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 “A Tale of Two Valleys” takes place in 2025 and portrays
a future for the San Joaquin Valley characterized by an increasing
wealth gap, geographic separation and privatized services for those who can afford them. This is tempered only by a small, slowly emerging Latino middle-class.
In the story, it's graduation day at the University of California, Merced, and the commencement speaker is explaining to the Class of 2025 that they are the best hope for the region.
GRADUATION DAY 2025
Rafael Hernandez had all
the right credentials to talk about the plight of poorly educated
Latinos facing the “digital divide” that kept the fruits
of technology beyond the grasp of so many. Born in Mexico, educated
at Berkeley and then UC Davis, the successful, agricultural entrepreneur
was a natural choice to give the Commencement Address to the University of California, Merced’s
graduating class in 2025.
As he stepped to the microphone on the outdoor
podium overlooking Lake Yosemite, he surveyed the Class of 2025.
Parents and relatives continued to trickle into the stadium due
to traffic snarls that had become commonplace throughout the region.
(As anyone could tell you, for the last 15 years, elected officials
and planners had been playing a game of transportation catch-up
they could never win.)
This year’s class, like last year’s,
was predominantly of Latino descent. By this point in time, the
Valley’s Anglo population was more than used to being in the
minority.
“Congratulations Class of 2025. You have
come a long way. You and your families should be proud. While I
recognize this is a day for celebration, here at the outset I am
pressed by conscience to admit that while listening to Chancellor
Woodall’s gracious opening remarks, I scanned your happy faces
and I realized you here today are the exceptions and the journey
for our community is far from over. I should warn you, I may step
on some toes this afternoon. But I cannot, in good faith, let what
I am about to say go unsaid.
“The good news of course, the wonderful news,
is that once again today, the great American dream of education
is fulfilled. You have worked hard, and you’re entitled. Your
adventure is just beginning. To all the students sitting here, and
all the parents and grandparents who sacrificed to make this possible,
I know I speak for everyone in saying that we honor you and offer
you our most sincere congratulations.
“But my friends, as you leave the gates of
this fine university this afternoon realize you are entering a Valley
where many go without, earn too little and even fight to breathe.
“Friends, parents, alumni, distinguished
graduates of the Class of 2025, I have one sobering question: Where
did we go wrong?”
REGRETS
“Could we have taken a right turn back at
the turn of the century? Is there a way out of the two-tiered society
we have here in the San Joaquin Valley? Let’s look back for
a moment at our recent history to see whether we can learn from
our experience.
“Now, most of you are too young to remember
the excitement generated when Hewlett-Packard announced that it
would open a plant just down the road in Los Baños. Hundreds
lined up for the new jobs, but very few of us gained employment.
No, the jobs went to people with college degrees and, at that time
anyway, too few of our people were even going on to college.
“All too often we thought that a high school
degree would be more than enough to get a job. After all, who needs
a college degree to clean houses or flip hamburgers or pick cotton
or peaches? Then some of the farm jobs started to disappear. High
technology came to the farm with the invention of the automated
strawberry picker and other tools that put people out of work. By
2010, the unemployment rate in much of the San Joaquin Valley hit
28%, even as the rest of the country was enjoying a boom economy
and the Valley’s high-tech industry was taking off.
“Agri-business became more mechanized. What
with the increasing application of biotechnology and new farming
techniques, everyone needed a college degree to be a farmer. By
2010 many of the jobs that migrant workers used to fill had been
exported back to Mexico, so those who had come north for work, brought
their families, and re-located their lives here in California had
neither homes to go back to in Mexico nor jobs here in California.
WALLS AND EXCLUSION
“That’s about when the gated communities
started raising their walls. The split between ‘The Two Valleys’
was announced in The Merced Sun-Star in a series of articles in
2011. They published the statistics-the low test scores of Latinos
in the public schools and the high SATs of the those graduating
from mostly private schools; the immense differences in incomes
for different ethnic groups. That series of articles should have
been enough to spark the political will to do something about the
problem, but, as usual, nothing was done.
“Throughout the next decade the white and
rich got richer, the poor and dark got poorer. Why? Why was it so
difficult for many of us to climb on the gravy train of the growing
California economy? Was it racism? Were we purposely excluded? Was
it Latino culture that placed less emphasis on education than most
European or Asian cultures? I meet too many well-educated Latinos—even
as over-educated as myself—to be willing to accept that our
culture limits our academic performance. Was it the nature of the
new technology, which demanded more education than did industrial
technology? Or was it all of the above?”
TECHNOLOGY FOR ALL?
“One of my teachers, Manuel Castells, used
to talk about the ‘black holes of informational capitalism.’
That’s the way he described the new pockets of poverty in
both developed and developing worlds.
“Information technology worked to lift the
rich ever higher, but unlike industrial technology, jobs using information
technology require a lot more than a high school education. After
missing the train of information technology, the poor and uneducated
sank even deeper into a relative poverty that was greater than what
they suffered prior to the introduction of information technology.
“His argument was pretty simple: Industrial
technology was a tide that lifted all boats. Henry Ford hired a
lot of immigrants who barely knew English. With only a high school
education, they could go to work on the assembly line and earn a
pretty good wage, enough to raise a family and buy a house in Flint
or Dearborn or Detroit. Not so for Mexican immigrants to the San
Joaquin Valley.
“A high school education wasn’t enough
to gain admission into the information elite, so most Mexican immigrants
had to settle for low-paying service work or jobs in the fields
that paid much less than those industrial jobs on the assembly line,
most of which have been exported anyway. And every time one or two
Mexican-Americans climbed up the educational ladder to join the
info-elite, five or ten more immigrants came across the border to
replace them at the bottom of the pyramid.
“We need to know whether Castells was right,
because the story is not over. We now find ourselves in a society
that is deeply divided. No one knows better than you, who are now
graduating from college, how difficult it is to straddle the Two
Valleys. On the one hand many of you see your parents and your uncles
and your cousins living in the barrio and laboring in low-paying
jobs. On the other hand you see your white classmates playing tennis
and driving their cars off campus to go skiing in the Sierra on
the weekends. And, let me say this, it is not their fault if they
want to have some fun!
THE TWO VALLEYS
“But you also find it hard to blame the kids
in the gangs who paint their initials on the high gates of those
walled communities. What do they have to look forward to in a society
that seems to want to deny them any opportunities to break out of
the barrio?
“Nevertheless, you are crossing the great
divide. You of Latino origins who are gaining your graduate and
undergraduate degrees are our best hope for healing the wounds that
our society is suffering.
“But, we have a great challenge and a great
opportunity facing us here in the Valley. California is on its way
toward becoming the first majority Latino state in the union. We
will elect more Latinos to Congress. We will change the face of
electoral politics in the United States.
“We must step up to the responsibilities
that will be vested in us by the power of our numbers. Or we will
remain, in effect, an underclass of under-educated, underemployed
peasants. Sure, some of your parents attended college. Yes, we are
beginning to see a Latino middle class in California. But you know
as well as I that class divisions in California remain closely tied
to race and racism, both between Anglos and Latinos, and among middle-class
Latinos and other new immigrants.
“These are harsh words. But these are harsh
times. You all know about the white and the able fleeing from Fresno
and Bakersfield. You all know about the pitched battles between
the gangs and the police. You all know about the roving bands of
unemployed and the growing fear of coastal Californians who no longer
want to risk traveling in the ‘wilds’ of our Valley.
“We cannot allow this rift between the Two
Valleys to continue. We must find ways to heal the divide and grow
a civil society that joins light and dark, rich and poor, in a way
that reduces the distances among us.
“Well, Class of 2025, this has been a somber
talk, I’m afraid. But as I look at your beautiful, young faces
here in front of me today, I speak for many in my generation who
hope a season of renewal for the Valley is ahead of us. You are
our last best hope. I wish you well.”
____________________________________________________________
"Of late, sadly, a new social class seems
to be emerging—the downwardly mobile. Many people who have
struggled to gain a foothold in the working class or the middle
class now find themselves slipping back—losing their homes,
losing their jobs, losing even their self-respect. They are as much
victims of the social and economic history of the Valley as of contemporary
events, victims of the fierce struggle for what little wealth remains
after the economic elite slices the pie."
—Gerald Haslam, “Other
Californians” in The Other California, 1994
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