Can Politics and Poverty in Fresno Change?

Driving down the last steep grade of Tejon Pass, you come upon a fold in the earth of middle California where the tentacles of Los Angeles end and a new place begins. If you’ve never made the trip, the crossing is one of the true demarcations in the American landscape, the West’s Mason-Dixon line, though you won’t discern it at first because the plain below hides under a cover of soot and smog.

Not until you descend into the muck, and the plug in your ear pops and your nose takes in the full hit of dairy dung, do you know you’ve arrived in the San Joaquin Valley. Set apart by three mountain ranges and a great delta to the north, the 250-mile-long flatland exists in a state of geographic and psychic exile.

Those of us who dwell here have come to understand that we’re not really living in California. We’re living in a kin of Texas or Missouri or Oklahoma plopped down in an act of defiance, where barons of land, water and sun have been running the show for 150 years.

The first of their bunch, not a few of them Southerners smarting from the Civil War, took on the task of erasing what the earth had been. They turned desert and marsh into the most prolific crop-raising region in the nation. Now their more polished heirs are busy with a second remaking, razing enough farmland to turn the interior of California into a vast bloom of suburbs and distribution centers.

My hometown got its start in 1871 when the railroad man named Stanford decided to lay down tracks on the hot, dusty plain and peddle the lots — it was not an easy sell at first — for a place called Fresno, “ash tree” in Spanish. Decade after decade, farmers and developers, often one and the same, joined hands with politicians and bureaucrats to declare their newest scheme for progress. The workers, imported by way of one epic migration or another and whose toil had actually transformed the plain, had little say in what was built and what was left behind.

Boom to bust, the power brokers have spread the town from the reach of one river in the south to the reach of another river out north. They’re now presiding over the fifth-largest city in the state in a metropolitan region of nearly one million people. On the Southside, they’ve hollowed out a crater of neglect, and this is where neighborhoods of Latino, Black and Hmong residents live in some of the worst concentrated poverty in America. On the Northside, they’ve built new hospitals, new schools, new housing tracts and shopping centers to lure upwardly mobile Fresnans to a land where none of that suffering exists.

Old mayors, new mayors, have called it “a tale of two cities,” but no mayor has been able to make the divide less stark. In the span of 15 miles, from the wealthy subdivisions and megachurches of the Northside to the meth-fueled hustle of the Southside, life expectancy drops 20 years. Just beyond downtown, the wide swath of urban poverty finally gives way to the mad plantings of vineyards and orchards. Venture deep enough into Fresno County, and you’ll find, tucked inside the bounty like a great shame, rural poverty of the most abject kind.

The one thing Northside and Southside share, and it is no trivial feature, is air that is often ranked as the most polluted in the nation. But there’s a difference in this too. The lawyers, doctors, developers, nut growers and pesticide dealers have second homes along the coast, in Carmel and Pebble Beach and Morro Bay, to restore their sinuses and lungs. The farmworkers sit on their lawn chairs after picking the valley’s endless harvest and watch the poison-specked sunset turn the most glorious pink, orange and purple.

Growing up in Fresno or Bakersfield or Tulare or Merced introduces a cruel calculation. At a certain age, you are given a choice. You either succumb to the vision of growth eating growth and try to make a living off the action, or you fight it knowing you probably won’t succeed. That the poor in our valley had been denied the leverage to push back on the power structure occurred to me as a boy when Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and their campesinos, raising Aztec eagle flags and chanting “Viva la causa,” showed up on our streets. It was the mid-to-late 1960s, and they had organized a union to protest the brutality of the grape harvest. For the first time, I saw Mexican migrants come out of the shadows of the vineyards and put fear on the faces of white growers.

Contracts were signed and wages and working conditions improved. But the dream of a place that shared its fruits lasted all too briefly. The union faded from the scene. The big-ag boys, forever hating Chavez and Huerta for their gall, grew only richer and more entrenched.

Last summer, I picked up the shrinking local newspaper, The Fresno Bee, and saw the return of a force a half-century dormant. Three reformers, all women, were messing with the gravity of things. In the name of environmental justice, Sandra Celedon, Veronica Garibay and Phoebe Seaton were advocating on behalf of neighborhoods long neglected, mobilizing residents who had never been mobilized before. In Los Angeles or San Francisco, agitation of this sort was the usual jostle. Here, civic leaders saw it as a subversive force. A local supervisor accused the trio of peddling climate-change beliefs that did not align with the “values of Fresno County.” A Northside City Council member called them “poverty pimps” for rallying low-income families opposed to industrial polluters in their backyards.

I encountered the women a decade earlier when they were just starting to build a valleywide movement. They were targeting cities, towns and unincorporated communities where people had been denied the most basic needs: clean water and clean air, a functioning sewer system, drivable roads, parks and playgrounds and neighborhoods protected from floods.

Operating under two separate organizations, Fresno Building Healthy Communities and the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, they had succeeded in ways I would not have guessed. They secured enough funding from the California Endowment, a nonprofit foundation with more than $4 billion in assets, to send teams of organizers into the poorest communities to right those injustices. Often, it took years of troublemaking — activists and residents working side by side — to realize change.

The three women shared an unflinching quality, though each expressed it differently. Celedon, 38, didn’t hide her displeasure. She had no problem throwing in an expletive to get her point across. Garibay, 36, was more low-key and brought a scholar’s precise arguments to her activism. Seaton, 44, a lawyer with degrees from California’s best universities, saw angles that others didn’t. She was helping write laws in Sacramento and suing government agencies that failed to comply with them.

The crew of organizers they mentored — mostly young, female, college-educated, Spanish-speaking — did not tire. Together, by means of community protest and legal challenge and local ballot measures that they conceived and helped pass, they were bringing change to the most hidebound of places. A shift in power and public spending was occurring not only in Fresno but also in small towns and rural settlements throughout the valley.

It was one kind of challenge to the status quo when they advocated for state legislation that forced the citrus town Exeter to extend its water to the sticks of Tooleville. Or when they helped secure an $8 million grant to build a multifamily apartment complex in the farmworker town Lamont. But now Garibay and Seaton were teaming up with Celedon to kill an initiative called Measure C, a $7 billion sales tax to fund highways and roads across Fresno County for the next 30 years. This was civic heresy.

The two previous Measure C’s built the roads and highways that fueled four decades of sprawl in Fresno and adjacent Clovis, luring waves of upper- and middle-class families to suburbia’s frontier. Sprawl, at least the way it was done here, made inequality a defining feature of place. Few developers chose to revitalize the crumbling neighborhoods in Fresno’s heart when acres of open farmland beckoned in every direction. Perversely, poverty turned land speculation into a bonanza. Putting more miles between Southside decay and the new subdivisions filled with three-bedroom, two-bathroom dreams became the easiest sales job ever.

Like a giant Ponzi scheme, each new growth area gave an initial boost to the economy but over the long haul didn’t generate enough revenue to pay for its own streets, sewers, police and fire services. Fresno was stuck in the perpetual state of having to add new subdivisions and retail centers to pay for the losses of the previous ones.

The public hearing to unveil the latest version of Measure C was held last July in a small meeting room atop a vacant downtown casino. Sixteen leaders from Fresno County, mayors of big cities and small towns and a county supervisor, sat on the regional Council of Governments that oversaw the measure. They were prepared to show the pie charts of funding, hear a grumble or two from the Southside and vote to send the measure to ballot, where voters countywide would pass it as they had before.

But the hearing did not go as expected. Southside and rural Latinos, old and young, filled the small meeting room and two adjoining chambers and spilled into the hallway. They had come to deliver a message that Measure C shorted their side of town, ignored the hardships of rural communities and put more money in the pockets of the same wealthy Northsiders. “Fresno can do better,” their signs urged. But they never got a chance to speak. There weren’t enough Spanish-language headsets to go around, for one thing.

The hearing was moved to the following week, this time at City Hall, this time with plenty of headsets. Jerry Dyer, the longtime Fresno police chief and now mayor, showed up with an 11th-hour compromise. Measure C would devote only 15 percent of its revenue to highways and major roads. By contrast, the first Measure C, from 1986, used 74 percent of its revenue for them. And now Dyer was willing to increase the slice of the pie to poor rural cities by tens of millions of dollars. This was fair, he said. This was the final plan. “It has enough good things in it that I’m hopeful we can get this passed on the 2022 ballot.”

Southside and rural residents weren’t buying it. The extra money wouldn’t begin to make up for the broken sidewalks, potholed streets, flood-prone roads and buses that did not run from rural towns to city hospitals. Celedon, Garibay and Seaton didn’t trust that far-right Republicans on the county board of supervisors would direct enough of the revenue to forgotten communities. And who knew what the rural mayors and council members might do with their bigger slices. A majority of them were now Latino, but too often, like the white politicians they replaced, they were passing out subsidies to developers.

At hearing’s end, the Council of Governments voted 11-to-4 to move the measure forward. “Tonight demonstrates that decision makers have no respect for community engagement and community voices,” Garibay said. “I don’t think that the public easily forgets.” The public in this case was the invisible faces now made visible by a justice movement. On the matter of Measure C, the Southside would see the Northside at the ballot box.

Early this spring, the vines pushing leaf, I took the highway that splits Fresno in two and drove to an office building on the Southside to meet with Celedon and Garibay. Seaton was busy in Sacramento trying to persuade regulators to curtail the pollution from the valley’s megadairies.

Though I resided on the Northside, my trips to the Southside took me to the neighborhoods where I grew up. Being Armenian, my family was barred from living on the fancy side of town for a half-century. No Negroes, Asians, Armenians or Mexicans, the deeds read.

My father, Ara, and mother, Flora, found a simple A-frame house on the Southside and introduced themselves to the neighbors. We made for a wonderful little ghetto. On Saturday nights, my cousin and I would repeatedly prank-call Fong’s Chinese Dinners and order tacos, enchiladas and bean burritos. “So sorry,” the cook’s patient wife would reply to each order. “No Mexican. We’re Chinese.”

The racist deeds were no longer legal by the time Celedon and Garibay crossed the border with their families in the early 1990s. Disdain for the working poor, however, remained a cardinal feature of California. Pete Wilson, the governor at the time, backed Proposition 187, a ballot measure to ban undocumented migrants from using schools and hospitals. The Save Our State initiative, as it was called, passed by an overwhelming majority. It took a Federal District Court to declare it unconstitutional.

Celedon grew up in Calwa, a tiny unincorporated community on the far Southside. Garibay was raised in Parlier, a farm town to the southeast. Their fathers had migrated between Mexico and California for years, picking valley crops and then returning home for winter. Those treks were now over. They were in El Norte for good.

Each family lived in a converted garage owned by migrants who crossed earlier. Life here felt a lot like life back home. Neighbors pitched in to help neighbors. Everyone was waiting for his or her green card to arrive. Some would wait a decade and more.

Celedon’s father, Gonzalo, left the fruit fields to slaughter chickens. His gloves were braided with steel. Her mother, Maria, cleaned rooms at a Days Inn. In their constant search for work more gainful, they landed at a company that manufactured shingles. After years of scrimping, their wages made for a down payment on a house. “The lessons my parents imparted were simple ones,” Celedon said. “There was no shame in any work, and always bring honor to the family.”

She adapted to school in ways her older brother and sister could not. English flew off her tongue; she won the Lion’s Club prize for her essay on the meaning of the U.S. flag. She was 16 when her green card arrived. No longer hidden, she planned for college, a privilege not afforded her siblings. Her brother and sister found good jobs after their father had a stroke. “My brother bought me my very first computer. My sister paid for my books. Their sacrifice made me.”

On her morning bus rides to Fresno State, Celedon studied the divide that kept laborers in one place and their bosses in another. “Our side of town, full of liquor stores and fast food, was not designed for people to thrive.” To make the divide less downright, she chose a career providing health care to the poor.

Like Celedon, Garibay recalled the nonstop work of her parents, Nemecio and Maria, to provide for their six children. She was 14 when her parents finally saved enough money to buy a house in Parlier. “It was a new stucco model in a new subdivision,” she said. “We were so excited the day my father got the keys. I remember my mother finishing up her shift at Ruiz Foods and walking through the door. None of the furniture was there yet, but it was ours. We fell asleep on the carpet.”

Once a week, her mother walked them to the library to check out books. Unlike other farmworkers, her father did not take his children to the vineyards during harvest to help out. He was a man who could fall into silences, but he pulled her aside one day and said this: “You know, in this world, they can take a lot of things away from you. One moment you have it, and the next it’s snatched away. But no one can take a college degree away from you.”

All six children graduated from a university. When it came time to pick a school, Garibay chose the faraway coast at U.C. Santa Barbara. In a law-and-society class, learning for the first time about social justice, she could feel her purpose shift. After graduation, she went to work in the Fresno office of California Rural Legal Assistance, advocating for farmworker communities. The office was shaped by a brilliant Texan named Jack Daniel, who preached that the flow of rivers and groundwater, denied to the poor, hogged by the rich, was a civil rights issue too.

Garibay befriended Seaton, an attorney at C.R.L.A. whose father was a civil rights lawyer and mother a librarian. Manhattan transplants, they had given their Berkeley High daughter the extracurricular choice of Hebrew school or basketball. She tried juggling both and then picked point guard. After graduating from U.C. Berkeley, she went off to Guatemala to bake bread for orphans and interview victims of military death squads.

In 2013, Seaton and Garibay left C.R.L.A. to start the Leadership Counsel. That same year, Celedon took over the Fresno office of Building Healthy Communities. With overlapping missions, the three women were now a team.

That first summer, Celedon asked her youth-engagement group to set up an evening workshop with Southside teenagers. Meet at the downtown library and bring enough Hmong sausage and rice to feed 40. Get the kids to tell you about community needs from their vantage. And keep it fun. “It got off to a slow start,” Celedon recalled. “And then a 13-year-old Latina raises her hand and asks, ‘Why aren’t you talking about parks?’ And the whole room of kids lights up. ‘Yeah, dude. Parks,’ another said. ‘They suck.’”

And that’s how a citywide initiative called Measure P began. The kids visited Southside playgrounds and parks and took inventory. Broken restrooms, broken basketball hoops, broken recreation programs. Park funding in Fresno, never flush, had been slashed by 53 percent. Builders were resistant to paying a citywide park fee. National rankings of urban green space found that of the 100 largest cities in the United States, Fresno sat at the very bottom. Its parks-to-residents ratio was so pitiful, one study found, that street medians were being counted as green space.

With the backing of the former mayor Ashley Swearengin, who led the region’s largest community philanthropic foundation, Celedon undertook a signature drive to qualify Measure P for the ballot. If passed, the sales tax would raise roughly $1 billion over the next 30 years for parks and arts.

Dyer, who was police chief at the time, loudly opposed it. So did Lee Brand, who was then the mayor; the local Chamber of Commerce; and patriarchs of the Assemi family, the city’s most influential farmers and home builders. The streets weren’t safe, they argued. The only sales tax Fresno should be entertaining was one to fund more cops and firefighters.

The argument struck Celedon and Garibay as absurd. Parks and arts gave kids a way not to fall into gangs. Police and fire already commanded a lion’s share of the city’s general fund. During the talks, police and fire laid down an ultimatum, demanding 50 percent of Measure P’s funds. “We tried to negotiate, but they wouldn’t budge,” Celedon said. “So we told them to go to hell.”

The campaign unearthed such racism that Black youths canvassing the Northside for Measure P were threatened. “You’re knocking on the wrong door,” homeowners told them. If they cared about their safety, they’d hurry back to “their side of town.” Celedon had to dispatch her white friends to gather signatures on the Northside.

Measure P landed on the 2018 ballot. Reflecting the city’s chasm, it received 52 percent of the vote. Sales-tax measures almost always require a two-thirds vote. Celedon’s legal counsel argued that because Measure P was initiated by citizens and not elected officials, only a simple majority was needed. An appellate court agreed. Measure P, in its first year alone, raised $42 million. “Mayor Dyer couldn’t be more happy,” Celedon said, noting his about-face. “The Latino council members who don’t always support our efforts are taking a victory lap.”

This past fall, the women and their organizers went at it again, rallying support against Measure C, the sprawl-inducing tax. Carrying a message of “Broken Roads, Broken Promises,” they knocked on doors of Southside voters and ventured deep into the Northside, too. They were surprised by how their message resonated across the divide. Northsiders told them the previous Measure C’s hadn’t improved the quality of their lives either. “It was the friendliest conversations we’ve ever had with conservative voters,” Garibay said. On Election Day, 58 percent of the county voted in favor of the measure, well shy of the necessary two-thirds. Civic leaders, for their part, have vowed to bring Measure C back.

I’d like to believe my hometown is starting to change direction. The Tower District, the hip Southside locale, hums. More young Northsiders now venture downtown for food and drink. Mayor Dyer is right to boast about high-density housing finally being built along Blackstone Avenue, the eight-mile long mecca of fast food that laces both sides of town.

And yet the subdividers continue their march to the hinterlands. On the far Northside, they’re turning a stretch of old farm ground into the new-new suburbs. Developers and home builders took over the board of the local Community Medical Centers and oversaw an expansion of the Clovis hospital that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This is right in the middle of the new growth area, where the same board members own land and businesses and are seeking to build more.

The trio, I fret, may only slow the stampede. “In so many of our fights,” Seaton said, “the powers that be had a chance to meet us halfway and be part of the victory. Instead, almost out of sheer stubbornness, they’ve opposed us. If they just saw the logic and morality of the people whose sweat built this valley getting their fair share, we’d all be better off.”

Mark Arax is a California writer whose most recent book is “The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California.” Devin Oktar Yalkin is a photographer based in Los Angeles who has previously covered Joe Biden, dirt-track racing, live music and falcons for the magazine.