Rural California Report Bloggers Don Villarejo
Blogger: Don Villarejo
Rural California Report
CIRS Blog about Rural California
After several years of involvement in the Los Angeles peace movement, including founding the Indochina Work Group (dedicated to ending U.S. military intervention in Vietnam), he joined the eight-member National Standing Committee of the Indochina Peace Campaign in 1972, representing the Pacific Region, a position he held until the conclusion of the U.S. involvement in 1975.
He served as volunteer with the farmworkers movement in 1976 and, after the conclusion of this work, founded the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS) in 1977, serving as Executive Director until his retirement from that position in 1999. CIRS is a private, non-profit research and education organization dedicated to helping create a rural California that is socially just, economically viable and ecologically balanced.
His professional career has been multi-disciplinary, starting with a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1967. He joined the faculty of the Physics Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968, serving until 1975, and then taught at the University of California, Davis, for several years until switching careers subsequent to the founding of CIRS. Dr. Villarejo's experience as a research physicist, particularly analytical and quantitative skills, proved to be invaluable preparation for his subsequent career as a researcher interested in agricultural economies and rural societies. http://www.donvillarejo.com/index.html
Dr. Villarejo has served as a consultant for numerous public and private agencies, including the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, California State Assembly (Office of Research), California Department of Industrial Relations, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Reclamation, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, California Rural Legal Assistance, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (Locals 601 and 890), and Migrant Legal Action Program, among others.
He has received a number of awards in recognition of his service, most recently the 2000 National Service Award of the Office of Migrant Health (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services) for "Exemplary commitment, dedication and service to the nation's migrant farm workers."
Dr. Villarejo's publication, Suffering in Silence (November 2000), was cited by The California Endowment as the primary motivating factor in its recently announced $50 million commitment in new grants to provide health services for hired farm workers in California.
When most Americans think of California, they typically conjure up visions of beaches, Hollywood, the Golden Gate Bridge, Silicon Valley, or an urban/suburban lifestyle. But for many decades, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, California also has had more rural residents than any of the eleven western-most states of the contiguous forty-eight. Census 2000 found California’s rural population totaled 1,876,753 persons, nearly twice as large as second-ranked Washington state’s non-urban population (Census 2010 has not yet reported rural population findings).
Rural economies of California have been historically dominated by natural resource production (some would say “exploitation”): farming, ranching, fishing, logging, mining and hunting. During the past several decades, only farming has experienced real growth in economic terms, largely due to a major expansion of the annual output of high value commodities, such as fruits and nuts, vegetables, ornamentals and dairy products.
California’s agricultural success story is illustrated by the fact that nine of the ten U.S. counties with the largest value of farm production are located within the state. But the fishing and logging industries are in serious decline and may never recover, while mining and hunting long ago depleted their natural resource bases.