By Lori Putnam
“I was born in Michoacán,” begins Señor Murillo, a documented immigrant farm worker now living in Oxnard. “I worked in the fields planting corn and strawberries from the time I was six or seven to now. It’s hard work; well, all work is hard, but fieldwork is the hardest job there is.”
Señor Murillo is a resident of a community serving low-income farm workers and their families developed by the Camarillo Economic Development Corporation. His story, among many others, was captured by students enrolled in an interdisciplinary undergraduate course entitled Narratives of the Working Class and co-taught by Sociology Professor Elizabeth Hartung and English Professor Renny Christopher in Spring 2006.
Hartung, who chairs CSUCI’s Sociology and Anthropology Programs, wanted to examine how affordable housing impacts quality of life for farm worker families, a significant demographic of Ventura County.
“Their stories show the side of a housing crisis that especially affects very low income families,” she observed. The residents of the Villa Caesar Chavez complex are part of an ongoing research study by Hartung to examine how housing impacts other aspects of people’s lives. She is revisiting the complex for a second round of interviews focused on building and maintaining community. According to Hartung, this kind of research lies at the heart of sociology today in helping us to understand and cope with social change.
Hartung herself is not a stranger to change. A Kansas native, she came to the Golden State somewhat reluctantly. Having earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1985, she found herself in a marketplace inundated with doctorates. “I sent my resume everywhere,” recalled Hartung. “When California State University Fresno interviewed me, I thought of Venice Beach. Imagine my surprise when I landed in the Midwest of California!”
During her tenure at Fresno, Hartung took yet another step away from her Midwestern roots to participate in a teaching exchange with the University of the Basque Country in Lejona, Spain. She recalls feeling surprised at finding herself quite comfortable in Gexto, a town near Bilboa, despite the fact that she didn’t speak Spanish at the time. “I realized Gexto reminded me a lot of the town where I grew up, where everyone knows each other, and each other’s business. And although I ran away from that as a young adult, when I found it in another country and culture, I found it charming. I felt like I’d come home.”
Hartung is a strong advocate of study abroad programs, describing their impact on students as life-changing. Not only do students broaden their own experiences with different cultures—something particularly important for students in the social sciences—they also discover more about themselves. “By moving out of an environment that you know and understand into one that you don’t, you learn a lot about yourself,” said Hartung.
In 2005, Hartung was invited to join the CSUCI faculty. She and her department colleagues are committed to providing students with the skills to succeed in graduate or professional schools, or immediately enter the job market. Studies like the one Hartung is conducting, gives her students real-world experience that can translate into a variety of professions.
Hartung describes the last four years as labor intensive, but very satisfying:
“I am grateful to be at a place where I look forward to coming to work. That is incalculable in terms of what that is worth to me.”
