A New Face for Empire of San Joaquin

There may be, as the Tourist Bureau claims, many “Californias.” But, in truth, only three really count: the empire of Los Angeles; the empire of the Bay Area; and the empire of the San Joaquin Valley. These are the true “Californias,” and they have ruled the state for most of this century.

This triad is all the more interesting because, every few decades, a tectonic shift takes place and the balance of power is forever altered. Since World War II, for example, we’ve seen Los Angeles overtake San Francisco and replace it as the imperial city of the West Coast. San Francisco has assumed the secondary role of getaway city and obsessive worshiper of its Victorian past.

And now another shift has begun. The San Joaquin Valley, long the most stable of the empires, is being transformed from one kind of economic and cultural creature to another. As with San Francisco, this change started slowly and its outcome, at this point, is hard to predict. Already, however, the transformation is altering the political equation in California.

If you drive through the San Joaquin on Highway 99, this evolution--at first--remains invisible. The highway still rolls past the richest and ugliest rural landscape in America. The valley was never so much a “farm” region as it was a place where the petrochemical industry converged with agriculture.

These farms contain no farmhouses, no picket fences, only giant machines and “managers.” These are farms that seem to rise out of the dreams of Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, not Thomas Hart Benton, and their purpose always has been profit on an industrial scale.

And for decades, they have succeeded. The incredible production of cotton, grapes, almonds, broccoli, and dozens of other crops by San Joaquin farmers remains one of the hoariest truths of the California classroom. The San Joaquin Valley is the reason why agriculture is still California’s biggest business.

So it’s hard to imagine this empire on the wane. But it is. Here’s why:

* From Stockton to Fresno, huge numbers of people are flooding into the valley, and eventually they will reduce the farmers to a minority. Stockton and Los Banos now serve as bedroom communities for the mega-commuters to the Bay Area. Fresno has become the fastest-growing, large city in the state.

These new arrivals come with attitudes that are born of the city, not the farm. They have little or no connection to agriculture, and at some point their sheer numbers will begin to tilt the politics of the valley away from the farm/water/chemical axis.

* The valley is suffering environmental decline, and this decline will pit the farmers against the new arrivals. Episodes such as the alleged “cluster” of cancer cases in the farm town of McFarland are deeply troubling to the newcomers, as are Fresno water wells that are being contaminated by pesticides on an epidemic scale.

Already, we see some politicians attempting to exploit this potential rift. This spring, John K. Van de Kamp rolled into Fresno to stand at a poisoned well and promise that his initiative, Big Green, would force agriculture to clean up its act.

Partially, this was an appeal to voters in L.A. and San Francisco, but Van ke Kamp was also betting that a new day had arrived for politics in the valley. It will be interesting to see if his gamble pays off.

* Most incredible of all, farming itself is threatened by the changing economics of the valley. No one predicts farming will disappear, but new subdivisions rolling outward from the cities already are consuming alarming amounts of prime agricultural land, and no one sees an end to it.

Alan Sokolow, political science professor at UC Davis, told an agricultural conference in Sacramento recently that he could foresee the day when farming is no longer the primary business of the valley.

Sokolow did not think this was good news. Farming has already been pushed out of Southern California and the Santa Clara Valley, he said. When farmers are forced out of the San Joaquin, where will they go?

No one seems to know. And there are many other questions about the transformation of the San Joaquin that will not be answered for years. How fast, for example, is the process taking place, and who will rise in local political arenas to challenge the boys in the John Deere hats?

One thing does seem clear. The political contrast between the San Joaquin and the other two empires is fading, and the role of the valley as a counterweight to the coastal cities will continue to diminish. Little by little, and like it or not, we are becoming more like each other every day.