Timeline

The 1990s opened with promises of prosperity and progress — but for many communities, the decade delivered something far more complicated. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 that opened markets between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, combined with the 1996 Farm Bill’s elimination of longstanding price supports, accelerated the corporate takeover of agriculture that devastated independent family farmers unable to compete with large-scale industrial farms. Displaced Mexican farmers fueled a wave of immigration that met a rising tide of hostility: California’s Proposition 187, passed by voters in 1994, sought to deny public services to undocumented immigrants; sweeping federal welfare and immigration laws of 1996 went further, stripping even legal permanent residents of access to federal benefits they paid taxes to support. Scholars and journalists sounded the alarm about a broader erosion of civic participation: declining voter turnout, weakening community institutions, and a public increasingly disengaged from democratic life. Anti-government fury was also finding a more dangerous outlet, with organized far-right movements building grassroots power at school boards and community meetings and creating a climate of fear that drove people away from civic life; the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 brought that threat into the national spotlight. By the late 1990s, the rise of the internet and information technology was generating new concentrations of wealth — but that prosperity remained deeply uneven, bypassing low-income people and communities of color who needed it most. The Norman Foundation responded by investing in organizations fighting to keep family farms alive, defend immigrant rights, counter far-right organizing, and rebuild the grassroots civic power that sustains democracy.