California’s Central Valley is the country’s heartland and the site of the richest, most bountiful farm region in America.
It also has a poverty rate nearly double that of the rest of the state.
Although many San Joaquin Valley parents work in agriculture, many of their children often go hungry. Poverty is so widespread that the valley has been called “California’s Appalachia” and its largest community, Fresno, ranks as the city with the most concentrated poverty in all of America.
Ten year-old Ramiro is like a lot of children in Tulare County. His father works in the fields and his mom struggles to make ends meet and he knows what it’s like to sometimes go hungry.
In this third and final installment in our series on childhood poverty in California, Ramiro walks us through his world to get a first-hand look at how they cope.
The third installment of a three-part series, “Kids for Real.”
- “Katrina’s Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America“, Brookings Institute
- Over 2.2 Million Low-Income California Adults are Food Insecure; 658,000 Suffer Hunger, UCLA Center for Health Policy Research
- Recent Trends in Income and Poverty, Public Policy Institute of California
- “Federal Funds Lag in Valley,” Fresno Bee, via the web site of Speaker Núñez
- Racial and Ethnic Wage Gaps in the California Labor Market, Public Policy Institute of California
- California Hunger Action Coalition, “a broad-based membership organization of food program providers, consumers, and anti-hunger advocates from throughout the state.”

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