I began writing this review a day after the ceremonial roll call at the Democratic National Convention which officially declared Kamala Harris as the Party’s nominee for President of the United States. Lil Jon was in the house, ringing in Georgia’s delegate count with his earworm inducing song, “Turn Down for What,” but no, what really got me was the finale, when California Governor Gavin Newsom introduced all votes in favor of Vice President Harris while speaking to the tune of the late, great Tupac Shakur’s “California Love.” This song has become my home state’s unofficial anthem, and as I watched and listened from my Portland, Oregon home office, I ached for Cali. I’ve been reluctant to say I missed California (grief will do that), but as I sang along to the words, “California knows how to party,” I felt, at long last, what it means to miss a home that once cradled me. Oh, that Cali love, the kind only Tupac could memorialize.
I felt that Cali love too while pouring through Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California, the recent anthology edited by Carribean Fragoza, Romeo Guzmán, and Samine Joudat. Consisting of twenty four personal missives, an introduction, and a foreword by Susan Straight, Writing the Golden State maps California in ways few anthologies have done before. As Straight writes in her foreword, this book tells “fresh stories about California, stories to bring readers to places they need to go” (6). The contributors all offer deeply personal accounts of their pockets of California, guiding us in a literary topography that forces readers to truly see this complex region for what it is, all of it, the impoverished farm towns in the Central Valley to LA’s Black Panamanian communities seldom acknowledged in tourism propaganda.
As the editors assert in the introduction, “Instead of measuring or forecasting the relative health of the “California Dream,” the authors provide an on-the-ground and honest portrait of the state’s past and present. There are no promises, lofty projections, or an ingenious panacea that will wash away the state’s sins” (9). Rather than reinforce the hella problematic myth of California as the last vestige of a wide frontier begging to be “discovered,” the essays in this volume explore those tucked away communities that would appear to be light years away from everything the iconic Hollywood sign represents. Who or what gets to be presented on a map? What and who does a map erase and bury? How can we (re)map a place and people into existence? These and more are just some of the questions the essays explore.
Rather than reinforce the hella problematic myth of California as the last vestige of a wide frontier begging to be “discovered,” the essays in this volume explore those tucked away communities that would appear to be light years away from everything the iconic Hollywood sign represents.
For instance, Wendy Cheng’s soulful essay, “In Rancho Santa Fe, We Were Orientals,” offers us a historical and personal account of this city that was once the site of the Santa Fe Railroad. Documenting the small population of Asians and Asian Americans in Rancho Santa Fe, Cheng explains, “I didn’t find out until much later that one of the reasons there were so few of “us” was because up until the 1970s, people of color were prohibited from living in Rancho Santa Fe unless they were servants” (19). In this one line, Cheng uncovers a dark side to Southern California history and how it was strategically mapped to exclude particular groups, belying the image of LA as a liberal bastion of inclusivity.
LA’s vastness even ironically fosters kinship and belonging, as Jenise Miller describes in her contributing essay, “We Are Our Own Multitude: Los Angeles’s Black Panamanian Community”: “As a Black Panamanian in Los Angeles, I was not an anomaly. Instead, I was part of a community that held and named me” (55). More than solely the home of the entertainment industry, Los Angeles is the diasporic home of communities like Miller’s.
Yet even “home” is a tricky, fraught sort of thing. Do all get to claim a home? Daniel Lanza Rivers documents how California’s Fort Tejon, located right off “the 5” (for all you outsiders, that’s California speak for the Interstate 5 freeway that stretches from Southern California to Washington State) quite literally capitalizes on the mythology of a romantic Spanish past that sidesteps the genocide of Indigenous populations who were forced to toil a land that was taken from them. These reminders of Spanish nostalgia litter just about every corner of the state, dotting the locations of the twenty-one California missions, or reflected in city and town names like San Luis Obispo and San Juan Bautista.
Still, essays like Cheng’s and others document how human beings make community from scratch, often in the most inhospitable climates. Lisa Covert’s “Looking to the Sky in the Antelope Valley” gives voice to that parched landscape of desert and Joshua trees, where Edwards Air Force Base became a lifeline for communities in need of jobs. Farther up the 5 and the 99, Brynn Saito introduces us to the San Joaquin Valley towns of Dinuba and Reedley, a short drive from Fresno, where I lived until 2021. Although this arid, dusty region is famous for supplying much of the nation’s agriculture, what is seldom acknowledged is what the land also once held: the concentration camps that incarcerated generations of Japanese and Japanese Americans during and after World War II. “Neither of my Japanese American grandparents spoke much about their time in the camps or their reentry into civilian life,” Saito tells us (129), laying claim to those silences and memories that lurk beneath the surface.
Although this arid, dusty region is famous for supplying much of the nation’s agriculture, what is seldom acknowledged is what the land also once held: the concentration camps that incarcerated generations of Japanese and Japanese Americans during and after World War II.
When I lived in Fresno, I once visited the fairgrounds just down the road from my home in the Southeast part of town, and it was only while gorging myself on fried fair food that I learned the grounds were a former camp. A painful chapter in my home state’s history that doesn’t jive with the racialized amnesia that residents and visitors swallow to maintain the laid back facade of a palm tree and white sand.
I come from California, a place that is chronically misunderstood. If you believe what you see on TV and online, Califas would greet you with endless palm trees, blue skies, pristine beaches, and blonde chicks as far as the eyes can see. But let’s not get it twisted. California may be this, but it is so much more. California is also my hometown of Oxnard, a city that birthed both the late writer Michele Serros and me, that place that has counted on Mexican labor for over a century yet degrades the very gente whose hands work the soil. California is home to many cities like Oxnard, those nooks and crannies that rarely make it to the forefront of our consciousness except for quick pit stops.
California is also my hometown of Oxnard, a city that birthed both the late writer Michele Serros and me, that place that has counted on Mexican labor for over a century yet degrades the very gente whose hands work the soil.
California will tear you up and spit you out. It will break your heart and then console you after. Loving Califas is not to forgive its past and present crimes, as Carribean Fragoza, Romeo Guzmán, and Samine Joudat remind us. To love Califas is to honor its people, the dead, buried, forgotten, and those who are alive and carving home as best they can. In the words of Tupac, Writing the Golden State celebrates the streets of LA, from Oak Town to Sac Town, the Bay Area and back down. Tupac got it right. And so do the editors of this gem of a book.
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