Coronavirus in rural America (Part CL): The most rural communities in California's Central Valley are giving up, drying up in the face of unprecedented hardship

This Priscella Vega piece in the Los Angeles Times is one of the most extraordinary and distinctive features I've read in a very long time.  As if the cities of California's Great Central Valley--Fresno, Modesto, Merced, Stockton, Visalia, Bakersfield--aren't challenging enough places to live and work, this story goes deeper into the truly rural reaches of Fresno County, population 1 million.  The dateline is Three Rocks, population 246.  Dominated by Fresno City, population 542,000, the fifth largest city in the state, Fresno County covers more than 6000 square miles, including some very remote places with few services.  Many of these communities are unincorporated.  The story suggests that even undocumented migrant workers are fed up with the deprivations of the most remote parts of California's Central Valley.  

For decades, farm labor has kept unincorporated communities alive throughout the Central Valley. But the drought is making it hard to stay. The dearth of essential resources — clean water, adequate housing and fair employment wages — has crippled towns that are easily overlooked and triggered a slow exodus to bigger places.

It can be seen in the dwindling number of people attending nonprofit-led workshops and meetings on agricultural worker rights, said Chucho Mendoza, an environmental and public health advocate who has worked with migrants and small farming families in the Central Valley for 25 years. The pandemic further hollowed out rural life.

In the Cantua Creek area, where pistachio and almond crops reign, some families are grappling with what’s next. Faced with a confluence of challenges, some are leaving; others are arguing over whether they should. Still others are determined to make it work here.

“They don’t know what to pinpoint but they’ll say, ‘We know something is wrong, but we don’t know what it is,’” Mendoza said. “Those who leave move to the next town but don’t realize hell is a lot bigger.”

Don't miss out on the entire story, which challenges so many assumptions we make about immigrant workers and what they are willing to tolerate just to be in America.    

Another major theme is loneliness and isolation as rural places--to use a term from my own upbringing--dry up and blow away.  

A Sacramento Bee story from this weekend about the impact of the drought on an almond farmer in Fresno County is here.   Another Los Angeles Times story about the drought, this one out of Needles in southeastern California, is here.