A former mayor used to describe Fresno as a “tale of two cities” to illustrate the historic racial and economic disparities that divide the county seat of California’s heartland. In a pandemic where all of society’s inequities have been laid bare, the city’s tale has spread across the region, locals say.
At the heart of California’s central valley, Fresno county and its namesake city is struggling to shoulder an onslaught of infections that have overwhelmed an overburdened healthcare system and devastated communities of low-wage, primarily Latinx essential agriculture workers.
“It’s really in some ways a failure that we as a community have allowed this epidemic to get this far,” said Dr Rais Vohra, the county’s interim health officer, in a briefing in which he announced that the county’s hospitals were activating their surge protocols.
At the root of this failure, according to community advocates and residents, lies a polarizing rightwing, anti-establishment sensibility that runs deep through the central valley – a sensibility, they said, encouraged by the messaging in the actions, or lack thereof, of local leaders during the pandemic.
The tale of two cities in Fresno has bloomed into a tale of two Americas, a microcosm of the national political discourse playing out in the agricultural capital of California.
“The best way I can describe this is one side is fighting for dining out without masks while the other side is picking the crops and putting food on your table while begging for protective gear, just asking to survive,” said Miguel Arias, Fresno city council president.
Fighting an uphill battle
In May, a group of unmasked individuals came to Arias’s door in downtown Fresno.
Days before, this group had held a rally at Fresno city hall, calling for an immediate and total reopening of an America that had been shut down to curb the spread of coronavirus. With cameras filming the interaction, they told Arias that he was “destroying businesses” and people’s lives. What wasn’t caught on video, Arias said, was that they had tried to enter his home, where his two children were napping, when he had answered the door the first time.
The group was led by Ben Bergquam, a locally based rightwing activist known for instigating filmed confrontations. In an email to the Guardian, Bergquam said he no longer trusted what “the ‘experts’ at the CDC are telling us” about the number of coronavirus cases. He threw his support behind a treatment plan touted by Donald Trump that health officials have repeatedly cautioned against, saying that “the left seem more interested in using this opportunity to attach [sic] President Trump than to help save patients’ lives”.
The rally that Bergquam organized on 6 May was attended by a city councilor and two county supervisors, with whom he was photographed in local media. A few weeks after the rally, the county department of public health issued an order requiring that residents wear masks in public, as was recommended by the CDC for a safe reopening. The county supervisors – a panel of five lawmakers – promptly pushed to change the language, making the mandate voluntary.
While many of Bergquam’s ilk in the central valley have echoed his sentiments that the lockdown efforts around the virus seem overblown and “politicized”, even the White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, Deborah Birx, has expressed concern, naming the central valley specifically as a region with high levels of infection.
In just Fresno county, an almost 6,000-square-mile area of nearly 1 million residents, coronavirus cases are at 2,100 per 100,000 residents. The San Francisco Bay area, a nine-county spread of 7,000 square miles with 7.7 million residents, has just 950 cases per 100,000 residents.
The virus has affected the county disproportionately, with cases most densely concentrated in zip codes of primarily low-income communities that are home to many of the workersthe region’s agriculture industry relies on. In a county where the per-capita income is $23,000 and 21.3% live in poverty, community advocates have felt they have been fighting an uphill battle since the pandemic began.
“There is so much need in so many different ways that we’re just literally trying to keep it on the rails,” said Lindsay Callahan, president and CEO of the not-for-profit United Way for Fresno and Madera counties. “When you’re dealing with families that are already struggling and they can’t work or they have to work in the middle of the pandemic, there’s no winning in this game.”
The city received about $92m in coronavirus relief funds from the federal government in April. The county received about $82m at roughly the same time. So the state assembly member Joaquin Arambula was concerned, on 17 July, when he received a copy of the county’s budget for stimulus funds and saw that the money specified for community coronavirus efforts was still marked “TBD”, to be determined, while staffing and departmental expenses had been marked “paid”.
That meant that for more than a month after the state put Fresno county on its monitoring list because of its high infection rate, the county’s earmarked $25m for testing – including testing specifically for agriculture and other essential service industry workers – targeted education, outreach and quarantine housing support was “TBD”. In comparison, the city had put forth $5m for testing and mask distribution by May.
“It took over 100 days into this pandemic to appropriately identify programs and ways to spend our Covid money when that money was there to help us protect the community,” Arambula said.
‘You cannot keep people from doing what they want’
Buddy Mendes, chairman of the county board of supervisors, said it was “total lies” that supervisors hadn’t spent funds on Covid relief. “We basically told the health department ‘Do whatever the heck you need to do’ back in March, we’ll backfill it,” he said – that included mobile testing sites. In addition, since mid-May, the county agricultural commissioner has handed out a total of 922,000 surgical masks and 52,000 N95 masks to farm workers. But in a budget presentation, the county administrative officer noted that the $2.5m in public health expenses spent in federal stimulus funds went toward creating social distancing measures in county offices. There were no line items for funds spent on community coronavirus relief efforts, just county departmental spending, with a county official later explaining to the Guardian that because the board only meets twice a month, it was easier to just reimburse the health department for whatever they deemed necessary.
To Mendes, the reason for the surge in cases is simple: “People are tired of being at home,” he said. “I think people are just tired of people in authority, period.” The central valley had shut down too early, in his opinion, when it did so alongside the rest of the state.
“You cannot keep people from doing what they want,” Mendes said. “This is a free society. That’s part of the problem. You can’t dictate behavior, no matter how hard you try.”
When asked about the mixed messages sent by local leaders pushing for reopening, he responded: “Reopening has nothing to do with it. That’s just leftist horseshit.”
Mendes’s district includes Coalinga, a city of 17,000 whose leaders declared, in defiance of state orders, that all its businesses were essential in May to allow them to open. “I don’t think there are any differences between businesses being closed and businesses being opened,” said Adam Adkisson, a Coalinga city councilor. “If you’re going to Costco and Walmart, you can get it just as easily if you go to a business that’s not deemed essential.”
Health officials have never disputed that – the purpose of closing nonessential businesses was to decrease the odds of spread when people need to go to essential businesses. But Mendes echoed this sentiment, seeing no connection between reopening and the central valley’s surge – even though, like the rest of the state, the uptick in cases was timed with reopening.
An urban-rural divide
Some – mostly local conservative politicians – will argue that the central valley is not as rightwing as it seems. There’s some truth to that – the 2018 “blue wave” that ushered Democrats into office washed over the central valley as well – and as of July, 39% of registered voters in Fresno county were Democrats, while 33% were Republicans. But 22% have no party preference, and at play here is a longstanding mistrust of a government perceived to have little understanding of a rural lifestyle.
Few believe that Gavin Newsom, California’s wealthy Bay Area-raised governor, fully appreciates the unique needs of a rural region like the Central Valley. Beyond the huge essential labor workforce and agriculture industry – the San Joaquin Valley alone has 583,000 essential frontline workers, 34.7% of the region’s entire workforce, according to the Community and Labor Center at the University of California, Merced – only about 7% of the civilian labor force works in the sort of professional and business services that would allow employees to work from home. In comparison, San Francisco has close to 20%.
“We don’t survive on corporate America down here,” said Paul Creighton, mayor of Atwater, a Central Valley city of nearly 30,000 that is located about 60 miles north of Fresno. “You go to San Francisco and it’s like a ghost town. You see these gigantic buildings empty. Yet here in the valley, you see people hustling and bustling.”
Like Coalinga, Atwater made the decision to defy state orders and keep all businesses and churches open, calling itself a “sanctuary city”. And as with Coalinga, the state has threatened to withhold coronavirus relief funds from Atwater until city leaders begin listening to Sacramento. But Creighton said Atwater had taken the threat of coronavirus seriously from the start, declaring a state of emergency before its county had a single case. In 2012, Atwater, still reeling from the foreclosure crisis, also had to declare a fiscal emergency. The state auditor ranked it the second most financially challenged city in California last year.
“We’re protecting the weakest,” Creighton said. “Our local Starbucks has a line that goes all the way around the shopping center. The baristas are saying they don’t have time to sanitize. Yet the nail salons that are masked up and rubber-gloved up and taking all these precautions and dealing with people every 20 minutes, the governor is saying they can’t be open?”
A sense of inevitability
In north Fresno on a recent weekday, masked diners braved the unforgiving valley sun for brunch at various locations, packing parking lots while they bunched up in the shade to wait for limited patio seating.
Making dining al fresco in 100F heat pleasant is not easy, but local businesses throughout the region have done what they could with tents, fans and cooling mist.
“You ever see Forrest Gump? Remember after the hurricane when there was only one shrimping boat left and there was all that shrimp? Yeah, it’s like that,” laughed Ben Torralva, owner of El Patio, when asked about business after reopening outdoor dining. “It’s just overwhelmingly busy.”
An unmasked Torralva had come out to speak to the Guardian as the night was winding down, reaching his hand out in greeting for a handshake. “If I shook your hand today right now, and I remembered not to touch my face or my eyes, or after I shook your hands, I got some sanitizer and cleaned it up, what risk do I run at that moment?” he shrugged.
In the Central Valley, there’s almost a sense of inevitability when it comes to the virus. Everyone seems to either have had or known someone who has had it. Everyone seems to know – or know of – at least one person who has died because of it.
“I don’t care how many times you wash your hands or your face and wear a mask, all you need is just a couple of seconds of something,” Torralva said. “It just takes a second. There’s no possible way to avoid it.” In the meantime, with every new precaution, lockdown and guidance, “we’re going to forget how to live”, he said.
Adkisson, the city councilman of Coalinga, echoed these sentiments. “We were never supposed to stop the virus,” he said. “We’re all going to come face to face with this eventually, whether we like it or not. All we’re doing by shutting all these businesses down is causing great economic catastrophe and causing people to lose everything they have.”
Adkisson noted that while the Central Valley had become a hotspot, Coalinga remained a place of low transmission. He acknowledged, however, that residents of Coalinga don’t stay in Coalinga. They work in the prisons, they work in Fresno, they travel to and from.
Never in all this is the role of asymptomatic spread recognized. And as always, it is those on the margins – with less access to healthcare, living in more polluted districts, working in places ripe for preexisting conditions – that end up suffering the most.
“I’m trying not to sound angry, but my community as a whole is angry,” said Arias, the Fresno city council president. “Because it’s our family members who are dying.”
‘It started with our president and ended with our supervisors’
For a week after activists went to his home, Arias received a deluge of death threats and disturbing phone calls. But the hardest part, he said, was explaining to his kids that the “modern-day mob” that came to their door would not face any consequences for their actions.
His condo sits in a gated community with clear “no trespassing” signage. Yet Arias was the one cited for misdemeanor battery and vandalism when the police turned up – the activists’ video shows him pushing them away from his home and slapping filming equipment to the ground. “I used the necessary force to get them out of my doorway,” Arias said. The district attorney declined to file charges.
Radio attack ads against Arias that broadcast on local stations throughout the valley play up terms like “social justice warrior”. His critics tell him to “stay in your lane”, saying he knows nothing of farming and farm life – even though from the age of 10 to 20, he was a fieldworker, living in Mendota. “I consider myself a Reagan Democrat. But if you ask the people of Fresno, I’m AOC,” he said, a reference to the progressive congresswoman and conservative bugbear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Everyone is AOC now.”
The sole public joint meeting that the city council has had with the board of supervisors during the pandemic was contentious. Councilwoman Esmeralda Soria asked a series of lengthy questions about whether the board would provide funding for essential workers recovering from Covid and housing assistance. “Your question was so long you burned all the time up,” Mendes, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said, never answering her.
After the meeting, Mendes posted a clip with the caption: “Social distancing and the use of a mask are still the most effective ways to slow the spread.”
The county’s leaders are now pushing for testing and education. But for some, all this comes too little, too late. Fresno’s cases continue to grow. Arias’s eight-year-old son tested positive in June.
“The message has been sent, the damage has been done, the well has been poisoned. It started with our president and it ended with our supervisors,” Arias said. “As result, more people are going to die.”