Daniel O’Connell and Scott Peters have produced a book as extraordinary in style as in substance. They present detailed accounts of eight scholar-activists and organizers who have struggled to understand and expose the diverse impacts of agribusiness on California communities. But O’Connell and Peters do this by giving voice to their eight narrators—and the result reveals a power of voice that is at once striking and moving, accessible and generous, displaying a continuing commitment and conviction that is at once instructive and inspiring. The “damning indictment of the greed and corruption that flourish under California’s system of industrial agriculture” (3) that follows grows not from any summary arguments of the authors but from the decades of grounded, engaged research, legislative testimonies, scholarly books and investigative reporting identified in the practices of these narrators, key actors “in the struggle.” The massive inequalities they portray may nevertheless not surprise readers, even as the poverty perpetuated by such concentrations of land and power and regulatory deference remains infuriating.Daniel O’Connell has lived, worked and written about the politics of agriculture in California’s Central Valley for more than twenty years. He was drawn to the University of California, Davis to study “International Agricultural Development” for a master’s degree; he later went to Cornell University to do doctoral work on the intersection of engaged scholarship and agrarian democracy. Teaching at Cornell, Scott Peters had deep interests in the democratizing potential of the contemporary university, including the rich history of the land-grant university mission and university extension services. He has also developed innovative oral history methods that allowed diverse professionals and organizers alike to present compelling and revealing accounts of their community-engaged work.1 Their collaboration complemented O’Connell’s knowledge of leading actors in the Central Valley with Peters’s knowledge and skills of crafting the grounded stories of those striking practitioners.As a result, the central actors animating In the Struggle include prolific academic researchers and community activists, legal aid workers turned organizers, and investigative journalists. Their stories corroborate each other as jigsaw puzzle pieces fit together; what emerges is not a shared political program but an astonishing portrait, a lived texture of making research matter, focusing research on issues of public good and vulnerability, realizing that facts matter. We see clearly how the facts of ownership and living conditions can matter enough so that big growers and land holders would be all too happy to suppress research, to eliminate faculty positions, to press federal agencies to look away rather than enforce regulations.One story line through these stories details activist research careers surprisingly free of ideological baggage. We see no jargon here and less academic theory, but rather an appeal to getting the facts, a curiosity about the community effects of ownership and scale, an almost quaint invocation of the mission of public, state universities—to serve the broader public by gaining knowledge about public welfare, to tell the truth about systems producing human suffering.But of course there were stories here of labor conditions in the fields that big landowners preferred not to have revealed. There were then and remain today questions of the abuse of power, of the failure of legal protections to be implemented, of the working conditions of immigrant and migrant farm labor, and of course myriad funding constraints on research efforts.We see early on, for example, as economist Paul Taylor fell in love and then worked with photographer Dorothea Lange that “Taylor was given permission to hire Lange as a ‘typist,’ even though, of course, what she would do was photography.” The authors continue, “Few relationships have been as potently productive and enduringly compelling in the cause of agrarian justice during the twentieth century . . . the nature of their work began to shift from documenting facts to taking action”—writing and submitting reports to the Roosevelt administration, influencing, for example, federal support for the housing of migrant labor (58). “Lange and Taylor’s most significant collaborative work, An American Exodus, was a direct outgrowth,” O’Connell and Peters write, “of their reciprocating innovations, shared devotion, and intense desire to assist the destitute in crisis.”2In the opening accounts of sociologist Walter Goldschmidt and economist Paul Taylor, we see not only seminal research that helped to define their fields, but lifelong commitments of truth telling, publication, congressional testimony, responses to attacks by spokespeople of “big ag” interests. Goldschmidt’s landmark study of the two towns, Arvin and Dinuba, produced findings that were as politically contentious as they were clear, as O’Connell and Peters summarize: “An economy skewed to benefit corporate agriculture with its consolidated landholdings had profoundly negative outcomes for the rural residents living in nearby towns and communities. Goldschmidt’s Arvin-Dinuba study was fiercely attacked, primarily because it reinforced the significance of the 1902 Reclamation Act’s acreage limitation and residency requirements” (25).Goldschmidt had done this study as a researcher for the USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE). But yielding to pressure, not only did the BAE refuse to release the final study, but “the follow up study was suppressed and disallowed” (27). Goldschmidt tellingly recounts, “We were never satisfied with the idea of making a comparison of two towns only, and we had . . . planned a second phase of the study, but we were prevented from doing this. . . . Why we were so prevented is perhaps more revealing of the problems derived from large-scale operations than would have been the results of such an endeavor. . . . There are interests in this country—or there were at the time—which did not want the evidence of the effect of corporate farming brought forward. They wanted to suppress the study, to defame it, to discredit it” (28).3This struggle of telling truth to power animates virtually every page of this book, certainly every one of the eight narrators whose accounts we read. Their commitments to exposing injustice and cover-ups are as instructive as they are inspiring, as promising as they are daunting. Early on, O’Connell writes of Goldschmidt’s and Taylor’s long-standing concern with the flaunting of the acreage limitation legislation designed to protect small landowners: “I realized that Goldschmidt had never left the fight. . . . Decades after Taylor’s death, he seemed still with him in the struggle” (36).These commitments—in strings of reports for government committees, in books for broader publics and academics alike, in testimony before legislatures, and more—continued and took new life in the work of Ernesto Galarza and Don Villarejo, activist scholars, researchers, and authors who worked largely outside of the university system that had protected Goldschmidt and Taylor before them.Galarza jumps off the pages of In the Struggle as a passionate, brilliant scholar devoted to improving the living and working conditions of farmworkers. With an MA from Stanford and a PhD in history from Columbia, Galarza, for example, worked “between 1947 and 1959 . . . as the Director of Research and Education for the National Farm Labor Union” (88). O’Connell and Peters write, “With only a modicum of union support and financial backing, Galarza battled agribusiness [there] for over a decade.” They quote Joan London and Henry Anderson’s So Shall Ye Reap: Galarza’s “weapons were . . . the shield of research and analytical thought. . . . Armed with these, he [battled the] feudal cities of the bracero system and the indifference of organized labor. His basic tactic was to document the flouting of laws—the abuses, the corruption, the debasement, the scandals inherent in the Braceros system—and to publicize his findings as broadly as possible” (89).O’Connell and Peters write, “Books were at the center of Galarza’s politically engaged scholarship and corresponding organizing strategies. Four of the stand out: Strangers in Our Fields (1956), Merchants of Labor (1964), Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (1970), and Farm Workers and Agribusiness in California, 1947–1960 (1977)” (95).4Don Villarejo had brought a PhD in physics first to teaching at UCLA, then to Davis, California, when his wife Merna accepted a teaching job there in biochemistry. Villarejo’s support for the United Farm Workers union led him to cofound the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS), “focused on agriculture, farm labor, water policy, reclamation law, and rural issues in California.” He recalled beginning CIRS: “The first place we go: Paul Taylor. We spent two days meeting with [him] in 1977. It was fabulous. Can you imagine what it was like to ask Paul Taylor everything you ever wanted to know?” (176).Villarejo was candid about his research strategy: “Being an empiricist means that you look for facts on the ground. . . . You look for all available evidence. . . . Then you try to extract . . . a version of the truth, what you are able to gather and see. You put that out as a hypothesis to test and see where it leads. That is the only way rigorous science can proceed. . . . You look at ‘New Lands for Agriculture,’ that’s what that is all about.” (189).5 As O’Connell and Peters summarize, “CIRS methods were based upon empirical social science while maintaining the critical tone of investigative journalism, . . . a tool for organizing campaigns” (190).Dean MacCannell and Isao Fujimoto had come to Davis from Cornell’s Rural Sociology Department. MacCannell had won the Rural Sociology Society’s “Best Dissertation of the Year” award; Fujimoto, though, received his PhD only after nearly fifty years of teaching and research at Davis, hardly least of all building a Community Development Program there and hiring MacCannell and additional faculty to join him.MacCannell was a polymath, coming to Davis to retest Goldschmidt’s seminal Arvin-Dinuba study, but he went on to work on land development and tourism in the fields of landscape architecture as well as rural sociology.6 Fujimoto began his teaching at Davis by building a new Applied Behavioral Science program. Course enrollments grew from eleven to fifty-five to one hundred twenty-five in successive early years. His students began studying the conditions of farm labor, but “getting at the truth” soon produced pushback: Fujimoto recalls a letter from the Director of Extension in San Joaquin County, “You are persona non grata. Do not come here!”MacCannell, too, was no stranger to opposition and intimidation. He’d been doing social impact analysis for a federal Environmental Impact Statement examining three scenarios of changing the land limitation laws: “indications appeared again [echoing Goldschmidt’s study] that very large farms do have a range of negative impacts on local communities” (156).The Westside Farmers Association pushed back. They asked MacCannell to change the EIS’s numbers. No luck. They asked him to recant the study. No luck. They took him for a ride in the countryside “with a couple of thugs.” Memorable, but no luck. Not least of all, MacCannell recalls a spiked cocktail delivered to him at a lunch with, “This one is just for you.” He had the wisdom and good taste to decline once again.Fujimoto had earlier anticipated such pressures even earlier, and he sought advice in meetings he remembers well with Paul Taylor, Ernesto Galarza, and organizer Henry Anderson: “I’m new to UC Davis. I’m doing work on rural poverty, but I am getting a lot of flack,” Fujimoto had told them. “They all gave me the same advice . . . summarized in two words: Get tenure. They told me the reality I was up against. It was a real education” (224).MacCannell became a widely published scholar, telling truth to power for many years. Fujimoto for his part had been an electrifying teacher and meticulous researcher, sending his students to examine and document labor and community development conditions on the ground for decades, writing up, presenting, publicizing results that many big growers would have preferred to have ignored. Fujimoto drew lessons: “Most people wait until they get tenure [to become politically active], but when they do that, they get sandpapered. They learn to be cautious and can’t get back to their roots” (250). His aspiration for community development scholars: “Play down the ego. Develop contacts in the community,” guidance that O’Connell and Peters recognize as “simple advice” that was nevertheless “hard to follow”! (250).Trudy Wischemann appears here as a self-proclaimed “fourth generation failed family farmer.” She had discovered the emerging field of conservation of natural resources, and after attending a talk of Paul Taylor’s on water, she might never have been quite the same again. Meeting, volunteering, and then working with Taylor as a research assistant, Wischemann recalls her surprise as Taylor took inspiration for his book of law journal articles from Isaiah 5:8, “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.”7 “He explained it to me,” she recalls, “‘Well, they’re just talking about the land concentration. Like we have in California.’ . . . [She continues,] Turns out, 20 years later, I discover the whole field of land theology that looks at the prophets, including Isaiah, that were screaming about . . . land concentration” (258).Wischemann revisited Arvin and Dinuba; she gathered data and did extensive photo documentation. That work led her to CIRS, the California Institute for Rural Studies, Don Villarejo, Dean MacCannell, and, eventually, too, to Isao Fujimoto. Reflecting on her work with them, Wischemann points to a deliberate strategy of working with risk. She recalls, “[Goldschmidt] was unhappy with [MacCannell] for using the term, ‘Goldschmidt Hypothesis.’ Wally said, ‘It’s not a hypothesis. I proved it!’ Dean found great utility in calling it a hypothesis, though. He was still presenting it to people who didn’t want to think about it at all by saying, ‘Here’s the hypothesis: do large farms make better towns or worse ones? Here’s what we got to show, prove us wrong.’ He was working in the science realm trying not to get killed” (264, emphasis added).Wischemann is blunt: “These scholars—Wally and Dean and Don and Isao—they’re part of a great cloud of witnesses.” A California Council for the Humanities grant had helped Wischemann to work with her photography of the Arvin and Dinuba communities. That led through a Forum on Church and Land, animated by music and humor and spirituality, to overcome her being “absolutely and unfailingly suspicious of religious people” to find with the Quakers a “faith home and a religious community that I feel part of.” Looking around, she says, “People down here [in California’s Central Valley] are afraid. They’re afraid to speak. But there are people who have spoken, and shown you can do it and still survive.”O’Connell and Peters turn finally to a younger legal aid activist, Janaki Jagannath. A child of an arranged Indian marriage, Jagannath brought roots in Louisiana, Alabama, and Oklahoma to her studies in international agricultural development at UC Davis. After graduation and work on farms, she went to work for the California Rural Legal Assistance’s largest office in Fresno. She wanted “to understand the Valley as a place; this backbone of California and the country. This old forgotten sacrificial landscape. This space that brought people of every shade together. And a place where the climate crisis is happening. I wanted to be on the ground for these things” (280).Jagannath’s work as a “community legal worker” turned out soon to be one part service worker, one part researcher, one part investigative reporter, one part sleuth ferreting out corruption. She says, “CRLA was not allowed to call me an organizer, and if I had said that I was organizing, I would have gotten fired. But I was definitely organizing in the sense that I was going out to little towns, talking to the postman, going to the gas station. Just wandering around, going to the park if there was one and chatting people up, asking, ‘What’s going on in this place?’”In Jagannath’s understated account, we see “chatting people up” taken to a form of political artistry. Finding farmworkers lacking clean drinking water and facing exorbitant billing by the powerful Westland Water District, Jagannath’s “chatting people up” soon connected local community members to the State Water Board and to the Office of Planning and Research in the state Governor’s office, even in the face of a Fresno County elected supervisor’s apparent greater allegiance to the Water District than to his constituents. Jagannath’s organizing, “with major assistance from the governor’s office,” helped to achieve substantial drought assistance, lower resident water rates, and repayment of “individual ratepayer arrears” (293).Surprisingly this community research and organizing led to county officials’ discovery that by drilling wells more deeply, they could access clean drinking water at three thousand feet. Jagannath comments, “[This was an] interesting revelation for the county to have after being threatened with a lawsuit multiple times and realizing they [had] no idea how the rates are being set.”Janaki Jagannath tells us she had moved to Fresno, “thanks to Isao (Fujimoto)’s writings. My curiosity was so sparked by [his writing,] the weaving of intercultural movement as a response to industrial agriculture. I was doing independent research, reading everything that he had written” (279). Just as Trudi Wischemann was carrying forward the work of Walter Goldschmidt and Paul Taylor, Dean MacCannell, Don Villarejo, and Isao Fujimoto, so was Janaki Jagannath buoyed by their work as well, perhaps following most of all in Ernesto Galarza’s organizing footsteps, integrating grounded research of interviews and documentation, testifying before state and local legislative boards, making place matter just as much as responding to agrarian injustice had mattered.Daniel O’Connell’s and Scott Peters’s In the Struggle makes a serious contribution not only to the academic disciplines of rural sociology and agrarian studies, labor studies, and community development, but also to the related fields of university-community engaged research, action research, and indeed professional research in applied fields more generally. They allow us to hear the voices of careful, committed scholars as central actors recounting their histories of speaking truth to power, confronting the wrath and intimidation and resistance of the powerful, but pressing on nevertheless. Through detailed accounts corroborating one another, we as readers can appreciate both the power and the risks of applied research. Seeing the debts of these scholars and organizers to one another, we as readers can recognize our own debts as well—and our own responsibilities.