Cal Ag Roots Podcast

In this podcast, listeners hear about the waves of immigrants who have shaped California's agricultural empire-- the great Central Valley. Much of this podcast comes from our latest live event, "Borderlands of the San Joaquin Valley."

Janaki Jagannath describes the ways that small immigrant farmers carve out niches in the industrial agricultural landscape of the Central Valley and experiment with innovative farming techniques that bring the soil to life. Poets Marisol Baca and Aideed Medina collaborate on two poems that powerfully illustrate the inter-weaving of cultures in the Valley and that speak to the immigrant experience in a time of increasing anti-immigrant oppression. Long-time Valley activist Lupe Martinez plays folk and organizing songs on guitar throughout the podcast.

"Despite those billboards that say 'farmers feed the world,' there's a far less glamorous group of farmers that are feeding the community." –Organizer Janaki Jagannath

"We are gathered at the Filipino Hall at sunset, the sweet-smelling ladies of the Society of Mary cooing motherly to a Chicanita in Tagalog. –Poet Aideed Medina

"The Central Valley is a landscape that has been shaped by wave after wave of immigrants. From the Chinese to the Japanese to the Filipinos to the Portuguese to the Armenians to the Sikhs to the Hmong, dozens of groups of people from all around the globe, really, have dug their shovels and their fingers into California dirt." - Ildi Carlisle-Cummins, Cal Ag Roots Director

Picture your produce aisle: Strawberries. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Celery. Onions. These crops fill shopping carts across the country and a full third of them come from California. There was a time, though, when California fields grew mostly wheat. Huge tracts of the land we now know as the salad bowl of the world were then pumping out massive quantities of grain, not fruits or vegetables. In the early twentieth century California farming underwent a major transformation that created the abundance you can see in your produce-aisle today.

And one particular group of California farmers really laid the foundation for that transformation. We don’t often hear their names and many of their stories have been long-buried.

According to Isao Fujimoto, "The early success of the Japanese farmers led the Japanese to be productive farmers, but instead of being praised, they got attacked. And the attack came in the form of Alien Land Laws."

In a lot of ways, you could say Japanese immigrants started California’s produce industry. But racist immigration laws and policies tried to push them out of the rural landscape. A few influential farming families dug in, shaping the industry in powerful ways. Many others left farming as a way of preserving their families and moving forward with their lives.

As we’ll hear, the Japanese American story in California farming is about tremendous ingenuity that’s met with a pretty sinister backlash. And it’s about ugliness that’s met with some pretty powerful resistance.

And the story couldn't be more relevant right now. As Nikiko Masumoto puts it, "If we as a CA we, as a diverse, beautiful CA we, want to heal some of the wounds of the past, we have to look at what happened before and why has there been an exodus out of farming by some communities of color."

You might never look at your produce section in the same way again.

It might be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when Mexican immigrant workers were welcomed with open arms into Californian communities. The Braceros were Mexican guest workers, many of whom saved the crops left in farm fields as WWII started and young men enlisted-- some call them the forgotten members of the greatest generation. This is the story of how the Bracero program became abusive over the course of decades, eventually crumbling under organizing pressure from farm workers. And it’s also the surprising story of what that farm worker movement missed in bringing down the Bracero program-- told here by people with personal connections to the work.

Until 1982, there was a law on the books—the 1902 Reclamation Act-- that limited the size of farms allowed to use government subsidized irrigation water across the Western U.S. to just 160 acres. That’s much, much smaller than the kind of massive-scale agricultural development that characterizes California farming in general and the Central Valley in particular. This podcast tells the story of an activist group called National Land for People that fought to enforce the Reclamation Act-- and came close to achieving land reform in California's Central Valley.

When you think of California Cuisine do you imagine baby lettuces doused in olive oil and carefully arranged on white plates?

If you’ve ever driven down the Highway 99 corridor, which cuts through California’s Central Valley, you might have a different sense of the state’s contributions to global food culture. Driving 99 any hour of the day or night, from July through September, you’ll likely have to swerve around trucks mounded impossibly high with tomatoes. You’ll pass acres and acres of dense, low tomato plants being harvested by machines that spit them out into trailers bound for a string of processing facilities that dot the valley.

2015 was a record for processing tomatoes, with a projected 14.3 million tons harvested. California’s Central Valley will, yet again, play a critical role in ensuring that one of America’s favorite condiments—ketchup—remains in plentiful supply. On the surface, this cheap condiment might not seem to have anything to do with California cuisine. But, as it turns out, there’s an incredible tale that ties the two together in surprising ways.

This podcast was produced by the Cal Ag Roots Project at the California Institute for Rural Studies.