rooted in exclusion, towns fight for the right to water

 

ROOTED IN EXCLUSION, TOWNS FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO WATER By David Bacon Capital & Main, 11/17/21 https://capitalandmain.com/rooted-in-exclusion-california-towns-fight-for-the-right-to-water The American Prospect, 11/17/21 https://prospect.org/environment/rooted-in-exclusion-california-towns-fight-for-safe-drinking-water/ https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/ LANARE, CA - 2010 - Angel Hernandez, a community leader trying to organize residents to win safe water, looks with distaste at a glass of cloudy tap water. SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA -- Alberto Sanchez came to the United States without papers in the 1950s. After working for two decades, he found a home in Lanare, a tiny unincorporated community in the San Joaquin Valley, where he has lived ever since. "All the people living here then were Black, except for one Mexican family," he remembers. Lanare is one of the many unincorporated communities in rural California that lack the most basic infrastructure. According to PolicyLink, a foundation promoting economic and social equity, there are thousands of unincorporated communities throughout the U.S., mostly Black and Latino, and frequently poor, excluded from city maps - and services. PolicyLink's 2013 study "California Unincorporated: Mapping Disadvantaged Communities in the San Joaquin Valley" found that 310,000 people live in these communities scattered across the valley. They are home to some of the valley's poorest residents in one of the richest, most productive agricultural areas in the world. Today, their history of being excluded from incorporated cities affects their survival around the most critical issue facing them: access to water. LANARE, CA - 2021 - Members of Lanare Community United Alberto Sanchez, Angel Hernandez and Isabel Solorio vaccinated over 1000 people from surrounding communities beneath the awning in their community center.  Lanare residents are all working-class people, mostly Mexican immigrant farm workers.   Lanare: A History of Racial Exclusion Lanare has its origin in land theft and racial exclusion, like many similar colonias. The land on which it sits was originally the home of the Tachi band of the Yokut people. It was taken from them and given by Mexican governor Pío Pico of California as a land grant to Manuel Castro, two years before California was seized from Mexico in 1848. Castro's Rancho Laguna de Tache was then fought over by a succession of owners until an English speculator, L.A. Nares, established a town and gave it his own name. From 1912 to 1925 Lanare had a post office and a station on the Laton and Western Railway.      Lanare drew its water from the Kings River. The larger town up the road even changed its name to Riverdale to advertise its proximity to the watercourse. But big farmers tapped the Kings in the Sierras to irrigate San Joaquin Valley's vineyards and cotton fields. Instead of flowing past Lanare and Riverdale, in most years it became a dry riverbed. By the 1950s Tulare Lake, the river's terminus, had disappeared. With no river, people left. The families who stayed in Lanare, or moved there, were those who couldn't live elsewhere. Paul Dictos, Fresno County assessor-recorder, has identified thousands of racially restrictive covenants he calls "the mechanism that enabled the people in authority to maintain residential segregation that effectively deprived people of color from achieving home ownership." One such covenant, written in 1952, said, "This property is sold on condition it is not resold to or occupied by the following races: Armenian, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Negros, Filipinos or Chinese." Excluded from Fresno, 30 miles away, as well as from Hanford, 23 miles away, and even from Riverdale, a stone's throw down the highway, Black families found homes in Lanare. For farm laborers, truck drivers and poor rural working families, living in Lanare was cheaper. By 2000 Lanare had 540 residents. A decade later, 589. Most people moved into trailers and today are farmworkers in the surrounding fields. A third live under the poverty line, with half the men making less than $22,000 per year, and half the women less than $16,000. With no river, Lanare had to get its water from a well. And in the late 1990s residents discovered that chemicals, especially arsenic, were concentrated in the aquifer below this low-lying area of the San Joaquin Valley. They organized Community United in Lanare and got a $1.3 million federal grant for a plant to remove the arsenic. When the plant failed, the water district they'd formed went into receivership, leaving families paying over $50 a month for water they couldn't use. Community United in Lanare banded together with many of those unincorporated settlements suffering the same problem, and began to push the state to take responsibility for supplying water. California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) filed suit on their behalf, saying California's Safe Drinking Water Act required the state to formulate a Safe Drinking Water Plan. Then former CRLA attorneys set up a new organization, the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, which filed more suits. "We organized to make the state respond," says community activist Isabel Solorio. "We got stories in the media and took delegations to Sacramento many times." State Sen. Bill Monning, who gained firsthand knowledge of California's rural poverty as a lawyer for the United Farm Workers, wrote a bill to provide funding for towns like Lanare. SB 200, the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) Act, finally passed in 2019, providing $1.4 billion over a decade to fund drinking water projects, consolidate unsustainable systems and subsidize water delivery in low-income communities. LANARE, CA - 2021 - Lanare residents have been fighting for drinkable water for over a decade.  They installed the tanks for cleaning arsenic from the water, but the treatment plant failed. LANARE, CA - 2010 - Juventino Gonzalez, a community leader who helped start the struggle for safe water, walks next to the abandoned gas station next to the highway.  Today it is still there, although the old Hancock gas sign has disappeared. LANARE, CA - 2021 - In the middle of the Lanare colonia is a huge junkyard with old house trailers that provide living space for people with no money to live elsewhere.

[. . .]

PHOTOESSAY ON POVERTY IN TULARE COUNTY WINS SF PRESS CLUB AWARD A photo series about the San Joaquin Valley during the pandemic just won the first place award from the San Francisco Press Club 2021 awards: TULARE COUNTY DURING THE PANDEMIC - THE HARD PRICE OF POVERTY By David Bacon Capital and Main, 8/3/20 https://capitalandmain.com/tulare-county-during-pandemic-price-of-poverty-0803 http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2020/08/tulare-county-during-pandemic-hard.html This series, and two additional ones, also swept the first place awards for photography from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.   COMING EXHIBITIONS IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH / EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE October 24 - December 19, 2021 Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, KS January 23 – March 20, 2022. San Joaquin County Historical Society and Museum 11793 Micke Grove Rd, Lodi, CA MORE THAN A WALL - THE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS OF THE BORDER February 22 - May 22, 2022 San Francisco Public Library DEPORTATIONS Rescheduled for a date when the gallery reopens Uri-Eichen Gallery, Chicago   Online Interviews and Presentations   Exploitation or Dignity - What Future for Farmworkers UCLA Latin American Institute Based on a new report by the Oakland Institute, journalist and photographer David Bacon documents the systematic abuse of workers in the H-2A program and its impact on the resident farmworker communities, confronted with a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXKa2lHJXMs David Bacon on union solidarity with Iraqi oil worker unions Free City Radio - CKUT 27/10/2021 - https://soundcloud.com/freecityradio/oct-27-2021-ckut-27102021-david-bacon-on-union-solidarity-with-iraqi-oil-worker-unions   Organizing during COVID, the intrinsic value of the people who grow our food Sylvia Richardson - Latin Waves Media How community and union organizers came together to get rights for farm workers during COVID, and how surviving COVID has literally been an act of resistance. https://latinwavesmedia.com/wordpress/organizing-during-covid-the-intrinsic-value-of-the-people-who-grow-our-food/   Report Details Slavery-Like Conditions For Immigrant Guest Workers Rising Up With Sonali Kohatkar https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/report-details-slavery-conditions-immigrant-guest-workers The Right to Remain http://www.franknews.us/interviews/415/the-right-to-remain Beware of Pity http://www.franknews.us/interviews/525/beware-of-pity En Español   Ruben Luengas - #EnContacto Hablamos con David Bacon de los migrantes y la situación de México frente a los Estados Unidos por ser el principal país de llegada a la frontera de ese país. https://rubenluengas.com/2021/03/video-mexico-estados-unidos-migracion-y-suenos-rotos-encontacto/ Jornaleros agrícolas en EEUU en condiciones más graves por Covid-19: David Bacon SomosMas99 con Agustin Galo Samario https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQSvM9s1lw "Los fotógrafos tomamos partido" Entrevista por Melina Balcázar Moreno - Milenio.com Laberinto http://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/david_baconm-fotografia-melina_balcazar-laberinto-milenio_0_959904035.html David Bacon comparte su mirada del trabajo agrícola de migrantes mexicanos en el Museo Archivo de la Fotografia http://www.cultura.cdmx.gob.mx/comunicacion/nota/0038-18   Online Photography Exhibitions   Documentary Matters -  View from the US  Social Documentary Network Four SDN photographers explore themes of racial justice, migration, and #MeToo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWl-uENA7SQ&t=1641s   There's More Work to be Done Housing Assistance Council and National Endowment for the Arts This exhibition documents the work and impact of the struggle for equitable and affordable housing in rural America, inspired by the work of George “Elfie” Ballis. https://www.thereismoreworktobedone.com/david-bacon   Dark Eyes A beautiful song by Lila Downs honoring essential workers, accompanied by photographs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdC2gE3SNWw A video about the Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14TvAj5nS08ENzWhw3Oxra4LMNKJCLF4z/view In the FIelds of the North Online Exhibit Los Altos History Museum https://www.losaltoshistory.org/exhibits/in-the-fields-of-the-north/ Virtual Tour - In the Fields of the North History Museum of Tijuana Recorrido Virtual de la Exposicion - En los campos del norte Museo de Historia de Tijuana https://www.facebook.com/542258639265202/videos/659536991515786   WORK AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: The David Bacon Archive exhibition at Stanford Libraries https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon/browse Exhibited throughout the pandemic in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford. The online exhibition (https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon), which includes additional content not included in the physical show, is accessible to everyone, and is part of an accessible digital spotlight collection that includes significant images from this body of work. For a catalog: (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/NonVendorPubOrderform2017.pdf)   IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH / EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE Photographs and text by David Bacon University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte 302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9” paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.) order the book on the UC Press website: ucpress.edu/9780520296077 use source code  16M4197  at checkout, receive a 30% discount En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF: https://www.colef.mx Los Angeles Times reviews In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte - click here   THE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com Other Books by David Bacon - Otros Libros The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013) http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328 Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants  (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473074/communities-without-borders/#bookTabs=1 The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520244726/the-children-of-nafta En Español:   EL DERECHO A QUEDARSE EN CASA  (Critica - Planeta de Libros) http://www.planetadelibros.com.mx/el-derecho-a-quedarse-en-casa-libro-205607.html HIJOS DE LIBRE COMERCIA (El Viejo Topo) http://www.tienda.elviejotopo.com/prestashop/capitalismo/1080-hijos-del-libre-comercio-deslocalizaciones-y-precariedad-9788496356368.html For more articles and images, see  http://dbacon.igc.org and http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com and https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums

Copyright © 2021 David Bacon Photographs and Stories, All rights reserved. you're on this list because of your interest in david bacon's photographs and stories Our mailing address is: David Bacon Photographs and Stories address on request Oakland, Ca 94601