In her 1997 poem, “Colorado Water,” she wrote:

The palm said, “My clover is cool around my bole, over my hidden roots.
My fronds clatter, crash
like waves in the far off sea.”

I follow the tradition of thousands of years, of date palm growers diverting the waters of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates and Indus, to irrigate their gardens. Water that entered the Colorado River basin as melted snow in Wyoming and Utah, Colorado and Arizona, and even New Mexico, contributes to the flow onto my property.

But this is a historic moment, too. This summer, for the first time ever, water on the Colorado River was rationed. With the West drier and the current drought dire, the river’s flow, which supplies water across the American West, as well as to Mexico, cannot meet the needs of all the humans who depend upon it.

When date growers want to order water for their palms, we can call or email the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) and order water—“30 inches on Monday, off Wednesday,” and their computer alerts the computer at the Imperial Dam on the river, which regulates how much of the total flow is routed over to our canal and Valley. As we are below sea level in the Salton Sink, the need for pumping is minimal.

My usual 30 inches are not much compared to neighbors who order 90 inches or 120 inches, so the “Zanjero” (the CVWD employee who opens the water valve gate up on Ave. 60 that regulates our stem of the canal) may not adjust the flow exactly to 30 inches, and I may get a little more or less.

The insects cry in different voices, “When the water comes
we climb the clover to the pinnacles of safety.”

The ducks speak in an ensemble
of piccolo, oboe and kazoo, “Now
there is water around the tree for our feet, a banquet of bugs on the clover;
our beaks snap and gather the harvest, crisp and squishy, legs and wings,
tidbits of flyer and crawler,
the last buzz in our bills,
the last tickle in our swallowing.

But if I get a little less and come up short of water, the final end palms in my rows may not get water that month. As the crisis deepens, who decides which “end rows” get short changed, and how that shrinking total flow is allocated?

Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to fund irrigation projects throughout the West. The original intent was for U.S. taxpayers to provide the infrastructure (dams and canals) to help family farms, with the subsidized water going to farms of 160 acres or less.

In 1922, the Federal Government and the affected Western States negotiated a compact that divided the allocation of the Colorado River’s waters. Seniority of water rights goes back to that agreement. Since then, this law of the river has spawned an army of lawyers and lobbyists defending different interests, and treaties that involve Mexico, Native Nations, states, and various other entities.

The Coachella Valley Water District and the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), at the southern end of the Salton Sea, cover a 100 mile plus area stretching from Palm Springs to the Mexican border. Both were formed over 100 years ago. But over the years, large landowners and corporate farms joined with IID to challenge the 160-acre limitation, going back to the Boulder Canyon Act of 1928, arguing the notion of “perfected rights.” In 1980, in Bryant v. Yellen, the U.S. Supreme Court waived any limitations on water deliveries to these growers.

The allocation of the river’s limited and life-giving bounty has become a political as well as ecological crisis as urban and rural interests clash.

During my several days of irrigating every month, tens of thousands of cars will be washed and tens of millions of toilets will be flushed in Southern California with water from the river.

I pay under $50 an acre foot (325,851 gallons) for my water. San Diego has agreed to pay IID $679 per acre foot. An acre foot is estimated to serve 2.5 households (four persons each) for a year. Since they have more votes than the sparsely populated Imperial Valley, and more representatives in Sacramento and Washington, and their own lobbyists and lawyers, and are willing to pay, urban users in San Diego and Orange and Los Angeles are going to put tremendous pressure on agriculture to cut back.

There are delights for all on a desert morning
when the water is sidetracked from the Colorado.
Even the insects know
they have hidden their eggs well, and their tribes will increase,
though they perish in the duck’s morning meal.

A key principle in water allocation is “best use” or “beneficial use” which assumes “best use for humans.” The ducks and bugs and clover cover crops, the whole web of life that the river stimulates in the date gardens in this valley, are not part of the equation. If the IID can provide water at $50 an acre foot, and San Diego is willing to pay many times that, corporate farmers and the IID are eying selling more and more of their high seniority “rights” to the water. The Imperial Valley reverts to desert.

But wait—water itself isn’t what we pay for. The original intent of taxpayer-funded dams and canals was to provide water to farmers to feed the cities. Farmers and urban dwellers are paying for the water delivery systems, and the maintenance of same.

CVWD delivers my water through canals by gravity flow, with no water treatment and almost no expense of pumping. Urban dwellers are paying for the pipes and pumps and filter systems that enable them to flush their toilettes with purified water suitable for drinking. As the decreasing supply of the river’s waters are reallocated, and the original intent of the 1902 Reclamation Act is overridden, urban and rural populations must both promote conservation and Best Use/Beneficial Use of this life-giving asset.

The Coachella Valley, with its high seniority water rights and highly productive and beneficial use in agriculture, may have more protection for its water that other agricultural areas. But the river cannot do all that humans demand. And agriculture, and the whole web of life it supports, will surely suffer.

The post When the Colorado River Runs Dry appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The mural—which is being donated to the city of Coachella by my old boss Billy Steinberg—was first commissioned for the company’s new packing plant and offices in the unincorporated town of Thermal, more than 40 years ago.

The 14-foot-by-7-foot work was created in 1979 by Laurence Neufeld, an art major whom Billy had met at Bard College in New York and who would go on to earn his degree from the University of Connecticut. Neufeld had studied the harvest paintings of Pieter Bruegel and Vincent van Gogh, and his mural was influenced by them. He did not want to paint the vineyards realistically—this would have limited his color palette—and instead used vivid expressionistic colors associated with French Fauvist painters, like Matisse and Derain.

Close-up of the mural. Photo by Aaron Salcido.

Neufeld applied the canvas directly to the entry wall of the office. He designed it to fit the space. To the right of the mural was the window where one might ask about a check or apply for a leave of absence or schedule a paid vacation. To the left was the conference room with the big table where we met for grievances.  

The most important thing about the mural was how it depicted farm workers. Unlike standard paintings purporting to show “happy” farm workers, Neufeld portrayed them realistically. They also were picking into boxes with the eagle of the United Farm Workers (UFW), Cesar Chavez’s union.

This reflects a history that should be better known. Billy’s father, Lionel Steinberg, started growing grapes in the Coachella Valley in the early 1950s. The David Freedman Company (named after his father’s step-father) became the largest grape-growing operation in the Coachella Valley, farming over 1,300 acres. In 1970, Lionel broke with other growers and signed the first Collective Bargaining Agreement with UFW.

Today, history books and school textbooks teach this momentous signing, which opened possibilities for farm workers to improve conditions in subsequent contracts. By 1980, the union contract at Freedman—negotiated by UFW VP Gilbert Padilla and the Ranch Committee for the Union, and by Lionel and Billy for the company—provided the best wages and benefits for any farm workers in the world.

When the Company was sold in 1988—just as I earned my pension with my 10th year of service of 500 hours or more—Billy divided the canvas on which the mural was painted, and transferred it to his office in Santa Monica. There, perhaps inspired by his youth in the desert, he made a career as a composer and songwriter, including songs such as “True Colors” and “Like a Virgin.”

This winter he contacted me to let me know that he was moving offices, and would no longer have a wall big enough to house the mural. He said he wanted to donate it. Did I have any ideas about a location connected to the union or Coachella?

I suggested the new Coachella Library, and folks there were enthusiastic. One mentioned having parents who had worked at Freedman; another was a special fan of Billy’s songs. Billy also offered other historic items to the library, including photographs with Cesar Chavez, important archival documents, and two charcoal vineyard drawings, done by Neufeld as studies for the mural.

If only it were so easy to preserve and restore the way that workers were treated at Freedman. Unlike most farm workers in the U.S., Freedman workers were paid double the minimum wage, with unemployment and disability insurance, family health insurance after 60 hours of work in a month, vision and dental plans, paid holidays, a modest pension plan, paid vacations for high seniority workers and most of all, respect. The company sat down with us to negotiate wages and conditions of work, and bargained in good faith to resolve problems.

So much has changed for the farm worker community in the Coachella Valley since the 1970-’88 contracts with the David Freedman Company. Our Congressman, Dr. Raul Ruiz, is from a farm worker family in Mecca. Upward mobility is a possibility.

But the mural is also a reminder of an alternative to today’s brutal California agribusiness system, which depends on the exploitation of a vulnerable population to work in the fields. The mural demonstrates that farm labor could be a choice for people that brings modest but adequate benefits—and pride in producing food for a hungry world.

“Sí, se puede,” we can build a more just system.

The post A Mural Once Familiar to Thousands of Farm Workers Comes Home to the Coachella Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If you’re looking for the quintessential Christmas experience, there’s only one place you should go: the Southern California desert.

The Coachella Valley is the Golden State’s very own Yuletide capital—which might make it the capital of Christmas in America, maybe even the world. After all, California popularized Christmas via Hollywood, and still designs it through our toymakers, digitizes it via Silicon Valley, and distributes it through our ports.

Some Scrooges will call this sacrilege, citing our lack of conifers and snow. Leave such people to their ignorance—the desert is already plenty crowded this time of year.

What they don’t know is that Bing Crosby, the man who first and most famously sang “White Christmas,” was a regular in the desert. For a time, he broadcast his radio show from the American Legion Post in Palm Springs, and he even developed Blue Skies Village in Rancho Mirage, according to The Desert Sun. The other signature voices of the American holidays—from Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra—also had deep desert ties. Frank Capra conceived his holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life in La Quinta.

Christmas, of course, has been a desert holiday for 2,000 years, since a child was born in Bethlehem, a little town in the Judean desert still remembered for its failure to provide enough lodging. Palm Springs would never make the same mistake.

Christmas is about birth and journeys, and so is this time of year in Coachella. While the rest of the state slows down at the holidays, the desert starts up. Hundreds of thousands of vacationers make pilgrimages to the region, and various seniors and snowbirds arrive to take up residence for the winter months, swelling the Coachella Valley’s population from 200,000 to 800,000.

It’s worth noting that an estimated 450,000 of these winter visitors are Canadians, who know all too well the horrors of a cold and snowy Christmas.

And why wouldn’t you come to Palm Springs in December? The warm daytime weather is perfect for golf or swimming, while the cool nights make it possible for you to put on your Santa suit and celebrate the season without breaking a sweat. And if you must have snow, it’s usually there—on top of Mt. San Jacinto, which is only a hike or tram ride away.

The desert is simply the most transcendent environment in which to pass this season. “If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert,” the great Northern California writer and novelist Anne Lamott once observed. “You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.”

Seeking such uplift on the first weekend of December, I drove from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, a trip that, at 100 miles, is about the same length as the journey Joseph and Mary made (in a caravan of migrants, some historians suggest) from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

During the holidays and the subsequent winter months, the Coachella Valley offers so many festivals—in music, architecture, art, film—that every weekend feels like Christmas. In December, it’s also home to huge light displays, none more awe-inspiring than Kenny Irwin Jr.’s Robolights, which draws so many people—60,000—that the city of Palm Springs is forcing it out of its current location in a residential neighborhood. Irwin is looking for a commercial space for next year.

But I most wanted to see what has quietly become one of the largest holiday parades in California: the Festival of Lights parade in Palm Springs.

It’s a relatively recent tradition—the parade started small in 1991. But it has grown, with city government and corporate support, into a bucket-list event that draws 100,000 people to a city with a population of 50,000, on the first Saturday night in December.

The parade runs for 1.3 miles along Palm Canyon Drive. This year, the crowds were 10 rows deep along the boulevard’s broad sidewalks. There were 84 entries—as many as in California’s biggest parade, the Tournament of Roses in my hometown of Pasadena.

All the participants and floats wear electric lights, including marching bands for middle and high schools, and vehicles from garbage trucks to fire engines to vintage golf carts. Neighborhood groups also inflate and carry giant helium balloons—like the ones in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City—which are lit with spotlights mounted in trucks that ride just in front of them.

In these angry times, the warm and welcoming atmosphere distinguishes the event. While Pasadena merchants have long shut down their stores during the Rose Parade, Palm Springs merchants stay open during the Festival of Lights. Even real estate offices, spas, and law firms along Palm Canyon Drive hold open houses, with some offering food and drink. The parade also provides announcers at a couple different points to offer personal details about the participants (this included an introduction of a parade marshal’s “new lady friend”).

At this year’s parade, the cheers were especially loud for the Palm Springs Public Library Book Cart Drill Team, the Desert Burners Bicycle Brigade, and the Cathedral City High School Ballet Folklorico, whose members danced while wearing a combination of multicolored costumes and multicolored lights that gave new meaning to the word psychedelic.

The audience also appreciated the entry for a local hotel, a lit-up Hummer with a snow-making machine mounted on top, promoting the hotel’s “DRG Brunch Sundays,” a set-price brunch that includes cocktails and a drag show.

“We’re so lucky,” said Ethan Kaminsky, a local video production guy who held a massive potluck party next to an RV he had parked on a vacant lot along the parade route. “We get to live where everyone else comes for Christmas.”

Make yours merry, bright—and dry as the desert.

The post From Bethlehem to Palm Springs, Christmas Belongs in the Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After all, Canadians already run the place in winter.

Over the past 40 years, snowbirds from the True North have grown into a winter fixture in greater Palm Springs. They get a lot more than an escape from cold winter weather. The California desert is a much shorter flight than Maui, and it offers an array of arts and culture—from the Palm Springs International Film Festival, to the design-focused Modernism Week, to the famous Coachella music festivals in Indio—that Phoenix can’t hope to match.

Over time, the desert has developed a Canadian-friendly infrastructure of restaurants, country clubs, and social organizations. The Desert Sun carries stories about Justin Trudeau and Vancouver Canucks hockey. La Spiga, once a top restaurant in Edmonton, is now open here. In some years, there’s even been a Canada Fest.

Coachella has also developed a Canadian civic life, with leading politicians from western Canada, particularly Alberta, spending stretches of the winter here. The Canadian Club of the Desert, founded in 1982 at the Gene Autry Hotel in Palm Springs, holds monthly breakfast forums “sharing experiences and ideas concerning issues of importance to Canadians.” (Curious Americans are also invited to attend.) The club organizes field trips to Southern California museums, holds tailgate parties before matches at local polo grounds, and hosts both a “Welcome Back Cocktail Party” in early December and “A Wind-Up Dinner and Dance” in late March, at the Canada-friendly Lakes Country Club.

It was the Great Recession that accelerated this Canadianization of the California Desert. In 2008, western Canada’s economy was booming, Canada’s baby-boomers were beginning to retire, and the Canadian dollar was at all-time highs, achieving parity with the U.S. dollar. At the same time, the inland California real estate market was in freefall—allowing Canadians to snap up properties cheaply in a place where your toes don’t freeze in February.

So many thousands did, that, in the first four years of this decade, Canadian buyers accounted for one-quarter of home purchases in the desert. And home sales are just one piece of the crucial stimulus that Canadians provided for a struggling region.

Canada is responsible for an estimated 450,000 visitors to the valley each year; the Canadian government has taken credit for tripling the population of Palm Springs during the heart of winter. The Canadian hordes have provided crucial ballast for faltering businesses; the Palm Desert Country Club and the Tilted-Kilt franchise in Palm Desert were rescued from bankruptcy by Canadian business people. Canadians have also fueled the expansion of Palm Springs International Airport, which boasts direct service to Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg.

The Canadian Invasion has stirred only minor resentments. Restaurant servers say they could tip better. Canadians are blamed for—or credited with, if you take a public health perspective—making traffic slower, given their strange national proclivity for obeying posted speed limits.

But the biggest problem with Coachella’s Canadianization is that it isn’t as big and strong as it should be.

The Coachella Valley could get even more of an economic and cultural boost if more Canadians could visit more, buy more homes, and stay longer. But Canadians are welcome here only part-time. That’s because our bullying federal government imposes its complicated tax and immigration systems on you if you spend too much time here.

While the details are complicated, many Canadians in Coachella limit themselves to just 182 days a year, to avoid U.S. taxes and immigration restrictions. Spend 183 days here—more than half the year—and you can be considered a U.S. “resident alien” and be forced to pay U.S. taxes on all your global income.

This hurts California, since our Canadian visitors and part-time residents pay state and local taxes, while using relatively little in services.

A Canadian couple who split their time between Indio and British Columbia (I am not naming them to spare them any federal government hassles) contacted me recently to point out that they have come to the Coachella Valley every year since 1984, and have owned homes here since 2003.

Their California property taxes, they note, are 180 percent higher than those in their home Canadian province. As six-month residents, they spend more time here than they do in Canada, but make no social service demands. They even buy extra travel and health insurance, they said, “to ensure that we can protect ourselves against the bankrupting cost of medical services here.”

So why shouldn’t they be able to stay longer?

“We are welcome here for 182 days, then we become ‘alien,’ and must depart,” they said. “We can own property but not weapons. We can pay every tax but not vote. We can patronize retail merchants but cannot win a prize for responding to surveys …. We commit no crimes. We buy media but seldom appear in it. We are a potential resource, never a threat.”

Recent declines in the Canadian dollar have made them less of a resource; Canadian spending, hotel stays, and vacation home rental all have slipped slightly from their highs earlier in the decade. The California housing shortage, and the soaring home costs that come with it, have made buying here harder for everyone, including our neighbors to the north. (Still, median home prices in the desert are less than half of what it costs to buy in Vancouver or Toronto.)

But this doesn’t mean we should give up on Canadians. To the contrary, California should be making it easier for more of them to come to the Coachella Valley, and to stay longer. Imagine if federal law were changed to make it possible for Canadians to spend nine months a year in California, rather than six months, without triggering U.S. residency rules and taxes. That would be 50 percent more time, and much more spending and sales taxes from Canadians. Building more homes—something California desperately needs to do—would open the door to more Canadian stimulus as well.

Could this happen? Maybe not. The federal government is hostile to policies that benefit California, and the NAFTA agreement that binds together our economy with Canada’s is in jeopardy. But Congressional Republicans are open to tax reform, and President Trump, despite his hostility to immigrants, has indicated he’s more favorably disposed to newcomers from wealthier and whiter countries like Canada.

Perhaps, if the feds won’t make things easier for Canadians in California, the state could step in.

Maybe the desert heat is getting to me, but I can’t help wondering if California might just deed the Coachella Valley to Canada. Not only would we get more Canadians but we’d get a better system of government that has produced an expanding middle class in that country. We’d also get a bit of insurance: If the federal government escalates its ongoing war against California, Californians would only have to drive to Palm Springs to ask for asylum.

A Canadian colony in California might not be paradise. But it sounds pretty good, eh?

The post O Canada, Please Colonize the Coachella Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Desert Sun arts and entertainment reporter Bruce Fessier—whose beat is strictly covering these festivals—began the discussion by asking if the Valley simply has too many festivals, and if they’re being forced to compete with one another.

Lisa Vossler Smith, executive director of Modernism Week—a festival devoted to mid-century architecture and design—said that as both a festival planner and a Coachella Valley native, the answer is no. “I’m thrilled to see the growth and diversity in our festival schedule,” she said. “There is something for everyone in our Valley.”

Palm Springs Art Museum deputy education director Irene N. Rodríguez agreed; rather than competing, she said, these festivals provide their audiences with different perspectives on local communities and a taste of cultures other than their own.

Different festivals admittedly target different audiences, said Fessier—contrasting an “industry” festival like Sundance to a “community” festival like the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which more recently became a destination festival. Which type matters most to “ordinary people”?

Indio Mayor Lupe Ramos Watson said that the most successful festivals come from locals—and then draw in tourists who want to be a part of the celebration. She pointed to the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival, now in its 69th year, as an example. It began as a celebration of the end of the harvest for the community, and today brings together 300,000 attendees annually.

Not all festivals are so lucky. Music writer and photographer Steve Appleford, who has covered many of them, including Coachella since its inception, said that there were so many festivals starting in the early 1990s that not all could survive. The Warped Tour lives on, as does Lollapalooza (originally a touring festival that’s now anchored in Chicago), but Ozzfest and Lilith Fair were not so lucky. Ozzfest was actually a victim of its own success: It did so well that bands started asking for too much money.

Appleford said that what distinguishes Coachella is that it started as a labor of love—and that Goldenvoice, the concert promoter that organizes the festival, is very astute about what’s happening in music. They are “exceptionally good” at picking both big bands and acts that are going to be big later on, and they have always been “forward-looking” rather than choosing top 10 or top 40 artists.

Art has become an increasingly large part of Coachella. What, asked Fessier, does this aspect of the festival—and what do arts festivals in general—do for local audiences and artists?

Rodríguez said that they create “awareness” among broader audiences, allowing people to get familiar and comfortable with contemporary art—which can be “very difficult to understand.” Festivals also bring emerging artists’ work to the attention of collectors and gallery owners.

Festivals can also bring local artists to bigger audiences. Watson said that when Lisa Vossler Smith’s husband, artist Phillip K. Smith III, was exhibited at Coachella, it was a “proud moment” for the community.

The cultural value of the festival can’t be measured, but the business value can. Ramos Watson said that a study commissioned by Indio found that Coachella has a $90 million impact on the city each year, with over $20 million in sales activity. As a result, the city has made a greater effort to help the festival grow. In return, Goldenvoice also gives back to the community, helping young people with music and arts opportunities in particular. “At the end of the day, we were satisfied with what we learned,” Ramos Watson said of the study, “and we’re confident about the future of festivals in Indio.”

Fessier asked Ramos Watson if she was concerned about “alternative crowds” and problems with safety. She said that the city was unfamiliar with the attendees in Coachella’s early years, but has learned that the crowds are “nice kids,” many of whom are still in school and save up for the whole year to attend. Like any other tourists, they want to have a nice time. “It’s just an extra 100,000 people in our city over the weekend,” she said, eliciting audience laughter.

Appleford credited Goldenvoice with knowing its audience for the safe atmosphere—a sharp contrast to the disaster of Woodstock 1999, which took place a few months before the inaugural Coachella and made national news with fires and physical assaults. “I’ve never seen a fight at Coachella,” said Appleford.

So what’s the secret to a successful festival? “I spend an awful lot of time curating,” said Vossler Smith of the work behind Modernism Week. She said that “quality” is the number-one thing she has learned from Coachella—the importance of setting a really high standard and creating a brand “people can count on year after year.” A great festival, she added—whether it’s Coachella or the Indio International Tamale Festival—offers audiences something new.

The Tamale Festival, said Ramos Watson, grew out of one city council member’s desire to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by building the largest tamale. The organic nature of its origins got the community invested in the first place—and now hundreds of thousands of people attend the festival over one December weekend.

“The festival has become the new convention,” said Vossler Smith. Industry conferences were educational and networking opportunities; now, festivals—be they architectural, literary, musical—are bringing together the “best thinkers and most voracious collectors in these fields together.” Successful festivals also cross boundaries, merging different experiences—fashion and culinary, architecture and design, in the case of Modernism Week. “You need more than one activity going on to call it a festival,” she said. There ought to be a level of diversity and engagement; if it’s a one-note event, it’s not a festival.

The post Why Do Coachella Valley Festivals Rock So Hard? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A few weeks ago, distinctive and noxious undercurrents churned upward into the nether reaches of the atmosphere and blanketed the Southland in a stench. Some people mistook it for landfill emanations; others worried of gas leaks. But eventually all fingers pointed southeastward toward the Salton Sea, that vast accidental lake created by a flooding of the Colorado River in 1905. The noxious odor that made headlines in Los Angeles is a familiar, even characteristic, fume to residents of the Coachella Valley. The areas most affected by it are Mecca and Indio and, on occasion, the more affluent retirement communities of Rancho Mirage and Palm Springs. Now that the emissions have made it all the way to the Southland, perhaps more Angelenos will take an interest in the plight of the Salton Sea, which I have been photographing for over a decade.

Buy the Book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon.

Kim Stringfellow is an artist and educator residing in Joshua Tree, California. She teaches multimedia and photography courses at San Diego State University as an associate professor in the School of Art, Design, and Art History. She is the author of Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005.

*Photos by Kim Stringfellow.

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This is the route I’ve driven every family holiday and birthday for the past seven years, ever since my grandparents, tired of their increasingly crowded Arcadia neighborhood, packed up and moved into a brand new home in Sun City Palm Desert, a gargantuan gated community for “active adults” aged 55 and older. Sun City has almost 5,000 homes, nearly twice as many residents, and two 18-hole golf courses. It boasts 44 different home models, but you would never know it driving past one tan and yellow “Spanish” house, with its desert-landscaped front garden, after another.

With its uniform houses, empty streets, and carpet-green fairways built atop 1,600 acres of barren desert sand, Sun City looks unbearably artificial. And it is artificial, even, somehow, unethical–a remote and isolated fortress in which ordinary standards and expectations fall away. There is no dress code in Sun City (although you’ll see a lot of golf shirts and khakis). There is minimal engagement with the rest of the world: You will probably read fewer books and watch more TV. You can still poke your head over the walls of the complex and see the arid wasteland that surrounds Sun City, but who wants to? This abruptly imposed settlement offers its aging denizens “resort style living,” an intentional detachment from cities, a permanent vacation in the middle of nowhere. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” but for Sun City dwellers this is no longer the case. They happily accept that their home and community are a fabrication for their enjoyment. They take Sun City for what it is.

Passing through Sun City’s gates, we leave behind not just the real world but also our ordinary outside identities: horse trainer, county engineer, suburban house owner, theater student, high school orchestra geek. We become simply parents, children, and grandchildren in a celebration of the simple fact of progeny. For better or worse, there’s no space for anything else.

For Christmas, Thanksgiving, or a birthday, a dozen of us cram into my grandparents’ house to stay the night or the weekend. Most of our time–like that of all loving families with little else in common–is spent eating. Between meals and snacks and lying on the carpet recovering, some of us make it out of the house to take a walk, go for a swim, or venture outside Sun City’s gates to the closest Starbucks.

On one such occasion, when we’re out for a swim, my younger cousins start some playful splashing in the shallows. The horseplay escalates, and the rest of us join them. Half an hour later, we’re in an all-out three-generation bout of Marco Polo, the Marcos blind and reckless, diving in any direction at the smallest splash, the Polos scrambling ashore (fish out of water!) in a last, desperate attempt at escape. On the far side of the pool is another large family. Each family has remained in its own corner until now, but after enough splashing our family has spread our reach across the length of the pool, roping in the other group. Some of them join the game; others end up serving as shields for frantic Polos on the run. The adults laugh and shriek as much as the children, and we keep it up until the sun goes down and it’s too cold to stay outside.

We leave without exchanging names with the other family or even waving goodbye. Perhaps we should have better manners. But then again, maybe not. Sun City has no rules. We’ve just had a good time like a bunch of kids at summer camp, temporarily freed from our societal roles, in Sun City, where the real world never reaches.

Antal Neville is an intern at Zócalo Public Square.

*Photos by George Illes.

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