You’d think that a town dependent on tourist dollars could never stop advertising itself. But in Sedona, Arizona, as wealthy residents’ weariness of riffraff jamming up their roads sparked a bitter rift over what constitutes “the right kind” of visitors, that’s just what has happened.

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sedona’s city government and chamber made a joint agreement to quit advertising the town in glossy national travel magazines and doing social media posts targeted at rich people, reasoning that such money would be wasted during an international shutdown. The pause sparked infighting, which then escalated: In April 2023, the chamber of commerce’s board voted to end its tourism contract with the city over the council’s refusal to fund “destination marketing.”

The experiment has not yielded the expected serenity.

Instead, Sedona has filled up with “wayward and lost tourists,” in the words of Christopher Fox Graham, managing editor of the Sedona Red Rock News. Without such destination marketing, he wrote, “Sedona has been beset by day travelers from Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas, and Californian overnighters who roll into town with little guidance on where to stay, eat, shop or explore other than what they saw on Instagram.”

One of the reasons for these visitors from nearby cities—and one of the headaches for the many retirees who would prefer that Sedona be more “Slo-dona”—is that more than a third of the city’s homes are used for short-term rentals. That fact led the city council to require, starting in 2022, an annual permit for lessors and mandatory sex offender checks on renters to prevent, in the words of one council member, “orgies in nice areas.”

Since then, the city of Sedona has also offered those landlords who can be persuaded to rent their homes to a local are offered a $10,000 subsidy. But few who work the low-wage tourism jobs can afford to live in Sedona. Neither can young families, which is why there is only a single elementary school, with declining enrollment, in a town of over 11,000 people. “Basically, people feel they live in a gas station,” observed resident Sean Dedalus.

The hard irony of the current controversy is that Sedona has long been defined by visitors and other outsiders. Sedona occupies a valley that had been a home for the Yavapai-Apache people for seven centuries before the U.S. Cavalry chased them away in the 1870s as a side campaign to the Apache Wars. When early settler J.J. Thompson arrived in Oak Creek Canyon, he found irrigation and fruit orchards that had been tended by people who packed up and left in a hurry. He simply took them over for himself, joined by later neighbors Manuel Chavez and the dapper storekeeper T. Carl Schnebly, who named the post office for his wife, Sedona.

The name Sedona gained cultural currency in the golden age of the pulp Western, after Zane Gray set his 1922 novel The Call of the Canyon in nearby Oak Creek Canyon, inspiring a quickie silent movie. Hollywood soon found the wine-colored spires and juniper trees just as rawbone-pretty as Monument Valley, not to mention closer to California. John Wayne came to Sedona to film Angel and the Badman, leaving behind a movie set that became a subdivision where all the streets were named after famous oat operas: Broken Arrow, Copper Canyon, The Last Wagon, Shotgun, and Johnny Guitar. Elvis Presley came here, too, to shoot what is widely regarded as the worst movie he starred in: 1968’s Stay Away, Joe, about a lascivious Native American named Joe Lightcloud who returns to the reservation in a Cadillac and rides a bull at the rodeo to redeem himself from bad behavior.

In the late 1950s, Sedona really found its tourism sweet spot. A real estate agent named Mary Lou Keller founded the Church of Light in her office and proclaimed the working-class ranching town a global center of spiritual energy. She may have been making this up to attract homebuyers who favored crystals and tarot cards, but the seekers arrived in force, turning Sedona into a cauldron of the New Thought movement that had gripped Los Angeles in the 1920s. One of Keller’s most important gurus was Manly Palmer Hall, who preached at L.A.’s occult Church of the People.

This influx of what conservative locals called “moon puppies” and “foo-foo woo woos,” led to Sedona’s first tourism crisis. Lisa Schnebly Heidinger, a great-granddaughter of Sedona Schnebly, recalled the day in the late 1960s when her grandfather came home for dinner to announce that a “bunch of hippies in their love van” had shown up at the Union 76 service station for repairs. He had gruffly sent them over to nearby Cottonwood, not knowing he was hustling away a future cornerstone of the local economy.

Today an estimated two hundred small businesses in Sedona cater to visitors intrigued with the theology of earth energy: bookstores, crystal emporiums, sweat lodge retreats, and other enterprises that come and go like sunbeams. One chamber of commerce survey found that 37% of visitors come for some kind of spiritual experience.

Often, they visit spots in the surrounding National Forests that have been proclaimed as “vortexes” of energy. Forest Service employees are constantly breaking up unauthorized rock arrangements that the metaphysical pilgrims say are “medicine wheels.” And in 2009, an Anglo businessman and “spiritual warrior” named James Arthur Ray held a sweat lodge ceremony that led to three deaths from the excessive heat. He served two years in prison for negligent homicide, and Native critics derided him as a “plastic shaman.”

Whatever their motivation, people keep catching what local realtors call “the red rock fever” and keep coming to Sedona—and adding to the traffic that kicked off the tourism debate in the first place. During the boom years of the 1970s and 1980s, spiritual flaneurs and second home seekers from Phoenix and Los Angeles flooded into the new subdivisions blossoming off the two main highways. A lack of coherent planning meant that interconnecting roads were never created and the legacy is a persistent traffic problem on Highway 89A, whose main junction, “The Y,” is often despairingly referred to as the “negative vortex.”

Recently, off-highway vehicles—most piloted by tourists—have added to the mess on 89A. Sedona mayor Scott Jablow, a former police officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, sought to ban these dune buggies from paved highways, but the idea couldn’t withstand the opposition of rental companies serving out-of-towners hungry for desert adventures or Republican state legislators calling for small government.

Jablow himself fought off a 2022 electoral challenge from Samaire Armstrong, an actor on The O.C. turned anti-masking Republican who had called Black Lives Matter “a one-billion-dollar domestic terrorist organization.” Sedona’s liberals breathed a sigh of relief when the ex-cop won. It helped that Jablow wanted to slow down the town’s popularity. “We have too many tourists. Period,” he said before his election.

His victory seemed less of a commentary on the national culture wars and some on something closer to home: a desire to yank back the welcome mat to the middle-class in Arizona’s capital of luxury tourism. For those who commute here by private jet, this might seem an easy decision. But for those whose monthly income depends on a steady flow of visitors to buy ice cream, tarot cards, and sunscreen, the town’s identity—and price of admission—is at stake. Nature’s artwork is not supposed to have a price tag, but commodifying the rocks is an old Sedona custom. What we’re seeing is no revolutionary moment, but merely a haggle over the amount charged.

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The café closed just before the pandemic, a victim of Merced’s own success. Ever since, it has been a specter—a ghost of the Merced I had known and a reminder of progress’s voracious appetite.

I didn’t have any expectations the first time I visited the eatery, for a Saturday brunch, after I moved off campus in 2016. But as my friends and I walked up to it, I was instantly charmed. It was a light-green building with art-deco features, trimmed in rusty red and faded gold. Green letters on the marquee announced the headlining act: CINEMA CAFÉ. What served as the entrance when the movie theater first opened in the 1920s was now a cozy patio space, shadowed by the marquee itself. Orange Tropicanna lilies and lush banana trees lined the sidewalk, a little paradise in the concrete grays of downtown.

The first meal Anh had at the café. Courtesy of author.

I remember my first meal fondly: chicken-fried steak, eggs over easy, hash browns (extra crispy), and coffee. And a spoonful of that house-made salsa—so bright orange, and so redolent of savory garlic and chilis that I had to try it. You could just taste the care and effort that went into it.

Each meal at the café brought me closer to Merced’s history and community. The Cinema Café’s owner, Gerardo Olvera, was an immigrant and transplant like myself. He moved from Guanajuato, Mexico, to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and got his start as a dishwasher at the now-shuttered Butterfields on the Sunset Strip, working his way up to chef (he impressed the restaurant owners so much that they paid for his cooking school tuition). After living in L.A. for many years, Gerardo and his wife Joy moved to the Central Valley to be closer to her mother. As they passed through Merced, Olvera noticed the Mainzer building,and commented, Wouldn’t it be nice if it was for sale? Later that day, Joy made some calls and surprised her husband with the news that indeed, it was. The couple took the plunge and started their new business in Merced.

“It was scary at first because no one knew me in Merced,” Olvera said, regarding the early days of the café in the late 1990s, “but once I started cooking and people tasted the food, it soon became busy.”

At the time, Merced was a quiet town, and construction for UC Merced hadn’t even broken ground yet. Merced’s low cost of living offered more spending power for families to establish livelihoods and settle down, and its small community meant neighbors knew neighbors and businesses were owned by the same friendly, recognizable faces you’d bump into at the grocery store. The café reflected this community-centered approach, operating from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., seven days a week. It became a watering hole for anyone looking for a filling meal, especially those who worked downtown or were passing through Merced, as no other eatery downtown was open as early or even all week, save for fast food. Once construction began on the newest campus in the University of California system, the development sparked excitement and concern among locals: some embraced the UC as a boost needed to rejuvenate the local economy after the Castle Air Force Base closed in 1995; others feared the presence of a UC would skyrocket housing and cost of living. One thing was certain: the Merced around the Cinema Café was changing. But the beloved eatery stayed the course, continuing to offer a space where all members of the community, including this new and growing university crowd, could gather over pancakes.

When I arrived in town as a student some 14 years after the Olveras, there was always a line to get in, and I was always happy to wait. Sitting down at the café felt like sitting down at someone’s kitchen table. The chefs razzed each other, and the waitstaff spoke to you with caring familiarity, with “here you go, mija” and “careful it’s hot, sweetie!” It felt like you could meet the whole town if you ate there. I dined next to university professors, office workers in slick suits, church ladies with fine pearls, construction workers in heavy boots, classmates in various stages of exam panic, and everyone in between. I met people’s families, friends, and pets. Specials were inspired by local landmarks (the El Capitan Omelet, for example, was filled with greens to fuel and nourish hikers on their way to Yosemite). A local artist who frequented the café even drew a tableau of the waitstaff and cooks; Gerardo loved it so much he made it the front of the menu.

To me, the Cinema Café was the very heart of downtown Merced. And then, one day, it was gone—on January 8th, 2019, the Olveras posted on Facebook that the café’s last date of service was just weeks away. A developer had plans to renovate the historic theater building, and the restaurant wasn’t part of the vision. With its growing population and newfound interest, investors were flocking to Merced, seeking to “improve” it and make it a “real” city.  The same appetite to grow and develop that had attracted me to Merced in the first place had now swallowed the café whole.

Initially there had been hope, Olvera told me, and he thought that the new owner might help the café relocate. But eventually he learned that “it wasn’t in their budget.” (I reached out to the current Mainzer business to learn more, but they declined to comment.)

“Nothing came of it,” Olvera said, when he contacted the city council for assistance. Today, a combination eatery/bar/theater taking the historic building’s name, Mainzer, stands in place of the café—a Hyatt Hotels venture. The building has been painted a crisp white, the banana trees have been replaced by manicured potted plants, and though there’s a Mainzer sauce on offering, it’s not the café’s salsa.

A popular slogan for Merced nowadays is “city on the rise.” Thinking about the Cinema Café makes me think about which communities are lifted with the growth and which are left behind. In a downtown where homey small-business establishments are increasingly replaced by trendy, upscale brands, what chance does a mom-and-pop joint like the Cinema Café really have? I worry about my other favorite local places that make Merced feel like home. Which will survive in the years to come?

It’s been more than three years since the Cinema Café closed its doors. I’ve referred to it as a specter, but maybe I’m the one who haunts it. I still return regularly to the café’s last post on its Facebook page to mourn, to remember, to hope for a sign it will come back to life. I know what I’m really hoping for is that the older, familiar Merced that grew out of its ethos will prevail.

These days, it’s always jarring when I find myself wandering downtown and end up at that familiar corner of N and Main. Looking up at the blinding marquee lights, I can still make out a glimpse of a young Gerardo and Joy Olvera, who saw an opportunity in an old movie theater. Then I’m jolted back to the present, and I can’t help but wonder—if they had driven through this changing city now, would they still choose to stop? And if they did, would they see a place to open the restaurant they dreamed of?

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Mount Shasta, California, and Ashland, Oregon did it right. Located in the California–Oregon border region where I live, they avoided economic devastation by having their survival plans well underway by the time their lumber mills began to shut down more than a half century ago.

Indeed, Mount Shasta was more than 100 years ahead of the curve thanks to a guy named Justin Hinckley Sisson, who planted the seeds for the town’s future reinvention as a recreational tourist destination. A schoolteacher from Connecticut, Sisson moved out West and reinvented himself as a rugged outdoorsman. In 1866 he opened a hotel and restaurant on the lower slopes of Mount Shasta and started taking his visitors on hunting, fishing, and mountain climbing excursions.

The timber boom that had begun around that time had pretty well petered out by 1990, when the last lumber mill closed in Mount Shasta.

By then, a wave of newcomers attracted to the recreational opportunities in the area had taken up where Sisson left off, setting up outfitting stores and offering guide services. A new ski park opened in 1985. All this was complemented by a new batch of motels and restaurants. Beginning in the late 1990s a nonprofit organization called the Mount Shasta Trail Association, fueled by grants and private donations, greatly expanded the area’s hiking opportunities, adding 20 miles of trails along lakes and rivers and on the slopes of Mount Shasta, with another 46 miles currently in the works. All in all, it added up to a smooth and vigorous transition from a timber-based economy to one based on recreational tourism.

Seventy-five miles up the road sits another former timber town, Ashland, Oregon. The last of its eight lumber mills shut down in 1967. But an English professor at the local college, Angus L. Bowmer, had already planted the seeds for the town’s reinvention. Bowmer had done some amateur acting on the side, and he got the idea of converting an unused structure in the city park into a venue for Shakespearean plays. The city of Ashland offered him $400 and funds for a construction crew—just enough support to get his project off the ground.

The first two productions occurred in 1935 and became an annual event: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. By the 1960s the festival had established Ashland as a major theatre town that drew fans of the Bard from up and down the West Coast. By 2019 the Ashland Chamber of Commerce estimated that over 100,000 visitors were showing up at the theatre festival each season. Its success has spawned a number of other live theatre venues.

What do these two successful town reinventions have in common? They both carry the promise that visitors to the town will leave their drab, boring lives behind and find something new and exciting.

A successful reinvention is a high tide that raises all boats, attracts that surge of hikers and skiers and theatre-goers who fill the hotels and restaurants and keep the cash registers in the retail shops humming.

But what happens when the tide doesn’t roll in?

The small town where I live, Dunsmuir, California, provides an example of what happens when you don’t have a plan B. Dunsmuir is just 10 miles down the road from Mount Shasta. In its heyday Dunsmuir was a thriving railroad hub for passenger trains, equipment repair, and crew changes. Ten passenger trains came through every day, but now most of that has gone away. It’s down to two passenger trains each day, and freight train crews are less than half what they were in the days of steam locomotives.

There was no plan B in place before, or during, the railroad’s decline. So now, more than half a century later, well-intentioned people here are playing catchup, trying to bring the town back to life, but through piecemeal efforts: a new art gallery, a small performing space, a microbrewery, some pretty good restaurants.

None of this adds up to a solid rebranding. The town has shrunk from 2,200 in population when I moved here 26 years ago, to 1,700 today. This is despite a number of elements in Dunsmuir’s favor: the Sacramento River runs right through Dunsmuir. It’s considered one of the best flyfishing destinations in California. Hiking trails abound, and the slopes of Mount Shasta and the ski park are a short drive away.

But new enterprises tend to come and go at a high turnover rate, like the outfitting store that only lasted a couple of months. An entrepreneur from Oakland, who’d made a bundle selling novelty items in China, bought up a half dozen downtown properties 20 years ago and promised that it would be the beginning of the town’s revival. Those buildings still sit empty. It’s tough to get a plan B going in a depressed economy.

In their book, Our Towns, the journalists James and Deborah Fallows found common factors in successfully reinvented towns across the United States. Among them was an openness to newcomers, to new people bringing new talents and ideas to their new homes. In these “open” towns the newcomers often find opportunities to reinvent themselves, to apply whatever skills and talents they may have in new ways in this new, stimulating environment. The retired accountant who made his own beer at home opens a microbrewery. Or the English professor gets into the theatre business. Or that Connecticut schoolteacher opens a hotel and starts taking his visitors on hunting and fishing excursions.

In Dunsmuir we see similar personal transformations that could plant the seeds for a successful town reinvention: A former stock and bond trader from the Bay Area took over the flyfishing shop. A former bank executive from San Francisco runs the hardware store.

Every small town has its share of talented, enterprising folks, the ones who get the art galleries and the microbreweries going. But they can’t do it alone. They need visitors and ideas from elsewhere. And people need to direct their positive energy and talent in the same direction, and come up with a theme, a story for their town to tell. Otherwise, they’re likely to have a nice, quiet town with a lot of empty storefronts.

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My family lives near Pico Boulevard, in an area that real estate agents optimistically call “desirable Picfair Village,” but that might more honestly be called Auto Body Village in recognition of repair shops’ massive presence on Pico. When we bought our rundown little house about 15 years ago the car shops were joined by a dry cleaner, a just-OK supermarket, some completely not-OK corner liquor stores, and a couple of terrific, old-school places to eat—one of them a mashup of Southern fare and a taco shop, the other a diner with a strong selection of Mexican specialties.

When it became apparent in 2005 that something was going on in a scruffy corner building on Pico, the neighbors were keenly interested. We watched the renovation into a pretty storefront and eagerly awaited the chance to buy a baguette and pastries at what was to become La Maison du Pain. The anticipation prompted me, as an LA Times reporter, to write a story about the two immigrant sisters who were risking everything to create their dream business.

When it opened, the neighborhood fell in love with the baked goods as well as the opportunity to sit and talk and to run into friends and neighbors. The sisters, Josephine and Carmen, became popular, too. They gave doughnut hole treats to kids and knew many customers by name. It was a family business: nieces, children, siblings all worked there. One niece worked while she attended the police academy; a daughter was a high school student; her sister designed the logo. Patrons felt welcome to hang out for as long as they liked; the bakery’s website describes the business as “not just the house of bread, it’s home.”

I was a regular customer. I bought bread several times a week, and I became friendly with the sisters. At Thanksgiving, I’d buy a few dozen rolls for our feasts. When friends got together, it was often pastries from La Maison for dessert. And one Christmas Eve, we came home from a dinner party to find a couple of boxes of pastry on our porch, courtesy of the bakery. One of my kids worked there for a few months on Saturday mornings. We affectionately half-translated the name to call it “House of Pain.”

But then, just as we began to take our neighborhood bakery for granted, the pain became all too real. In 2015, news stories reported that Carmen had, along with a sister-in-law, taken more than $5 million from a former employer, using a portion of it to pay off the bakery’s credit card debt. The money was also used for a Porsche, private school tuition and family trips to Manila, Tokyo, London and Switzerland.

The news was bad enough, but then the rumors began. One afternoon I sat in the nail salon a few doors away from the bakery as one client brought up the situation. All kinds of stories were told about the bakery and its owners, some I knew to be untrue. Like a telephone game, the money involved got inflated; people thought the women had been imprisoned when in fact, the court case was a civil one. A customer who got into a verbal tussle with the sisters posted an awkward, angry video online—the last I checked it had been viewed more than 80,000 times.

The news shredded many neighbors’ trust and affection, and we had to find alternatives for coffee and conversation, none of which seem to capture our community in the same way. Carmen and Josephine have generally declined to talk about what happened.

Storefront of La Maison du Pain.

 
The hope some of us invested in the bakery might never have been fair, but it seemed to be the sort of place that was creating community despite the auto shops, the Pico traffic, the litter, and the liquor stores. I can only speak for myself, but without a neighborhood park, the House of Pain felt like our gathering spot and so its problems became a problem for many of us.

A couple on my block used to go there with their two little children; he called it a “true centerpiece of our developing neighborhood.” These days many of us are uneasy supporting the business and knowing its backstory. A friend had, for years, scootered or biked to the bakery with her sons every Saturday to buy croissants. Now, her kids grown, she walks maybe twice as far to another bakery because she can’t bring herself to patronize La Maison du Pain.

The sisters still run the bakery. And people still sit outside. After all, people move out and new ones arrive. A couple of Yelp reviewers have wondered why it’s not a busier cafe. For them the elegant storefront must be appealing. One morning, a friend new to the neighborhood brought a big box of pastries to an event. I recognized the box; she didn’t know the story.

Businesses have come—a great pet food store, a hipster coffee bar, a modern soul food cafe—and gone in the decade since La Maison seemed like a pioneer. I’ve started to worry about too much gentrification. Still, there’s one little business we could use, a place to call our own. But “a place to call our own” is—as I’ve discovered—a complicated thing.

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A bike-riding skeleton by Martin Sanchez.

I came to the U.S. when I was 16, and I started by selling oranges along the freeways. I would collect things from the side of the road, bottles and cans and anything that looked interesting. After that I had a hotdog cart, and then I got a job as a cook and I did that for five years until I was able to buy the place, which you now know as Tio’s Tacos. I had always wanted to run a restaurant, and I’d always imagined it would be unique. Just making good food wasn’t enough. I wanted to bring something besides food to my customers, and I wanted the whole experience to stand out. Riverside is a very art-friendly community, so it made sense to bring my own creativity into the neighborhood through the restaurant.

Indian Headdress by Martin Sanchez.

The food and the art serve the same purpose. They bring other families here, from other counties and other parts of California, to sit and eat and start a conversation, together. I’m sharing my own community, the recipes and the art and the culture of my hometown, Sahuayo. The food gives me a connection to the people who come here, and sharing the experience connects them to one another. I choose to work with found objects, and to recycle what would otherwise be garbage, because I want the people who come to the restaurant to leave feeling inspired. Anything in our lives that we don’t need, or that we aren’t satisfied with, can become something better. That leaves the world around us a better place, for our neighbors and for future generations. I’m proud to say that my daughter Maiten, my youngest child, is taking an interest in art. She works with me on some of the pieces and also makes her own artwork.

Dia de los Muertos Cowboy by Martin Sanchez.

Some of the pieces I’m especially proud of are my Day of the Dead pieces. I have a cowboy and also a bicycle rider. These have been displayed at museums and as part of cultural exhibitions around the Inland Empire. I also have a funny piece up on the roof of a lawnmower and a man who is driving the lawnmower and flying through the air. That’s me!

The Flying Lawn Mower by Martin Sanchez.

That’s my lawnmower that I used to use when I worked as a gardener for a while. One day I reached in to fix something and I didn’t realize it was turned on, and in an instant it chopped off the tops of my fingers. So, you know, I had to keep that lawnmower as a reminder. Sometimes Maiten will paint the skin on the tops of those fingers to look like painted fingernails!

Martin with daughter Maiten.

People leave the restaurant full of ideas and excited to make the most of what they have, and that attitude has been central to my success. If it helps these people achieve their dreams, or if it just fills their lives with more art, then I’ve done what I wanted to do with this restaurant.

Ever since I came to this neighborhood in the 1990s, I’ve made an effort to communicate with my neighbors, especially other business owners. When I came here, there was a lot of prostitution and drugs. It was a scary area. But the business owners in the area all came together and reported any crime we saw to the police, and we stood together to make it clear that sort of thing isn’t welcome in our neighborhood. It’s important that local businesses stand up for their communities, their customers and neighbors, since those businesses are where community really happens. I have a good partnership with the other restaurants around here, like the Taco Station and Mario’s Place.

Palm Tree Woman by Martin Sanchez.

We make sure to recommend one another’s shops to people passing through town, or to people staying at one of the nearby hotels. I also make an effort to invite new business owners to come here for dinner, so we establish that communication from the beginning. My family lives here, so I try to make everything in the neighborhood better for them. I’ve been here for 25 years, and I’ve spent the whole time trying to make this food the healthiest I can, because my family eats this food.

I hope my restaurant and my family’s story leaves a legacy for the young people here. The teenagers here need to know how to set goals, and not get distracted from them by street problems or the other challenges they face. I want this community I’ve helped build to continue for generations. And the youth here today are lucky. My wife and I moved here without any education, and barely knowing any English. There weren’t resources here to help people like us in the ‘90s, but we took what we had then, and made it into what you see now. Young people today have advantages, there are programs to help them, and they need to take advantage of that.

Tarasco Bear by Martin Sanchez.

We’ve been here for 25 years, and we’ve had some rough months, but we’ve built this restaurant and now my neighbors and my children get to be a part of my culture. If I did all of this without any studies and without much money, anyone can do this. I want to write a book someday to tell the young people in my neighborhood that they can do anything. Never be ashamed because you don’t know something, or because you don’t have much. You only get anywhere by facing the hardships of life, making the most of what you have around you, and taking care of the people you share a community with.

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