning about. This consolidation of land on top of a consolidation of water rights, and they're joined. He knew that now the fight is going to get even more extreme and more difficult.
And then after Villarejo shows that the Westlands has never followed the law and is getting around even the change in the law. So, what are you going to do? And now the narrative starts shifting into organizing, into bringing knowledge and teaching folks, teaching workers, teaching, especially farmworkers, how they are being manipulated and oppressed and implicating them in knowledge production. We're going to shift there. So, I won't go into that aspect of the book. But the book moves from the academy to the valley in a lot of ways.
Sam Sandoval
And you know what, thanks, Daniel, I know that there is a lot of content here. But it is the part of seeing all these scholars and how they are putting all these scientific outputs. And the pushback also. A common thread, or something that I saw, is that all of them at some point come back and start looking at the water, and how water infrastructure was subsidized. And it was enabling it, because with the land, there’s nothing that you can do without the water, and how water was kind of coming at all these different parts of the story. The one other thing that I also mentioned, Ernesto Galarza, he put up a good fight for labor. And something that as you're saying is that this is kind of a Chinatown on steroids. So, I was making the analogy that you have the land, and then you subsidize the water. And later, you also subsidize the labor. And when I was reading that chapter, I was like, 'Oh, my God', like, I didn't think that it could go even worse, or even deeper. But you have Ernesto Galarza and I also believe Paul Taylor.
Daniel O’Connell
So, it's super important to lay out the context of California. Galarza is very, very important. This place was, is Mexico, right? What is a place? And countries never last forever, but we stole the Californian in 1/3 of Mexico to gain slave territory in Texas. So, these crimes of imperialism and racism are all back loaded into here. And now you have a scholar, Ernesto Galarza, born in Mexico in 1905. The Revolution forces him north. He grows up in Sacramento. He's a farm worker himself. And Ernesto Galarza, then how he negotiates this, imagine being born in a rural village in Sierra Madre, and then making your way to Occidental College, where Obama first went to, gets his degree there, it goes to Stanford, gets his master's degree, goes to Columbia, and gets his PhD. And what does he do with that? He signs up with a labor union to basically organize the valley.
And what does he do? He heads straight to the area around Arvin, and begins a strike in 1947 against DiGiorgio Farms, the biggest. It's like going after Goliath. Because if you realize how Galarza wins his fights, they take a lot of time. There's a portion in Galarza's chapter where he says at the end of his 10 to 12 years of organizing farmworkers in the valley, before the UFW, he's hospitalized for three months, and he couldn't move from sheer exhaustion. How many folks heading into university are ready to do that? They come after him with everything, mostly a series of lawsuits that cripple and destroy his union. And finally, his union undercuts him. He finally realizes that the Braceros program that was started in the 40s is another subsidy of agribusiness. And in fact, the Cooperative Extension System that you all work for once did assessments on where Bracero should go. So, wow, the University of California is completely, embarrassingly implicated in implementing this undercutting of labor in California.
Well, he then writes Strangers in the Fields, which is a pamphlet to talk about the Braceros program. And then Merchants of Labor, which actually is published a year after he's effectively destroyed and the law is overturned in '62, '63 or '64. Notice that, due to Galarza's lobbying, pressure and organizing, he used farm workers to bring him data at the same time he educated farmworkers about how they were being oppressed. So, the distance between where knowledge is produced and where we want to affect change is completely absolutely narrowed. And scholars that are university based need to be wary of the conjecture, or the risk of speculation that they have, especially if they've been up on the ivory tower for decades. I think their graduate students actually connect them to the real world a lot more than they realize. So, Galarza is implicating farmworkers in understanding their oppression, and then bringing that forward to change federal law and he successfully does it.
The year after the Galarza finishes and the years following it, notice 1964, the UFW starts winning strikes in '65, '66 and on into the 70's. Galarza, in the overturning of the Bracero law, basically lays the foundation for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to be more successful in organizing. And Cesar and Dolores also use other things like the boycott, which were very innovative because organizing in the valley is very difficult. There was actually political violence used in the San Joaquin Valley, especially in the 1910s. And then in the 1930s, you have the largest chapter, people were being killed here for organizing in the past.
We as scholars have more space and organizers have more space to create change now. And this space was opened by people like Galarza. And when I bring the book and present it to people, I'm mostly speaking to young folks of color. I basically say, "Start with Galarza. And read Isao Fujimoto and Janaki Jagannath,” and those three I direct them to and basically Galarza shows you how brutally tough you're going to have to be. A pause there, there's a lot more to say about this.
Labor, and water, and access to land, and science are key facets to how the San Joaquin Valley has become the most productive food producing region in the history of the world. The public institution, University of California, and the federal government, and state government in California, are implicated in what happened here. The University of California Davis should trumpet how successful they were.
But they externalized a lot of the problems that were now in our environment. It's the most polluted place, it has the highest poverty and the highest hunger rates. The paradox of the place that creates the most food in the world, having the highest rates of hunger, and the most hungry folks are often farm workers picking the food, should be a paradox that drives everyone absolutely mad. It makes me so mad. I've had to temper a cold anger now. But that paradox is immoral and unethical. And we must change it, must change it.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, I think thank you, Daniel. We really want to know about the Central Valley Partnership. Let me switch gears here a little bit and ask if you can tell us what the Central Valley Partnership does and explain to our audience.
Daniel O’Connell
When I came here, I had done a ton of work that I just won't go into. But finally, I ended up at the table of what was at the time called the Fresno Partnership. And it was Fresno based. Well, they want a new name, and they're going to incorporate as a nonprofit. And I said, we should call this the Central Valley Partnership. Now it's more encompassing, and we're still pretty much in the Fresno and southern San Joaquin Valley regions. But I did that because every time I say the name, I'm carrying on the work of Isao Fujimoto.
Now, the Central Valley Partnership in its early construction was a blue green alliance with organized labor, environmental and community groups trying to come together. We seek common ground, and we try to set aside differences and in a place like Fresno, there's just friction within the movement that keeps us from moving fast and quickly forward.
Then the 2016 election happened. We moved to a regional posture; we brought in the Dolores Huerta Foundation. I'm already working very closely with the Central Labor Council. We started doing work out in Kings County. We do candidate trainings as a nonprofit, nonpartisan candidate trainings, but specific governance trainings, but specific to immigrants, women and girls, farmworkers, the LGBTQ community. We prepare the civic infrastructure for taking power. And it's happening, right now it's happening. And you see a wink at it with the reference to Eddie Valero's election and now recent reelection.
And I'll just finish on the CVP. We have monthly meetings that are multiracial, intergenerational, and broadly gender inclusive, and we're explicitly progressive. When the need comes, I stepped forward. I sued Devin Nunez, for instance. I try to take on bullies. The Fresno County board of supervisors on redistricting, we went after them. And we eventually didn't sue them, but we changed the law. So, in 10 years, we'll have fair redistricting. We do direct action, sometimes protests. We use multiplicity, and we sue and litigate. I just recently won a lawsuit against the city of Visalia when they tried to change the general plan. I'll finish by saying I'm currently, as of this moment, preparing to step back from my role as executive director to a position as a policy and research director. And I'm going to take a postdoctoral position at 55 years old at UC Merced at the Community Labor Center, to do the sequel to In the Struggle, because In the Struggle kind of stops in the 1990- 1980s.
Mallika Nocco
Daniel, we always like to ask our guests if there's anything that you would like people to know about your work, or is there any way that people who are listening to this podcast could support your work? How can we support you?
Daniel O’Connell
You are doing it now. And for me, because I'm a graduate of UC Davis, you'd know how much I love UC Davis. I lived in the domes there. And of course, to the land grant, but that you, and then your connections to the state policymakers. I'm a big optimist, things are going really well. You know, I just wanted to mention a few final things. First, is this theory of agrarian democracy. The book if you're going to synopsize, the book, economic equity is both a requisite condition and a measurable outcome for a Democratic Society.
If you're going to have democracy, you have to have equity. And equity is a measure. This is what Goldschmidt and McCannell were doing empirically. And so, when you have a place like the Westlands Water District, which the County Board of Supervisors, in which are agribusiness dominated, are the representatives, and that there's a special district that apportions voting by not one person, one vote, but by how many acres you have is how many votes you get on the Westlands Water District and other California waters. So, we basically have active forms of feudalism happening here, the workers can't vote, but they are taxed. So, taxation without representation is happening here. So, if we move forward, if you're going to have democracy, you must have equity. Economic equity is the easiest measure of it. And we are a highly inequitable society. And if we're not careful, we will lose our democracy. That's one of the lessons from here.
And then finally, I want to leave you with the handful of folks that might want to follow in this: If you're going to be this sort of scholar, you're going to almost have to unlearn everything that you've learned up to that point when you come back here, and it's not hard to unlearn it. But being humble and stepping back all of the potency of what you can do. First of all, the community will not understand how to utilize you. Folks can read our work as well. And they will pick up our language, but we do basically have to unlearn a lot of what we learned and be extremely humble, which is hard, because we're trained to be experts. So, there's so many contradictions in being a scholar and doing work in the community. But this is an invitation to those tensions. What richness happens in that space, that interstitial space between the university and our most impacted communities. I want to invite everyone into those spaces.