By Priscilla Enriquez, President and CEO

I have never worked in a place so incredibly rich and complex as California’s Central Valley. Its history is rooted in waves of migration from all over the globe and from within the U.S. self-determined migrants on the journey to seek the American dream of economic prosperity from the land.

“Grapes that hang like jade eggs,” exalted by author Mark Arax’s Armenian great uncle in the epic tome about the Central Valley, The Dreamt Land.

And the people who live here look like everywhere they came from. These people built this nation, the Chinese laying down railroad tracks, the Irish digging the levee trenches, the Japanese harvesting fruit, the Mexican sowing the seed, the Black descendants of enslaved people fleeing Jim Crow in the Great Migration and carrying with them artistry, labor, and democratic yearning, and the white families Oklahomans escaping Dust Bowl poverty, all converging in the new West with the dream of economic freedom. These are the stories of the Valley of California, of course, but also the story of modern America.

“The wind blows cold and then howls over the barren landscape. Hastily constructed wooden barracks. Loose wooden boards bang with the wind. Barbed wire fences and stockade walls. Guard towers with armed soldiers. The sound of emptiness permeates the land and the soul.

Distant mountains on the horizon spread like a wall separating all from freedom. Occasional storm clouds roll in, a wave across the vista, teasing with the promise of rain, but most often no drops fall: this is a desert, parched and empty. Worst of all, no one knew how long their sentence was.”

• excerpt from Secret Harvest by David Mas Masumoto,  https://www.masumoto.com/shop 

Last year, I read these words from Fresno-based peach farmer Mas Masumoto, who, as only a poet can, captured the anguish and angst over the discovery of a “lost” aunt, separated from her family during the Japanese American internment. His book Secret Harvests spoke to me. We share an Asian identity and the notion of family secrets, but more importantly, his heartbreaking story added another dimension to the story of California’s Central Valley.

The Valley, this beautiful land of promise, was also a place of imprisonment during the Japanese American internment, where over 30,000 families were temporarily detained in eight detention centers up and down this rich land. And despite the distance we believed we had from such inhuman realities, today, this minute, this second, we again live in a time when people are being racially profiled, violently abducted off the streets, children and families separated. Migrants who work the land to feed us are sent to prisons with inhumane conditions in unfamiliar places. Fear now shows up in school attendance, where empty desks mark the cost to learning. ICE detention centers are starting to proliferate across the Valley, ensnaring those who pick our lettuce, walk their children to school, shop for groceries, or serve a hot meal from a corner stand. Most are Latino, but every descendant of those who once came here seeking promise feels the weight. Once again, our core American democratic value of due process is flagrantly discarded. And still, this migration story, the story that built California into the world’s fourth-largest economy, echoes through the Valley.

There has always been a contradiction in the Valley’s story of itself. 

One version sees the Valley as a dumping ground, air choked with agricultural waste, land cheapened into warehouses of trinkets bound for doorsteps. Another holds fast to the Valley’s promise, as the center of a multicultural future, a geography of abundance where fields feed the world and classrooms prepare the next generation. 

Yet today, almost a century later, that contradiction sharpens: ICE detention centers multiply in the South Valley. So we must ask, are we a place of beauty and life, or of wanton imprisonment and the rotting fabric of humanity?

Today, I see Mas’ book as both a prescient oracle and sober litmus test of the present.

“Prisoners without a trial. Guilty of enduring a face that looked like the enemy. Americans convicted of being the wrong Americans.

Why? What did they do? How long is their punishment? The answers are trapped in the darkness of their prison. They are bound together by the faces they wear: the masks of strangers. They ask: “Does anyone know we’re here?”

But I’ll add to that, and to my colleagues with the means to act with instinct and decisiveness: 

Which Valley are you really willing to stand up for?