*Source: 2007 American Community Survey

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The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
by Tyche Hendricks

—Reviewed by Erica E Phillips

Beyond its physical demarcation, the border between the United States and Mexico is, above all, a region – and one rich with humanity. In her first book, veteran immigration reporter Tyche Hendricks has compiled many of the stories she came across during her travels through the region, characterizing it as “defined by its proximity to the border and to the country on the other side.”

Through vivid storytelling, Hendricks illuminates not only the unique history of the borderlands, but its people, culture, and politics. Beginning at the East end of the border, the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, and journeying as far as Tijuana at the western end, Hendricks visits many of the unknown outposts of the borderlands – some divided by a muddy river, others by tall metal fences.

The human stories in The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport originate on either side of the line, but more often they exist on both sides – the business manager of a Mexican maquiladora, who lives on the U.S. side and commutes through customs every day; the schoolchildren living on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, which straddles the border between Arizona and Sonora, who catch the school bus at an opening in the barbed wire border fence each morning. The line is an everyday reality for them, a “permeable membrane where commerce and culture, air and water, workers and students, pollution and disease flow back and forth daily.” Were it not for this very real line, much of the region’s industry – and thus many of its thriving cities – would not be here.

Perhaps most poignant is Hendricks’s careful alignment of many parallel narratives on either side of the border. In McAllen, Texas, a wealthy housewife struggles with her social position. She moved from rural Kansas into a suburban subdivision, where her comfortable home has a pool and air conditioning. A mother on the other side of the border in Reynosa, Tamaulipas emerges from a shack, breaks down a wooden crate to build a fire, and de-feathers a chicken for her husband’s supper. Both of the women’s husbands commute to the same Mexican factory for work each day – one as a manager and the other as a laborer.

Hendricks uses the border region as a way of addressing the core of several continent-wide issues: the bi-cultural existence of two peoples with distinct histories; the monumental economic disparity; land-use; illegal immigration; health care; energy and pollution regulation; and the narcotics and firearms trades.

She visits hospitals and health care facilities on both sides of the border in Nogales. When undocumented immigrants suffer injury or dehydration as a result of a dangerous border crossing, they arrive at facilities on the U.S. side. Meanwhile, many U.S. citizens pass through customs every day, seeking out affordable medical and dental services on the Mexican side. The facilities exchange equipment, patients, coordinate transfers and share supplies, just as any number of hospitals existing in the same city would do.

In one of the more provocative chapters, Hendricks looks into the co-dependent energy relationship between Mexico and the United States. Peering through the fences surrounding a power plant development in Mexicali, watching for endangered birds in the marshes of the Colorado River delta, or listening to the pounding wind’s energy potential atop the cliffs in La Rumorosa, Hendricks paints a complex picture of the water and air pollution crises along the border. In Baja California, power plants are harvesting energy using harmful processes unregulated by the Mexican government-processes that have been outlawed in the United States. But the majority of the energy produced is transferred back to the United States for consumption. As the blowing wind and flowing rivers carry pollution between the two nations, one environmental sciences professor comments to Hendricks: “They say the wind doesn’t need a passport or a visa.”

Further Reading: Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone by Terry Greene Sterling and Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail by Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks

*Photo courtesy Tom Peck.

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Before Monica Ganas began teaching California, she lived it. A native of the state and a 30 year veteran of the entertainment industry and now a professor at Azusa Pacific University, Ganas explained how her personal background inspired her book, Under the Influence: California’s Intoxicating Spiritual and Cultural Impact on America. “I think I’ve been trying to make sense of my personal experience for a lot of my life,” she joked. It wasn’t until she left the state that she began to see its strangeness, and the way it impacts the country. Ganas stopped by Zocalo’s offices to explore California culture – from the glamor of movies to the ordinariness of traffic, from car obsession to spiritual diversity.

*Photo courtesy Wolfgang Staudt.

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Lucien Wulsin is the project director of Insure the Uninsured Project and is working on approaches to expand coverage for uninsured working Californians. He is the author of “California at the Crossroads: Choices for Health Care Reform,” a study on California’s options to redesign its health care system. Before chatting about health reform’s implications for California, he took our Green Room Q&A.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. Hiking up in the Santa Monica Mountains with my dogs.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Jump out of an airplane with a parachute.

Q. What music have you listened to today?

A. Not a note.

Q. When do you feel most creative?

A. First thing in the morning until roughly 11 or 11:30, or when I’m in the mountains or on a boat.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Uh.

Q. Who is your favorite fictional character?

A. The Brothers Karamazov – all of them.

Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?

A. My house.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. A baseball player, and then a singer. Eventually I realized I can’t sing and my baseball skills are not that great.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?

A. When we go out to eat.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. Supreme Court Justice.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. I don’t know that they’re material possessions, but, my dogs.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, together. I’d just listen to them talk.

To read more about Wulsin’s panel, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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Charles Bukowski lived and wrote all over Los Angeles. He devoted a short piece, a June 1974 installment of his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column in the L.A. Free Press, to the hunt for home. He recalls his moves from the famed (and recently landmarked) DeLongre Avenue court, to a house with a girlfriend, to a “modern apartment,” and finally to Hollywood and Western, where he felt “in love with the world again.” Below, the newspaper column in full, pulled from a new collection featuring his unpublished or long unseen work, Charles Bukowski: Absence of the Hero, edited by David Stephen Calonne.

To find the proper place to write, that’s most important; the rent should be reasonable, the walls thick, the landlord indifferent, and the tenants depraved, penurious, alcoholic, and lower middle-class. With the advent of the high-rise apartments, small courts, with their own private entranceways, have more and more vanished, and the wonderful characters that once infested these places have vanished along with them.

I lived for eight years on a front court on DeLongpre Avenue, and the poetry and the stories flourished. I’d sit at the front window typing, peering through excessive brush onto the street; I’d be surrounded by beer bottles and listening to classical music on the radio, sitting in my shorts, barefooted, my fat beer belly dangling. I was surrounded by rays and shadows and sounds, and I made sounds.

My landlord was a drunk, my landlady was a drunk, they’d come down and get me at night…. “Stop that silly typing, you son of a bitch, come on down and get drunk.” And I’d go. The beer was free, the cigarettes were free, they fed me; they liked me, we talked until 3 or 4 in the morning. The next day they’d knock on the door and leave a bag of something: tomatoes or pears or apples or oranges, mostly it was tomatoes. Or often she’d come with a warm meal – beef stew with biscuits and green onions; fried chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes, and bean salad with cornbread. They’d knock, listen for my voice, then run off. He was 60, she was 58. I put out their garbage cans every Wednesday, eight or 10 cans gathered from the courts and the apartments in back. The alcoholic next to me fell out of bed at 4 each morning; there was an ATD case in one of the apartments in back; 14 Puerto Ricans lived in one of the center courts, men, women, and children, they never made a sound and slept on the rug next to each other.

Mad people came to visit me – Nazis, anarchists, painters, musicians, fools, geniuses, and bad writers. They all imparted their ideas to me thinking that I would understand. Some nights I would look around and there would be from eight to 14 people sitting about the rug, and I only knew two or three of them. Sometimes I would go into a rage and throw them all out; other times I just forgot it all. Nobody ever stole from me except one who professed to be my friend and was always fingering my bookcase, slipping first editions and rare items under his shirt. The police raided continually but only took me in once or twice, yes, it was twice. Once they came bearing a shotgun, but I told them I was a writer and they left. Yes, it was a good place to live and to write.

Then love came and I moved out and into this house with this lady. She was good to me and it worked well, I liked her two children; there was space and shadow, a crazy dog, and a large backyard, a jungle of a backyard with bamboo and squirrels and walnut trees, wild rosebushes, fig trees, lush plants. I wrote well there – many love poems and love stories; I had not written too many of those. I walked about and it felt as if the sun was inside of me; I was finally warm, and things seemed humorous, gleeful, easy; I felt no guilt about my feelings. Yet, that finally went bad as those things do go bad. One or both begin to build resentments; things that once seemed so marvelous no longer seem that way. Each blames the other – it’s you….you did this, you said that, you shouldn’t have acted that way, you….

I had to move quickly. I searched the streets for a plausible place, somewhere a man might possibly get off a short poem. The afternoons and mornings mingled: First and last month’s rent, $200 security, $75 cleaning, references. None of the places even seemed livable, and the landlords and managers gave off the worst of vibes: greedy, suspicious, dead-meat creatures. One of them wouldn’t even look at me; he just kept staring at his TV set and tolling off the charges. I began to feel dirtied, like an imbecile, a man without a right to hot and cold water and a toilet to rent as his own. There was actually no place to be found. In weariness I simply paid somebody and began moving in.

It was a modern apartment, a place in the back, up one flight, apartment 24. There was a garden in the center and two managers, man and wife, who lived downstairs and they never left the premises; one of them was always there, especially the lady, who dressed in white and walked around with a little brown bag and often caught the leaves as they fell from the bushes; she got them before they hit the ground. She was immaculate, face heavy with white powder; she wore much lipstick and had a rasping voice, a voice that always gave the sound of somebody lying. Her husband had the booming voice, and he boomed about the Dodgers and about God and about the prices in the supermarket. My first night there the phone rang and he told me that my radio was on too loud; they could hear me all over the court. “We can hear you all over the court, Hank,” he said. He insisted that we call each other by our first names. My radio had not been on loud. I turned it off. Then somebody started playing an accordion. “Oh, that’s beautiful!” I heard a voice. The guy ran through all the Lawrence Welk tunes.

She was always there, ubiquitous, most ubiquitous, and I’d have a hangover, be coming down the stairs, listening, thinking, she’s not around, I’ve gotten by her this time. And I’d have my bag of empties full of ashes and crap, the bottom wet and wanting to rip open, myself feeling like vomiting, I’d get down on the ground and then go through an opening in the back garage in between the cars, trying to get to the trash container, and out she’d pop with her broom: “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” “Oh yes,” I’d say, “it’s a nice day.”
And she was always at the mailboxes when the mail came, she was out there with her broom; you couldn’t get your mail. Or if somebody unknown came to the court she’d ask: “What do you want?” On warm days she placed herself in one of the deck chairs and reclined, and it seemed as if all the days I lived there were warm. And others came out and joined her and one was allowed to listen to their voices and their ideas.

The modern apartment-dwellers are all the same; they spend much time scrubbing and waxing and dusting and vacuuming; everything glistens – stoves, refrigerators, tables; the dishes are washed immediately after eating; the water in the toilet is blue; towels are used only once; doors are left open, blinds parted, and under the lamps you can see them sitting quietly reading a safe paperback or watching a laugh-track family-affair comedy on a huge TV screen. They buy knickknacks and ferns, things to hang about, fill the spaces; a Sunday afternoon at Akron is their Nirvana. They have no children, no pets, and they get intoxicated twice a year, at Christmas and at New Year’s.

There were two small couches in my place about a foot and a half wide. Upon one of these I was supposed to sleep. It was impossible to make love to a woman on either one of them. I discovered 18 roaches behind the refrigerator, and whenever I typed the woman below me beat up on her ceiling with a broom handle. And there was always somebody knocking on my door saying that I was disturbing them. Then one day all the tenants were given forms saying that there would be an automatic $5-a-month boost for each apartment. The roach spray I used almost cost me that. The writing had dwindled, almost stopped. My editor phoned me and assured me that every writer had his slumps. He said that I had five years left; that I needn’t write anything for five years and that I still could make it. I thanked him….

And I lucked it. I found this court just off of Hollywood and Western; I found it by getting the inside that somebody was moving out before that somebody moved out. It is my kind of neighborhood – massage parlors and love parlors are everywhere; taco stands, pizza parlors, sandwich shops; cut-rate drugstores full of wigs and old combs, rotting soap, hair pins, and lotions; whores night and day; black pimps in broad hats with their razor-sharp noses; plainclothes cops shaking down people at high noon, checking their arms for needle marks; dirty bookstores, murder, shakedowns, dope. I walk up Western Avenue toward Hollywood Boulevard and the sun shines inside of me again. I almost feel in love again, My people, my time, the taste of it….

I’ve only been here a week and just last night I looked around, beer bottles were everywhere, the radio was on, and in my place there were some people who live in this court: a guy who runs one of the love parlors, two guys who work in a dirty bookstore, and a dancer from one of the bars. We talked about dildoes, shakedowns, some of the ladies of the boulevard and the avenue; we talked about the freaks and the good people and the hard-hearted; we talked all through the night, the smoke curling, the laughter O.K. We ran out of beer and the delivery boy came in high and screwed-up and stayed an hour. We sent out for chicken and potatoes and cole slaw and buns. The night rolled easy. Finally I called an end: I’d been drinking beer since 11 a.m. They left in good form. I went to the bathroom, pissed, and then went to bed. Hemingway couldn’t ask for better. The light was coming through; I was in love with the world again. Ah.

Copyright 2010 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski. Reprinted from the new collection Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2 1946-1992, Edited and with an introduction by David Calonne, by permission of City Lights Books.

*Photo courtesy revrev Homepage photo courtesy Roger Jones.

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Joe Mathews, a fourth-generation Californian and frequent Zócalo moderator, joined forces with his fellow New America Foundation scholar Mark Paul to write California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It. “We’re colleagues, but we’re very different people. We’re from different ends of the state. He’s a baby boomer and I’m not. He has worked in government and politics, and I would never do that in a million years. He’s definitely a liberal, I’m not,” Mathews said. “But we both had this incredible shared frustration with the state of conversation and action about good government and reform.” Below, Mathews chats with Zócalo about why the state is broken, what Schwarzenegger has done about it, why Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown aren’t helping, and how to get out of the mess.

Q. How did we get into this mess, and are we doing anything right?

A. I think we make pretty good policy in some areas that involve majority votes in the legislation. We’re actually representing the people of California in those areas. We do things in a timely manner, and if things get screwed up, it’s clear who messed up and they can be held accountable. That’s not too terrible.

But our problems started in 1849, in the sense that we didn’t have a real founding. We had this very strange beginning of the state that no other state had. It’s the curse of bigness and suddenness. We were this big place, we were far away, and we went from nothing to the whole world showing up because we had a gold rush. We were immediately a state without going through any of the processes. We had a constitution but it was worthless. We’ve never gotten it right. Californians have never been people who have engaged in their government. We do things in hurried, improvised, angry spasms. We’ve always gotten away with it because we’re bigger and faster-growing and better looking than everybody else. We could get away with it because the state changed so fast, and so much wealth was coming in. We would have a bust, and people would talk about fixing things in a real way, but before we figured out how, the new boom was on, so who cared? We’ve had this 160-year adolescence.

This is the moment – and by moment, I mean 20-year period – where we have to have a real founding. We are no longer a state of arrival. We’re a state where most people arrive in maternity wards, though many people still come here and many people leave here. It’s very significant that California is finally a place where most people are from here. We’re not going to be bailed out by some new arrival of wealth. We have to educate our own people. We have to find a new generation of homebuyers well-off enough to buy the homes of people retiring.

It’s not going to change our character. We will always be a big, diverse, crazy place with crazy politics doing things that make the rest of the world scratch their heads. We just need to do all that in a democratic way, making sure that people doing crazy things can be held accountable, and allowing us to make decisions and balance budgets in a timely fashion. But we haven’t reckoned with things. We’re stuck.

Q. What got us stuck with this system?

A. We passed Proposition 13, which centralized authority for a really big, diverse state in a small number of people in Sacramento. Then, through a series of measures passed on top of that, we created this system that limited options for the handful of people that we gave all the power to. We put a small number of people in charge of money and taxation and spending, and then tied their hands behind their backs. We’ve created this kind of ratchet, as we call it in the book, on any matter that involves money. It’s a system that can’t really be operated by anybody.

There’s an aspect of this that fits in with the larger conversation in the country of being “too big to fail.” It’s clear now that with banks and some other institutions, when they get so big, it’s hard to run them. If those people screw up, it can create all sorts of problems for all sorts of folks in a way that isn’t fair. It creates an unacceptable level of risk. The argument for breaking up big banks is that it spreads risk.

California has the same problem. By centralizing, by robbing people of control and making it hard to govern, we’ve created an unacceptable level of risk. We need to restore local control of taxation and spending. There will always be some Maywoods – some places that screw up. But you need to spread the risk around. It would be much better for the state, and for the people who manage their lives and cities wisely.

Q. How do voters and elected officials relate to each other? Why would Californians vote to give more authority to politicians they otherwise seem to want to restrain?

A. Well, Proposition 13 didn’t say, “Let’s make Sacramento the center of all fiscal authority,” so there was no real vote for that. People warned that it was going to happen.

But there is this mutual cycle of contempt. Voters don’t trust politicians, whether local or state, so they try to tie the hands of politicians. That’s what Prop. 13 was all about. That’s how it was sold. And it tied the hands of local folks who set property tax rates. But when the state got that power, we tied their hands – you can’t touch this spending, you can’t touch this tax.

So what the folks in power spend time doing is trying to subvert and get around the restrictions we’ve put on them. they find it harder and harder to do, and they end up doing things people don’t like – backdoor fees and tax increases. And that makes everyone more mad, and we impose more restrictions. That’s the cycle we live with. It needs to stop.

Part of this happens because of the way the media approach the California story. The message is always: You’re getting screwed. That narrative needs to be replaced with a big full-length mirror that says, “Maybe you’re being screwed, but nowhere near as much as you’ve screwed yourself.” Once people understand that, then reform will come more easily. I think you’re talking about a 10 to 20 year process of public opinion being changed and actual action taken. And then in 20 years they’ll say, “Twenty years ago there was that book that started it all….”

Q. Have we begun that process, and if so, how far along are we?

A. I think you’ve seen the beginning of it with the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and the vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger would never say this, because his persona is built on this idea that everything is possible, but ultimately what he said to us in three separate elections is that the current system doesn’t allow him to legislate or govern in any sane way. He’s been saying that for seven years. He’s been trying different ways to say it and to fix it, and he has the advantage of being right.

The good government people have been working for years, too, to push for redistricting and an open primary. The effort to get a constitutional convention, even if it failed, is the beginning. Mark and I disagree with the California Forward people on some of their prescriptions, but what they’re doing right is building an interest group, something long-term to fight for the system. We need a real, sustainable public opinion campaign.

The best people at that is the California Teachers Association. They’re always on air talking in messages even when there is no political issue they’re working on. You hear from them when school starts – they’re talking about teachers, about giving them better pay and more freedom. Over the course of doing this they really have changed public opinion. Proposition 98, which they see as a very important thing and I think has been a disaster, passed with 50 percent of the vote but today something like 70 percent of people support it.

They’ve moved public opinion, and there needs to be the same effort with the state as a whole. We’ve created this political system and our elected officials are scapegoats. They do a great job being scapegoats – they’re awful, as any good scapegoat should be. But we need a broad public education campaign. For instance, people think most of the budget is spent on prisons and not on education, and that’s just not the case. Right now, our messaging is small and indirect. We need a lot of money and  a lot of time and a lot of smart campaigns. Maybe then, in ten years, you can go and have a constitutional convention or a revision conversation. Then you just have to hope the changes are the right ones. This is a really opportune moment and I wish people were doing more. This book is our effort to do something. There’s a moment when everyone knows something’s wrong and everyone’s paying attention. They may not show up to vote, but they’re paying attention. Now’s the moment to explain what’s going on.

I don’t think the people running for office right now are helping with this, unfortunately. Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown – every time they open their mouths they make things worse. They’re lying to us. They’re saying it’s just about controlling spending. They’re saying, “If we got a different person, me, in there, everything would be fine.” The best thing Meg Whitman can do for the state is end her campaign and put that money into the changing of public opinion. She could spend $100 million to send our book to every Californian. We would do it for a discount! But instead what she’s saying is often completely misleading and distorted. She’s giving people false information about the state, and that’s profoundly problematic. Brown is in some ways worse. He says things about Proposition 13 being the greatest thing that ever happened. He knows better, more than anyone alive. But he’s running for office.

The one political endorsement that I will ever issue is, don’t vote for governor this year. Not voting, leaving it blank, has value. In California, the requirement for a qualifying initiative or referendum is the support of a percentage of the number of people who voted in the most recent gubernatorial election. If you don’t vote for governor, you’re making it easier to pass referenda in California. You’re making it easier for people to come up with bad ideas, of course, but you’re also easing the way for good ideas.

Q. Does California need a new constitution?

A. We need a new one. The old one is a mess. It’s very long. People say India and Alabama have famously long constitutions, too. Constitutions should be simple. We have lots of things that don’t belong in it – from special tax rates to the kind of gill nets you use in commercial fishing.

We probably need to start over. Everyone’s scared of the blank page, but we should start with a blank page. Rather than negotiate every edit with every interest group that likes something in the Constitution, we can start anew. I think it’ll be politically easier. It’s also something we’ve never done. I don’t count the 1849 rogue convention where they plagiarized Iowa’s constitution and took out all the explanations of how to pay for things. We need a founding. We should invite people and let people dress up and make it a big party. I think anyone who wants to show up should come. Given the level of civic engagement in the state, I don’t think it’ll be an unmanageable number of people.

There are people doing some of this already. There are efforts online – Mark is involved with one. I always compare it to fantasy football. People who are really addicted to this – not me, not me, I swear – know that before the draft, you can do a mock draft to plan, to strategize. You create this in a wiki sort of way, with 12 other random people. We need that functionality for constitution writing in California.

Q. Given the state of the state, how did California become a model for the rest of the country?

A. I don’t know if we’re a model, but, I think the Gold Rush is the answer to that question, ultimately. We were this place of dreams that was talked about and watched from afar from our very beginning. Sometimes people pay less attention to us – we ebb and flow. We’re so big now, and so important. Obama seems to be trying to do it, but really, you can’t bring back the American economy without the California economy. That’s something I don’t think Obama quite understands, or he’d be doing more for us.

We’re less a model than we are an alternative. It’s the [Carey] McWilliams metaphor – we’re the great exception. We’re a parallel country within the country, separated by distance and some pretty big mountains from power and the rest of the country. Sometimes we do things that people want to do the exact opposite of, and sometimes they want to follow us. Certainly for the last generation we have been a technology capital, and that has a way of spreading our values and thinking. We’re also a pop cultural capital, and that has a way of giving us an outsize footprint in the world. And we’re just better looking. Really. That’s a fully-researched claim, with the full force of a think tank behind it. I mean, aren’t we?

*Photo of flag courtesy welshbaloney.

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A veteran Variety reporter, Nicole LaPorte wrote The Men Who Would Be King at the risk of never lunching — or breakfasting or dining — in this town again. Her book catalogs in precise detail — from boardroom blow-ups to red carpet premieres — the rise and fall of DreamWorks studios, the brainchild of Hollywood’s biggest moguls since the golden age of the studio system. “There was money, it was the 90s, Clinton was in office,” LaPorte said. “The movie business is always a risky  business, but back then, there were many more people willing to place bets.” Unfortunately, no matter how big the men behind it or how many hits it made in the early years, it didn’t keep DreamWorks alive, as LaPorte explained at Zócalo’s offices.

*Photo courtesy just_kelly.

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101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory
by Terry McDermott

–Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib

Under Terry McDermott’s watchful, and sometimes worshipful eye, his subject – UC Irvine neuroscientist Gary Lynch – emerges as a charming egomaniac and autodidact, an engrossing character. But more importantly, 101 Theory Drive offers an education in how science happens – the almost exploitative systems of work, the incestuously small and competitive community of scientists, the personal stakes involved in turning a hypothesis into a theory.

Lynch is by training a psychologist. He taught himself neuroanatomy and cell biology after turning away from behavioral psychology, and has spent decades researching how memory works. Lynch has hypothesized that the formation of a new memory causes a structural change in brain cells through a process known as long-term-potentiation, or LTP. McDermott catches him in an intimate profile as he struggles to convince the scientific community of this hypothesis.

One of the joys of reading 101 Theory Drive is accompanying McDermott on his learning curve – which is almost as impressive as Lynch’s. The book is dense with descriptions of neurological processes that McDermott goes to great lengths to translate for the lay reader. For instance, McDermott notes that many scientists think cells have to send new proteins to synapses to form memories. But that, McDermott says, summing up Lynch’s counter-theory, is akin to a construction crew having to “put down their hammers and call their office for a delivery every time they needed a nail.” In a later chapter, thinking about baseball players – who respond to pitches using their memory of the last throw – leads McDermott naturally to a broader discussion about human memory. We tend to file away experiences by relating them to what came before – in other words, we automatically categorize them during LTP.

Through such vivid comparisons, McDermott tantalizingly follows his mad scientist through rat decapitations, failed experiments, and the politics of peer-reviewed papers. Equally intriguing is the discussion of the medical and commercial implications of Lynch’s discoveries. Lynch founded Cortex, a company that develops high-impact ampakines that could provide a cure for various neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Once frowned upon in the scientific community for mixing commerce with science, Lynch increasingly finds himself hailed for his entrepreneurship, particularly as public research money dries up.

Eventually, investigating the diseases leads Lynch to the next frontier: what Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman refers to as “the remembered present” – consciousness itself. As McDermott puts it, “the brain is virtually always doing something. Signaling, initiated from the environment or internally, is constant.” And as Lynch himself hypothesizes, “All of this is mediated by changes in synaptic strength, across colossal chambers of networks…. Memory is the wrong word for all of this… it’s thinking.”

Lynch’s personal charisma and his epic quest to solve one of the most vexing biological mysteries of our times lends itself to mythologizing. McDermott presents him as a foulmouthed but conquering hero – the narrative breaks for conversations or email excerpts that only serve to prove Lynch’s alleged charms. And yet every Holy Grail needs a hero to search for it, and in Gary Lynch, the convoluted workings of human memory has found a knight errant. McDermott reminds us that there will always be more Holy Grails to find. There is no such thing as perfect knowledge in science, and it seems, there is no such thing as a perfect scientist.

Further reading: Big Brains: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, and In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel

*Photo above courtesy majorbonnet.

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Kathay Feng is the Executive Director of California Common Cause, and author of Proposition 11 – California’s successful redistricting reform. Before chatting onstage about direct democracy in the state, Feng sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A.

Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?

A. Chocolate.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. Just finishing up breakfast with my husband and daughter.

Q. What do you do to clear your mind?

A. Wash dishes.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Lately, dilemma, because my three-year-old just learned it. She walks around saying, “That’s a dilemma.”

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. Carol Burnett.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?

A. Tibet.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. A hand print from my daughter from when she was first born.

Q. What is the best gift you have ever received?

A. The most recent one was for Mother’s Day. My husband got me a collection of stories about moms and daughters. The very first story I flipped to was about a Native American woman and how difficult it was when she was raising her daughter, and I was brought to tears. It’s nice to read it with my daughter, even though she doesn’t understand most of it.

Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?

A. It is extremely diverse. When I first came here, my stereotype was Hollywood and personalized license plates – a shallow image of a shallow town. But it’s so much more, and that’s why I love living here.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. Buddha. I’d love to ask him if, when he was first discovering meditation, he ever imagined that his thoughts and contemplations would turn into an international religion.

To read more about Feng’s event, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

The post Kathay Feng appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement
by Miriam Pawel

–Reviewed by Saskia Vogel

Written at a time when everyone knows what it means to construct a public image, Miriam Pawel’s Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement revisits the story of an iconic movement with an even more iconic leader. But instead of a “Chavez and Goliath” story, Pawel shows us exactly how many people make up the “little guy” and how they fought for better wages and working conditions.

Instead of offering another hagiography figuring Chavez as a saint, Pawel focuses on the experience of eight people who dedicated their lives to making a difference to the United Farm Worker cause. From Eliseo Medina, a grape-picker who rose in the ranks to become the second vice president of the union, to Chris Hartmire, a Presbyterian minister who headed the California Migrant Ministry when he began supporting the fledgling union, the characters give an intimate perspective of the victories and losses of the union’s fight.

Because of Pawel’s more democratic approach, Chavez appears less as revered leader than as a dedicated man with a keen sense for staging and a spellbinding public speaker. In the chapter describing Chavez’s influential fast of 1968, Pawel recounts that Chavez aimed to send a message to workers to be disciplined and willing to sacrifice. Coming in the middle of the emotionally-charged Delano Grape Strike, Chavez indeed picked the right time to send a message of non-violence and determination to those he had helped call to action.

Pawel’s book ultimately seeks to show that “the union was the workers,” and that this sentiment kept union morale solid. As the union started to be seen as synonymous with Cesar Chavez, union and leaders and the icon already had diverging visions for the organization. Faith corroded within the union, and its tenet that “people organize people” was replaced with impersonal strategies like using direct mail and, for the first time, using money to wield influence.

For those without a specific interest in labor practices, agriculture or Californian history, Pawel’s approach can seem dry where it might have been more literary, perhaps differentiating the subjects in her narrative with distinct voices in addition to her even-keeled reporter’s tone. Take her account of the Delano Grape Strike. As Pawel notes, at the height of the strike, 17 million Americans stopped eating grapes to support the union. Pawel recounts stories, for example, of those instrumental in organizing the strike and those who pleaded with supermarket buyers and shoppers not to buy grapes from the region until labor practices changed. It’s a story with victories and weathering losses presented as a collection of facts.

Still, the story of the farm worker’s movement reminds us that buying is not simply a matter of choosing between brands. Each purchase is a vote of support for the companies that put a particular item on the shelves – and for their labor practices. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers also remind us that David can become Goliath, but no victory is set in stone.

Excerpt: “Those who once dedicated their lives to Cesar Chavez’s crusade now wince when they drive past farmworkers, hunched over rows of vegetables or trimming grapevines in the bitter cold. Once so certain they could change that world, the UFW alumni rue their failure. They applaud each other’s individual accomplishments, but lament the lost opportunity to collectively achieve more. The memories still cause pain.”

Further Reading: Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century and Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement

Saskia Vogel writes a lot. Visit her at http://SaskiaVogel.com.

*Photo courtesy **bc**.

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