A Bridge Conversation on Connecting Action and... -
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Published on: 1/1/2008
Last Visited: 8/10/2009
This essay is based on a conversation between Isao Fujimoto and Tim Marema.
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Isao Fujimoto (pictured here with his daughter Esumi) grew up on the Yakima Indian Reservation in eastern Washington.
His family was farming around the reservation towns of Wapato and Toppenish along with 125 Japanese immigrant families on Yakima land.
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Fujimoto attended U.C. Berkeley and also conducted Cornell rural-sociology fieldwork researching village development in the Philippines.
Soon after he started teaching at U.C. Davis in spring 1967, he sought out Cornell colleague Jerry Brown, who was research director for the United Farm Workers.
He found Brown and his wife Juanita on the picket lines at Guimarra farms in Delano, where he joined them.
There's an inscription on Hilgard Hall at U.C. Berkeley that Fujimoto says he took to heart: "To Rescue for Human Society the Native Values of Rural Life.
Those words have guided his work over the last 40 years, starting the U.C. Davis graduate program in Community Development and serving on the boards of Global Exchange, Food First, American Friends Service Committee, California Institute for Rural Studies, Rural America, the Rural Development Leadership Network and the Data Center.
For the last ten years, Fujimoto has been the project facilitator for the Central Valley Partnership for Citizenship, a collaborative of active community-based organizations working with emerging immigrant, migrant and low-income community organizations throughout the 450-mile stretch of California's Central Valley.
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Isao Fujimoto has spent his life crossing boundaries and borders.
The retired University of California-Davis professor grew up on a Yakima Indian reservation in the Pacific Northwest, where his family farmed.
He spent World War II in the infamous Japanese-American concentration camps in Wyoming and California.
He graduated from Berkeley in the 1950s and served in Korea in the armed forces.
And when he had his pick of schools for a graduate science-education program in 1960, he chose Howard University, where he was the only non-black in his program, because he thought he would learn more than just chemistry from the experience.
Isao is a one-man network, a direct link to seminal events in U.S. history, and a person for whom building bridges comes as naturally as breathing air.
His need to create connections is palpable, even over the phone when I interviewed him for this brief article.
With 75 years of history and experience to discuss, he takes time to ask about my history. (It's far less interesting, I assure you.
But Isao doesn't think so, or doesn't let on if he does.)
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Isao was part of group of faculty who thought the study of agriculture should deal with people, not just crop hybrids and yields.
So, he started building bridges.
He participated in a large campus debate about the responsibility of the agriculture school to research social consequences of farming.
Simultaneously, the field of ethnic studies started to blossom on the U.C. campus, and Isao helped start the Asian American studies program.
The farm-labor movement was in full force in California at the time, and Isao got involved in labor issues in the Central Valley, where his family had settled after being held in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
This unique confluence of interests and events - agricultural science, rural sociology, ethnic studies, immigration, community organizing and labor organizing - led Isao and others into pioneering a new approach to academic studies - action research.
Action research is yet another bridge discipline for Isao, one that links the power of academic research with the needs and expertise of local communities.
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"Doing this kind of applied research is looked down on" by many academics, Isao said.
And hard-scrabble communities living on the economic edge may not easily see the value of investing energy into research.
But both sides in the relationship benefit when it works well.
"We have to figure out ways to communicate and do the bridging," Isao said.
"And the way I've done this is to work with off-campus groups on research."
Over the years he's formed many relationships with social-justice and community-service organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee, Global Exchange and Food First.
Such groups have kept Isao abreast of the issues that are important to communities.
In return, he's kept them informed about relevant academic research and helped them create their own research projects.
He's also been active with the Rural Development Leadership Network, which helps rural community organizers of minority background earn college degrees.
The program, which Isao starting working with at its inception in 1985, has helped participants from Indian Country, the Spanish-speaking Southwest and African-American sections of the Southeast.
He's placed his students from U.C. Davis with these same organizations, building links around the country through practica and internships.
And his work with California's labor movement has created bridges among the state's diverse racial groups: Chinese, Japanese, East Indian, Filipino, Mexican, Central American and others.
Isao was also there at the beginning of Central Valley Partnership (CVP), a social-justice organization that has brought together community-based groups in the Central Valley to work together to improve their communities.
"The Central Valley is the richest agricultural region in the world and yet has the greatest concentration of the poorest communities in California," he said.
The CVP combines the disciplines of community-based organizing, legal strategies, popular education, social services, media, youth empowerment and applied research.
It also looks as though Isao has built a bridge to the next generation.
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