Awakening the Social Sleepwalkers
Technologies of Agricultural Research Accountability in a Land Grab University System
Aaron Alvarado
Introduction
Whenever I close my eyes, I can easily imagine the country roads that connected my small hometown in the San Joaquin Valley to the other rural towns and bigger cities in the region, spanning orchards, waterways, and agricultural fields. Those country road drives constituted a liminal space for those who aren’t necessarily involved in the day-to-day activities of agricultural labor. In my youth, I often understood the fields as something to slowly observe on Sunday afternoon car rides. My eyes would struggle to stay awake as I watched the rows and rows of carefully planted crops pass and lull me to sleep.
I had a different relationship to the fields than did my father, who spent his childhood and young adult years as a farmworker. My privilege of seeing those rows of agriculture as a landscape that inspired sleep contrasted heavily with my father’s stories about these roads as he would often point out where in the fields he would work and what type of crops he would pick at different times of the year. These stories of labor and agricultural harvest animated how I was introduced to the valley.
As a whole, the San Joaquin Valley is known as the most agriculturally productive region in California and has been so ever since post-war industrialization transformed much of the agricultural land in Southern California into a sprawling metropolis. As such, the relationship between the Valley and agriculture was also hotly contested. Growing up, I constantly heard stories about labor organizers like César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farmworkers as the main people who were politically invested in the valley. As national figures, their legacy was memorialized and celebrated as part of our public-school system’s embrace of a kind of liberal multiculturalism. While they were household names, it wasn’t until much later in college and graduate school that I learned about the many other peoples who were integral to liberatory struggles in the San Joaquin Valley.
In my ethnic studies classes, I learned about Philip Veracruz and Larry Itliong who were important figures in the history of agricultural labor organizing and the creation and operations of the UFW. Similarly, in my graduate research about the valley, I learned about a set of professors who were invested in studying and advocating for rural communities including farmworkers like Carrey McWilliams, Ernesto Galarza, Paul Schuster Taylor, and Isao Fujimoto, while also learning about the research that Ruth Wilson Gilmore did into the underdevelopment of the San Joaquin Valley in the context of California’s prison boom in the twentieth century. Learning about these individuals in classrooms and on my own helped address a larger gap in my education about the valley, as I tracked a larger network of people that were engaged with the valley as a site of struggle for abolition, environmental justice, food justice, and racial justice.
As such, what I grew increasingly interested in during my graduate studies was the visible-yet-invisible genealogy of academics who were historically committed to envisioning a liberatory future for the valley and other agricultural regions of California. These professors focused on a host of issues related to farmworkers, labor, and agriculture; however, many of them like Galarza, McWilliams, Taylor, and Fujimoto never made it into my region’s K-12 curriculum. Besides those that I met in university who were also from the valley themselves, the legacies left by these professors—unlike those of Chávez, Huerta, and the UFW—were seemingly invisible to the everyday people I knew in the region. Even as someone who was involved in place-based youth organizing during my last years in the valley, I never really learned about these scholars and how they hoped to change and improve the valley.
Reflecting on these experiences now, I am left with more questions than I can answer: why didn’t I know about these people before attending university? How do I make sense of the dreams that these scholars tried to realize in their efforts to improve peoples’ social conditions through their research? How do we assess their relative “success” or “failure”, and what do we do with the dreams that were arrested from fruition? How do we reckon with their visions for a public? How does my own knowledge about these research projects now augment my own dreams and ambitions as someone committed to the work of decolonizing within the university?
This initial reflection on my own memories of falling asleep and social life in and outside the valley marks the relative dis/connections between political struggle, everyday life, and circuits of knowledge as they move through agriculture, history, and the valley. My chapter opens with the valley because it offers poignant lessons about the relationship between history, place, and power. Many know about this region because of its agricultural yield and the ongoing dynamics of labor exploitation in the fields. What perhaps is less known are the many social projects that emerged to address how scientific research at public universities contributed to the exploitative nature and direct underdevelopment of agricultural regions in California.
For the purposes of this chapter, I put my own relationship to the San Joaquin Valley in conversation with the historical legacy (or lack thereof) of a University of California (UC) professor, William Friedland, and his proposed social scientific project from the 1960s and 1970s. While there may be some limitations to his ideas, I write this chapter to revisit his project through a critical university studies lens. To undertake this task, I begin by explaining Friedland’s idea for improving scientific agricultural research and its arrested uptake, while reflecting on how his ideas were premised on flawed universalizing ideas of the public. Yet, instead of throwing his ideas out entirely, I then move on to explain why his ideas could be reimagined as part of the functions of a third university that performs the work of decolonization.
Drawing on la paperson’s theorization of the third university, I showcase how Friedland’s dream might be augmented and repurposed for today. At stake in these histories and conversations are thorny questions of the limits and promises of scholarship that not only critique the university, but also fundamentally engage how we should alter it so that it might better do the work of creating justice for marginalized communities and challenging settler colonial practices that are embedded in many public land grant (read: land grab) institutions as well. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to wed the heavy-eyed dreams of the valley’s agricultural fields that made up my youth as part and parcel to stirring the social sleepwalkers that Friedland dreamt scholarship could awaken.
For the Public: Stirring Agricultural Research Within the Land Grab University
In 1974, William Friedland, a UC Santa Cruz professor and one of the founding members of the Community Studies program there, published an article through the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences at UC Davis with the support of their Agricultural Experiment Station.[1] In it, Friedland uses the metaphor of a social sleepwalker to characterize a tendency within scientific research to blindly fumble through scientific discoveries without a deep consideration or genuine care for their social implications. By not considering their impact on the world around them, scientists, according to Friedland, were like sleepwalkers—unable to seriously consider how their sleepy and careless movements through the world altered the people and places around them.
Using this metaphor to describe researchers of California agriculture, Friedland urged scientists to effectively wake up to the world around them and, thus, to the social and ethical imperatives behind their research. He particularly targeted agricultural research as a transformative site for various reasons. However, one of the most compelling reasons is because this applied form of research is largely funded using public resources from public institutions. Much of the agricultural research undertaken in the United States has been performed at various publicly funded entities like the colleges of agriculture at land grant universities and federally funded agricultural experiment stations. Moreover, Friedland’s larger body of work closely examined the politics of agricultural research and how much of the research performed at California’s land grant colleges and experiment stations ended up benefitting the profiteering goals of big agribusiness. Thus, a question arises for Friedland: if agricultural research is publicly funded through a distinct line of funding from the state, how answerable must the researcher be to “the public”?
Noting the complicity of scientists in the continued social problems of agricultural research, Friedland tasks scholars with developing a methodology to evaluate and address harm caused by research experiments. Friedland believed that scientific research should be wedded to an evaluation of its social impacts “since the work of some people will affect others, it makes sense that when an enterprise is undertaken that might affect the lives of others, some attempt should be made to determine how human lives, society, and the world will be affected”.[2] As such, Friedland proposed the development of what he called a Predictive and Evaluative Methodology Unit (PEMU), from which more socially aware scientific research could be done. With his institutional foothold in the UC system, Friedland advanced that any project seeking funding from the Agricultural Experiment Station at UC Davis, or a similar institution, would have to provide a social-impact statement. That statement would aim to describe what effects the researcher believes their research would have on the public. If the research is funded, then that social-impact statement can be evaluated again later to assess and compare the project’s actual effects to the public at different intervals.
With this process in mind, Friedland hoped that these various social-impact statements would enable researchers to refine their ability to predict the different advantages and disadvantages of their research more effectively. Moreover, he imagined that there would be opportunities for researchers to sharpen this assessment by incorporating an evaluative component after research projects were completed. Knowing that this process would take a lot of work, Friedland imagined that the scientists would receive administrative help to craft these statements. Specifically, Friedland’s ideas for PEMU included a process where affiliated social scientists would work with those agricultural science professors to help them finetune their predictive methodology. This process, and the social-impact statements themselves, would ideally allow for more public engagement in what type of research projects would be funded. Later in the monograph, Friedland likened the social impact statements of research to the growing use of environmental impact statements, especially after the passage of the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970. While environmental impact statements have become a norm, there remains a lack of a similar process for publicly funded agricultural research at land grant universities and experiment stations akin to PEMU.
Friedland further refined his thinking and vision of a predictive and evaluative methodology in subsequent monographs where he would approach some of the social harms of scientific research in agriculture, such as the development of the tomato harvester at UC Davis and the development of lettuce harvesters.[3] In places like California where big agribusiness operations have historically held a lot of political and economic sway, Friedland’s ideas could also be seen as a means to challenge that sway within the UC’s business affairs to instead consider the needs of small farmers, farmworkers, and other groups who are also directly impacted by the ways public research funds are used and who they historically benefited.
In proposing PEMU, Friedland aimed to shift how agricultural research was performed in ways that could potentially transform agricultural regions and different constituents involved in agriculture more broadly. While I believe there is still importance to this methodological approach, the framework for his writings about PEMU often relied on the language of a universalizing public. For instance, in “Social Sleepwalkers,” Friedland believed that social impact statements can help engage a generalized public and that public engagement would help ensure industries like big agribusiness would have to be answerable to the public if they were involved with publicly funded agricultural research.
This emphasis on the public, however, runs into some limits since PEMU’s universalized public might also gloss over the colonial and racial politics that frame the California public. At the time of Friedland’s writing and publishing this article, Ronald Reagan was California’s Governor, and his policies around the economy and governance widened social and economic inequalities for decades to come. California that same year also voted Jerry Brown in as the next governor of California, whose own conservatism could be traced through his objections to Southeast Asian refugees being relocated to California.[4] In this context, Friedland’s imagined public was an entity that was value-laden and historically situated despite its attempts to articulate a universalizing public. This public, imagined or not, was rife with economic inequalities, xenophobia, and structural racism, to name a few. While Friedland’s methodology could be understood as corrective, the universalizing public that Friedland imbues hope into fails ultimately to explicitly address racialization.
This omission is even more glaring since the entities that perform these technological and scientific research in California agriculture are mainly from California’s land grant colleges and universities. Land grant universities have historically been applauded for their role in matriculating those who traditionally would be unable to attend institutions of higher education. Passed in 1862, the Morrill Land Grant College Act sought to create universities that would be more democratic and available to more Americans by educating farmers’ sons just as much as other institutions of higher education traditionally focused on educating the sons of the elite. As such, the bill provided a means for the federal government to grant land parcels to states that were willing to use either the land or the selling of parcels to fund universities. Part of how this bill aimed to appeal to the non-elite, everyday person was by requiring that these institutions that were founded and/or funded by land grants to pursue research and/or outreach around agriculture, engineering, mining, and military arts. While these land grant universities were often celebrated for their ability to offer more Americans access to university, what is often understated in these celebrations is how the land parcels that funded the whole endeavor were Indigenous lands that were dispossessed from American Indian tribes and nations.
In this context, Friedland’s imagined public fundamentally excludes serious considerations about the existent Native communities in the state itself, much less in the context of the state’s explicit attempted genocide of California Indians.[5] Moreover, it does little also to examine how agricultural research at a land grant university like the University of California was always part and parcel to how California aimed to naturalize its role as a settler colony, what Manu Karuka might call an act of “countersovereignty”.[6] In the words of Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee, these land grant universities should be renamed land grab universities instead to reflect the actual historical mechanisms that dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands in order to create and maintain these educational institutions.[7]
In addition to Indigenous dispossession, land grab universities in California have further disenfranchised California Indians and other communities of color through their agricultural research projects. For instance, the University of California’s agricultural extension had historically diverted waterways used by Indigenous people in the early 1900s.[8] Furthermore, the UC’s own agricultural research and outreach programs have also functioned to dispossess other communities of color. By looking at the history of land grab universities, we can inevitably trace the imbricated nature of U.S. agriculture, racial dispossession, and settler colonialism. When considering Friedland’s PEMU, these histories illuminate Friedland’s own limitation in imagining a different public in his time.
While I’ve explored the assumptions about the public as it relates to Friedland’s formulation of PEMU, my critique does not mean that I think that his conceptualization of PEMU is without value for our current moment. On the contrary, I believe that interrogating the legacy of California’s land grabs and the vexed nature of the California public are important to examine if we are to more seriously consider Friedland’s PEMU and proposals to transform agricultural research especially as it relates to California. Rather than sacrifice hope for a different form of agriculture to cohere without contradictions, I follow la paperson’s (2017) provocations regarding the different types and stages of universities, to not aim to create a non-problematic university but what it means to work within a colonial university towards the aims of decolonizing the operations of the institution itself.
Dreaming with Eyes Wide Open: Toward Liberatory Horizons in Agricultural Research
When thinking about the limits of Friedland’s formulation for PEMU in the historical context of racial marginalization and settler colonialism, la paperson also offers us a nuanced approach to the multilayered functions of the university. In A Third University is Possible, he outlines three different universities (2017). Drawing from conversations in Black and Third cinema, he discusses a first, second, and third university that can exist simultaneously in the complex assemblages that constitute modern institutions of higher education. For instance, the first university is akin to research one universities and for-profit institutions, while the second university is oftentimes found in liberal art colleges that focus on a student’s self-actualization through reading literary classics and touting liberal diversity initiatives without action. As he notes, the differences between the three universities can be characterized by how “[t]he first world university accumulates through dispossession. The second world university ‘liberates’ through liberalism. The third world university breaks faith from its own machinery by inspiring the academic automaton with a fourth world soul.”[9]
Applied to something like Friedland’s formulation of PEMU, la paperson’s description of three universities helps us work through Friedland’s own tensions with the public. While Friedland’s vision of PEMU could be seen as part of a third university insofar as it sought to undermine accumulative agricultural research that benefitted big agribusiness, it did so by relying on the idea of the public. The way Friedland evoked the idea of the public draws upon liberal assumptions and doesn’t consider the colonial and racial violence that was foundational to shaping an American or Californian “public”. This can be seen especially in a California context where the state’s formation was premised on Indigenous genocide and racial exploitation to create the state.[10] The University of California system constitutes a network of key sites that accumulated Indigenous lands through dispossession with land grant legislation, and the system further accumulated value through its agricultural research that changed much of California’s landscape. In this light, Friedland’s original formulation of PEMU might be seen as existing ambivalently between a third university spirit and a liberal imperative characteristic of the second university, since PEMU’s proposed effectiveness relies upon the actions of a generalized public.
While this is the case, la paperson’s formulation of the first, second, and third university renders available to us the conceptual flexibility to understand how we might be able to imagine the ways PEMU could actually work towards a decolonial means of operation in the university. la paperson does not provide unproblematic understandings of the university; indeed, for him, the strategic decolonizing machine of the third university is not a utopia. Instead, la paperson acknowledges that the third university is complicated, as it is
made up of [the first and second university’s] scrap material … actively reinvent[ing a first university’s curricula and the second university’s critique]… to synthesize these disparate sources into not only a coherent discourse, but a far reaching, transformative radical project.[11]
In its emphasis on the reuse and reinvention of old traditions and critique, the third university sits with the thorny dynamics of historical legacies and contexts as we aim to bend the university towards justice. Thus, in applying la paperson's formulation to Friedland's idea, we can both acknowledge how Friedland’s understanding of the public was flawed and might have reified the idea of a California public uncritically, while still enabling us to understand how Friedland's ideas tried to use the scrap materials from the first and second university in his visions for PEMU itself. In this way, Friedland’s efforts to legislate, program build, and/or render agribusiness accountable to the public might be seen as an effort to not necessarily create, “a decolonized university but a decolonizing one.”[12]
With this framework in mind, how can PEMU be reformulated with the insights that la paperson and other decolonial scholarship bring us as scholars, researchers, students, and teachers? For me, this starts with understanding that PEMU and the social impact statements they would require from researchers need to function within a broader historical context. If it were to be reimagined, a predictive and evaluative methodology unit doing the work of the third university in one of the University of California’s agricultural research formations would need to grapple with the historic violence performed by agriculture. For instance, given the levels of labor exploitation in the fields, what would it look like if researchers needed to account for how their work impacts farmworkers? Similarly, if research is done in agriculturally productive areas like the San Joaquin Valley, what would it look like if agricultural scientists actually considered the impacts of their research on Indigenous sovereignty and on Indigenous foodways? What would it mean for scientists, their funders, and their students to become invested in the political project of land back?
Thus, if, as Friedland argued, scientists needed to be awakened from their sleepwalking, what would happen if the sleepwalker actually acknowledged their impact on the regions in which they worked? What if scientists were trained to understand, study, and acknowledge the relative harm and efforts of recuperation that their colleagues and mentors had historically undertaken with public communities as part of their obligation as researchers to PEMU before they are even considered for state funding? In this context, it might even benefit scientists who are largely beholden to industry and/or the university’s own investments to learn from interdisciplinary scholarship that demonstrated the harm that the state caused to various communities due to its scientific research. If scholars are meant to keep up to date with the newest perspectives on their scientific research, there might be a correlated argument to be made about the need for these scholars to keep up to date about the social scientific and humanities research that engages the places and regions in which they work, study, and live.
Conclusion
The reformulations that I suggest regarding PEMU alongside the iterative and radical reformulations of land grab universities might seem like an impossibility, given agribusiness’ physical and epistemic reach, economic and political entanglements, and its very proliferation as a global model in universities. However, creating an entity that would be given the power to oversee how research funding is allocated like PEMU could begin the work of destabilizing current academic-industrial formations in agriculture—even if it was given just a fraction of what the California budget allocates for state-funded agricultural research. Potentially, it could even begin to do decolonizing work by directly centering the social impacts and needs of different communities in California, ranging from California Indians to our current farm working labor force, which has historically and increasingly been composed of Indigenous farmworkers from Mexico and other Central American countries.
While these are just preliminary sketches I have around how PEMU could be reconfigured, this chapter ultimately engages in the task of dreaming without guarantees; that is to say, that it is not invested in an ultimate ideal. If anything, it is picking up the scraps that Friedland left and trying to weave it into my own ambitions—which shares Friedland’s goal of creating justice for communities impacted by agricultural research—to envision the functions of a third university within the University of California. As I think about the ways that agricultural research can be used for the purposes of a third university, I think about my upbringing in that rural geography and the own economic, political, and cultural marginalization of communities I saw there, especially at the hands of big agriculture. Perhaps, had another form of scientific agricultural research been done, the San Joaquin Valley would have been able to facilitate different lifeworlds as compared to those made possible by big agribusiness. Maybe justice could have been felt by everyone in the space.
I opened this paper with the country road car drives I’d take as a child and remind myself now what it is like to visit my hometown as an adult. On the car rides to my family’s house from the airport, I look out at the rows of agriculture and think about not only the labor exploitation that happens in those fields, but also how the landscape has been drastically altered by ongoing settler colonialism. I think about Tulare Lake, which was the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes that was eventually drained by the Army Corps of Engineers to the detriments of Indigenous communities.[13] Now during those car rides, I find it impossible to sleep and instead realize how I can dream without needing my eyes shut. If Friedland’s goal was to awaken the social sleepwalker, then my hope here was to complicate that notion. The social sleepwalker not only needs to be awakened; the social sleepwalker needs to reckon with their complicated status as a being that is intimately embedded in land grab histories and realities. The social sleepwalker needs to do more than recognize that they are on Indigenous lands in order to undo the bindings that align scientific projects to the benefit of the settler state. It is through this process that I start to imagine an alternative agricultural science that would not do the biddings of big agribusiness but could center the practices of agroecology and shift desires from wanting bigger and bigger yields towards building healthier, thriving communities.
Notes
Of interest to note is that the Department of Applied Behavioral Science at UC Davis eventually became the Department of Community and Regional Development. The Applied Behavioral Science Department also hosted Asian American Studies classes before a formal department was created. Friedland’s 1974 article was titled, “Social Sleepwalkers: Scientific and Technological Research in California Agriculture.” ↑
William H. Friedland, “Social Sleepwalkers. Scientific and Technological Research in California Agriculture. Research Monograph No. 13.” (Davis: University of California, Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 1974).↑
These harvesters were developed by scientists oftentimes spurred by the California legislator and big agriculture as a technological solution to the United Farmworkers and farmworker unionization. ↑
Joseph D’Hippolito. “When Jerry Brown Tried to Keep Immigrants Out of California.” Wall Street Journal, Mar 9, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-jerry-brown-tried-to-keep-immigrants-out-of-california-1520634989 (accessed Apr 20, 2023). ↑
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2016). ↑
Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019). ↑
Lee, Robert, and Tristan Ahtone. “Land-Grab Universities.” High Country News, March 30, 2020. https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities. ↑
Angela Firkus, “The Agricultural Extension Service and Non-Whites in California, 1910–1932,” Agricultural History 84, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 506–30, https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2010.84.4.506. ↑
la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). ↑
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 2009). ↑
la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). ↑
Ibid. ↑
William L. Preston, Vanishing Landscapes: Land and Life in the Tulare Lake Basin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). ↑