I lost my mom to COVID in February 2021. She died alone, after spending 10 excruciating days in the hospital. A year after her death, a white envelope with no return address arrived in my Pomona College mailbox. Inside was a photo of my mom from the early 1970s.

In the photo, she is standing between two corridors of Sparks Middle School’s brick campus in La Puente, where she taught until she retired in 2008. She smiles gently, with her arms by her side. Her hair is long and straight, and she is wearing a sleeveless dress. She looks so young.

She was gone, and there were so many things I couldn’t ask her. For years, as a researcher and resident, I wrote about La Puente’s Mexican community and its fight for educational justice. My mom’s death—and that precious photo—made me consider new questions about the past. I began wondering about Greenberry, East San Gabriel Valley’s first Black suburban neighborhood, sometimes called “Little Watts.” Some of my mom’s early students lived there. I first heard about this neighborhood from her, but still knew next to nothing about it.

I wanted to be near my mom, and I wanted to learn Greenberry’s history. I began reaching out to some of the students she taught in the 1970s, and digging through yearbooks, newspaper articles, church records, and city council and school board minutes. I learned that Black residents in La Puente, so often forgotten, challenged multiple forms of racism. At times, they found common cause with Mexican Americans and other allies, including my Sicilian American mom. Indeed, Greenberry and its now-hidden history of activism helped forge today’s multi-racial San Gabriel Valley.

My family’s history, and specifically my mom’s early years at Sparks, intersected with Greenberry’s growth and its residents’ fight for equality. First-generation college graduates committed to social justice, my parents returned to La Puente—the multi-racial blue-collar city where their Sicilian and Nicaraguan immigrant parents lived—to become junior high school teachers. In the early 1970s, they rented a house on Evanwood Avenue, less than a mile south of Greenberry.

Pushed out of South Central Los Angeles by urban renewal, eminent domain, and the 1965 Watts uprising, Black families, some originally from the South and Midwest, moved to Greenberry in the 1960s. Newly suburbanized La Puente had relatively affordable homes, so Black families bought there and created a thriving community. White real estate agents, however, sought to preserve all-white neighborhoods. Fueled by racist beliefs that Black residents would lower home values, they steered Black families south of Francisquito Avenue into an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County just outside the then-white middle-class city of West Covina. Greenberry Drive led to the enclave’s three main blocks—Greenberry, Glenshaw, and Evanwood.

Former residents fondly describe late midcentury Greenberry as a “village.” Black families integrated existing churches, and Black pastors established new ones. Black women hosted parties and games of bid whist and dominos. The community discussed issues that impacted the village and in 1964, frustrated with ongoing discrimination, established the La Puente-West Covina branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They fought segregated housing in West Covina, and curriculum tracking and IQ testing in schools.

Children who grew up in Greenberry went to Sparks, where my mom taught Spanish and language arts to the area’s Black, Mexican, white, and few Asian American students. She wanted students to leave feeling better about themselves than when they entered. During Mom’s Zoom memorial, former student and Greenberry resident Keith Williams recalled, “The thing I valued most from Ms. Francesca Ochoa is the way she always finished her Spanish class, ‘Que tengas un buen día. Have a nice day.’ She showed us that she cared.”

Living in the school district where my parents taught, the lines between work and home often blurred. My mom’s 1970s students told me they occasionally dropped by our home to make the 10-minute walk to school with Ms. Ochoa. Some even remembered hearing toddler-me crying in the background.

Shortly after Mom arrived at Sparks, the local NAACP allied with the La Puente-area Organization of Mexican American Communities and La Raza Unida Party to fight police brutality and to increase the number of Black and Chicana/o educators. They pushed for Chicano and Black Studies classes, and in 1972, demanded that the school district make one year of Chicano and Black Studies a graduation requirement for all high school students. My mother taught Chicano studies for several years.

As I learned more about Greenberry and its history of Black activism, I found my mother in the historical record. Lionel J. Brown came up often in my research: a president of the area NAACP, an organizer against police violence, and a teacher who advocated for, and then chaired, a council to address racial discrimination in the school district. Through school board minutes, I discovered that my mom and Mr. Brown participated together in a multi-day workshop in 1974 titled “Different Aspects of Mexican Culture.”

I was eager to find Mr. Brown, and I looked for him at his old address. The owner told me Mr. Brown lost his home to foreclosure in the early 1980s; he stored some of Mr. Brown’s items for a few years, but never saw him again. This was the closest I came to finding Lionel Brown. I was overcome with sadness—a sense of loss thinking about how he was pushed out of his home and community, and a sense of loss reflecting on how his labor to improve our area is unknown to too many.

Almost none of the Black families in Greenberry remain today. In the late 1970s, many of the neighborhood youth left for the military, college, or work. Priced out of the area and able to purchase newer and larger homes further east, young families went to the Inland Empire; their parents, like mine, passed away. I spoke with 65-year-old Ethel Smith, who lived in Greenberry from 1969 to 1976, and recently visited the neighborhood, hoping to reconnect with old memories. “It’s sad,” she grieved, “I went through Greenberry to reminisce, and I can’t remember people whose houses I’ve been to. I can’t remember where they lived.”

But relationships endure, even as the community is now physically dispersed. Greenberry’s former residents have met for yearly reunions since 2012. “How many communities from the ’70s—communities not families—get together once a year?” Keith Williams marveled when I visited him as part of my research into the neighborhood. “I don’t know of any communities that have such an interwoven connection with one another,” he reflected. The seeds that the original residents planted, Keith observed, have connected the former Greenberry residents’ kids, grandkids, and great grandkids.

Recovering local histories of placemaking, like Greenberry’s, teaches us about our interrelated and unequal pasts, and about the times that people have united for change. Researching Greenberry’s past has been part of my own remembering—a way to stay connected with my mom, honor the relationships she maintained, and hold onto the love she conveyed. It has exposed interconnected and transgenerational relationships and on-going struggles for justice.

For all of this, I’m grateful to former Greenberry residents. I hope to ensure more people learn about this past, and the community’s work—for them, for my mom, and ultimately for us all.

The post Searching for My Mom, and the History of La Puente’s ‘Little Watts’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I lost my first year of high school to Zoom in 2020. Not just my first day, or first week, but the entire first year. This jarring start to a new phase of life set a pace that marked high school milestones strangely.

Now, with graduation approaching, I look back on those milestones—the ups and downs of four pivotal years—and reflect. What can I remember? What should I remember? What will I forget?

This is where the yearbook comes into play.

Yearbooks allow us to slow down and take a look back at the previous year. It goes by so fast when you’re in it: a blur of classes, finals, presentations, clubs. But with a yearbook in my hands, I can see the last of everything with my friends. Yearbooks capture the random science lessons we didn’t know we would miss, the teacher who taught us one year and was forgotten about the next, the friends known only as hallway acquaintances, the people we never thought we would connect with but will definitely keep in touch with beyond this phase of life. Even now, I page through my middle and elementary school yearbooks, and I’m instantly transported back to my day-to-day life.

There is beauty in the curation of a yearbook, too.

For as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had the ability to take a picture and save it digitally—which means our pockets are filled with disorganized fragments of memories dating back years and years. There is something special about having a designated space for specific photos that come together to tell a story, captured in a tangible book that forces us to flip the page and feel the weight of the memories.

Besides, when have we ever been able to hold time in our hands?

When I was younger, I was afraid of the idea that memories were happening all around me—and that forgetting them would feel like losing a piece of myself. That’s when I discovered the power of journaling to hold my memories. Writing would ensure that I could look back on the different versions of myself, and what I experienced: from the mundane things, like what I ate for breakfast on Thursday before school (toast and scrambled eggs with cheese), to my first crush in elementary school (and the red collared shirt he wore on the first day we talked).

Yearbooks, too, help capture how we change—which is why they are especially important for teenagers, who are too young to play with the kids but not old enough to fraternize with the adults.

They are how we remember this transitory phase, and the passage into adulthood—our “coming of age.”

During my freshman year, I joined the yearbook staff. We were forced to figure out how to bring people together digitally in a sea of blacked-out, camera-off Zoom screens. Which also meant we got to know our classmates differently. We saw pictures of their pets, got selfies taken in their rooms, and discovered who’s most likely to fall asleep with their camera on. Our small but mighty yearbook team did it all. We often had to get creative. Instead of prom, we spotlighted pets, instead of field trips, we showcased sidewalk chalk art, and instead of homecoming, we featured our actual homes.

So, while we didn’t have the usual options that marked the high school experience, we got to learn more about each other—like a shared love for the same band through posters hanging on our bedroom walls, meeting classmates’ siblings, and finding out that your dog and a classmate’s cat have the same name.

Yearbooks are a shared experience. Although we experience the same year, the same classes, and the same people, a yearbook is not catered to one person’s version of a story; it’s made up of pieces of everyone’s journey. That’s one reason why that COVID year’s book felt particularly special. The pandemic put the value of people and shared moments into perspective for me. And it’s the people I’ll remember the most from my time in high school.

My favorite part of the yearbook process is exchanging signatures, and as a graduating senior there’s more weight to it this time around. I know I’m leaving a lasting message or a last message, a final impression of the past year with my peers. I like to read the personalized versions of what people remember about our shared experiences. What did they remember about me? What memories did we share that didn’t cross my mind? As much as we walk together through high school, every day is different for each person.

Looking back is bittersweet. When it’s time to receive my yearbook this year and the smudged ink signatures are in place, I will be able to turn the pages and hold on to the memories I was lucky enough to have. To look back on the past, not think about the future, and extend the present.

The post A Yearbook to Remember appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Los Angeles is an unreliable narrator. The very cityscape is an illusion, albeit on the grand scale—streets and buildings, the human design of it, erected on a bed of sand and tar. If you want to know what it is about the place, you need only visit my favorite local site, the La Brea Tar Pits, where the kitsch of Fiberglas mammoths comes face to face (literally and figuratively) with the existential reality of the tar lake, which are the existential realities of Los Angeles itself. The tar, after all, is where the city emerged from, and it is the tar to which we will eventually return—a sinister coeval to the false cheer of the palm trees and the sun. As such, perhaps, the tar is the only reliable narrator, since everything that’s been constructed upon it will disappear. In the end, the truest thing about Los Angeles may be that we are all just making it up as we go along.

I wanted to play with signifiers of noir in my novel, Thirteen Question Method, which features its own unreliable narrator, a character hiding out from both his past and the larger present, in a bungalow court in Hollywood. Noir, I’ve long imagined, is an essential Southern California aesthetic, not only, or even mostly, because of all those glorious black and white movies of the 1940s and 1950s (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly), but rather because of what the late Mike Davis characterized in his touchstone work City of Quartz as “the master dialectic of sunshine /and noir.”

For Davis, sunshine/noir was a defining dichotomy, a conundrum that arose from the city’s status as aspirational—a place both to succeed and fail. That’s a cliché of Los Angeles, although that doesn’t mean it is untrue. If our sense of this place and its essence has densified and broadened since Davis introduced the idea in 1990—less a city of transplants than a complex mix of communities and cultures, many of which have been here for millennia—the essential relevance remains. What happens when you aspire to something and it doesn’t happen? What happens when you take the risk and it fails? That could mean moving to California to pursue a dream that turns into a nightmare, which is where the story of noir begins. “The real city,” the narrator of Thirteen Question Method observes, “unfolds in apartment complexes and bungalow complexes, in the sprawl of neighborhoods over crests and flatlands, in 4 million people trying to make it through the day.”

Part of what the Tar Pits conceal are the real stories of some of those people: I’m reminded of La Brea Woman, the first known homicide in what is now Los Angeles, who was beaten to death, her body discarded in the Tar Pits, until 9,000 years afterward, her fossilized remains were recovered and preserved.

Who was La Brea Woman? We’ll never know the answer; in that sense, she is another vivid emblem of the city’s unreliability. It is we who impose the burden of story on her. It is we who assert significance. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” Raymond Chandler writes near the end of The Big Sleep. “In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill.  You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.  Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

Chandler is saying that it is easy to get lost here, that it is easy to be erased. This is what happens, after a fashion, in Thirteen Question Method, which is built around a narrator who wants nothing more than to get out from under his history, to live in a never-ending present tense. In that regard, he is a quintessential sort of Angeleno, rootless, disconnected, adrift in an ever-deepening state of dissolution—noir after the sunshine is eclipsed.

I wanted to tell this story because I am drawn to the unreliable. I have long found myself surrounded by unreliable narrators, both in Los Angeles and everywhere else. I began writing the novel in 2015, but I hit a wall and set the book aside for a number of years. The reason was simple: the necessities of narrative. As an essayist, I’m used to living the story before I write it. As a novelist, I don’t have that luxury. Luxury? Yes, the ability to know where it is going, although in the unreliable city, how much can we ever truly know?

When I returned to the book in the summer of 2020, I was as isolated as the central character; locked down in the early days of COVID, experiencing Los Angeles as a scrim, a stage set, something to be viewed in two dimensions through a window, except during the long walks I took every morning, before anyone else was out. I was beset by the lies of the Administration, the president’s insistence that the pandemic was some sort of ruse. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he wondered at an April White House briefing. “… [S]upposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.”

Then, there was the insurrection of January 6.

Could there be a more unreliable narrator than the author of that fiction? There’s a reason my narrator, when he needs to leave the bungalow court, puts on a blue suit and a long red tie.

Also important was the matter of my own unreliability, all the things about the character, about this narrative, that I did not (want to) know. I was compelled by these ambiguities, much as I have long been when it comes to Los Angeles. My narrator had been married at one point, but where his spouse might be now was an open question. He had the money to support himself, but I couldn’t say how. As the novel progressed, he began to go mad, in the 19th century sense of the word. I found I didn’t want to assume too much—or perhaps the better word is: control. Instead, I wanted to observe, to discover what would happen; I wanted to see where he might go. Because he was living in a willful twilight, drinking too much and devoted to forgetting, it seemed useful for me not to possess too much foreknowledge, not to understand much more than the character did himself.

Such amnesia, let’s call it, has long been a hallmark of Los Angeles; it is a city that erases itself. “The most photographed and least remembered city in the world,” the urbanist Norman M. Klein has written, referring to the countless times it has appeared on television or in the movies, often “playing” somewhere else. That’s the case as well for those who, like the narrator of Thirteen Question Method, wash up here with nowhere else to go. Sunshine/noir, the mammoths and the tar lake—what we’re getting at, really, is artifice and authenticity.

This is less a divide than a sliding scale: a circularity. What is true about the city is equally untrue about the city. Something similar might be said of noir, which is the quintessential form of Los Angeles narrative because it reflects the city’s starkest polarities. What is authentic here is unreliability. What is authentic here is all we do not know as we live it day to day, moment to moment, caught between the darkness and the light.

The post Los Angeles Is an Unreliable Narrator appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog. I would carefully select books from a paper form distributed in class. A few weeks later, paperbacks arrived at school in wondrous boxes. Best of all, they usually had nothing to do with schoolwork. I read them in bed or in a park, on winter nights or summer days.

Those novels took me places, out of my crowded, insular hometown. My family often visited nearby Manhattan but that was still off-limits for solo wandering. Children’s and young adult literature let me imagine independence—meeting new people and exploring different places on my own. One book in particular, Mystery of the Green Cat by Phyllis A. Whitney, led me to develop an affection for that distant, hilly city on the Pacific coast: San Francisco.

The little paperback’s romantic portrayal of the City by the Bay grabbed me and never let go. It’s a depiction that pushes back against the rampant San Francisco bashing in vogue today. I fear that San Francisco has gotten such a bad rap—borne of an often brutal, and mainly conservative, narrative about the city—that people have lost sight of its unerasable allures, and its irreplaceable spot in American history and culture. It’s important to remember the things that made, and make, San Francisco great—not for the sake of nostalgia or adolescent literature, but to ensure that a dark fog of disdain doesn’t block out everything else.

Of course, parts of downtown San Francisco do face huge social problems—homelessness, drug addiction, shoplifting invasions. But Fox News, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and many other critics persistently push an exaggerated portrait of the city as a hellhole, where car thefts and fentanyl deaths, corporate flight, and retail closings fuel a so-called Doom Loop. As the city loses tax base and tourist revenues while gaining pathologies and street crime, they predict the end is near.

Too many seem to gleefully dance on what they hope will be the grave of a city they always resented for the scary things it represented politically, sexually, artistically. San Francisco is home to beat poetry, hippies, gay libs, Big Tech, Nancy Pelosi, political correctness, and pricey and beautiful architecture that made its critics’ own pale hometowns look like dumps—so now is the time to avenge all that.

They never mention that San Francisco rebuilt itself, heroically, after the 1906 earthquake and fires that had leveled it. It re-emerged as a magnet and cradle for talent and creativity, punching above its weight in music, art, literature, technology, medicine, alternative lifestyles, and stupendous business success.  It can survive its current troubles.

It may sound childish to inject a middle-grade mystery book into a debate about today’s painful, intractable issues. Still, in gentler times, Mystery of the Green Cat, first published in 1957, celebrated San Francisco. Whitney, writing for kids all over the country, displayed a skill, unburdened by kneejerk politics, that unearthed the magic of the place.

Whitney presents a vision of a pre-hippie S.F. that is obsolete, or maybe never existed. Still, who could resist it? Was it real? At least some of it was and is.

Recently, I decided I wanted to revisit that place, and I went looking for Whitney’s book. My original copy was long lost, but I ordered a used one from an online book dealer. I re-read its 188 pages, in large typeface. It was an odd time-traveling experience, allowing me to consider my own pre-teen brain and realize how little of the book I accurately remembered other than its general vibe.

In the book, a widow and her two young daughters move to San Francisco to live with her new husband, a widower, and his two pre-teen sons. Family conflict ensues. Meanwhile, in the spooky Victorian house just up Russian Hill, two elderly and mysterious sisters keep a bunch of Asian relics and a batch of secrets. The frailer sister keeps asking for her missing green cat, which turns out to be a little statue containing a life-changing note from her long-dead husband.

Its plot is underwhelming to the Adult Me, but then the plot was never important to me as a kid. The book’s real star is the city itself. I loved the way its young characters explored San Francisco’s foggy beauty and pastel ethnic neighborhoods. Eleven-year-olds hike around Chinatown and Coit Tower, ride cable cars, and snoop around old mansions, library archives, and antique shops—without grownups. Dramatic hills surrounded by water, tugboat hoots from the bay, and bridges that defy gravity grabbed me.

“The view up here was tremendous,” Whitney wrote of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. “The streets of San Francisco went straight away beneath the tower and straight up the opposite hills, as if somebody had ruled lines on a piece of paper, paying no attention to the heights… The little houses clung to steep cliffs, their gardens gay with birds and flowers. It was like another world – a suspended, arboreal sort of world.”

At Fisherman’s Wharf: “There were so many boats that their spars and masts stuck up like a toothpick forest … Crabs were cooked in kettles right on the walks.”

I first visited S.F. when I was in college, in 1973, as a guest of a Los Angeles friend who drove me up the coast through Santa Barbara, Monterey Bay, Big Sur, and finally across the Bay Bridge. I was far from a country bumpkin, but the sight of the skyline over the water was thrilling. We hiked up hills and clung to poles on cable cars’ outer ledges. San Francisco’s lovely mixture of urbanity and nature seemed more humane than New York’s noisy swagger and scary decay.

Later, my work as a journalist brought me to S.F. many times. I stayed in high rise hotels with views of the bridges, to my delight. Covering higher education, I persisted through interminable University of California regents’ meetings knowing that, after deadlines, I might eat in Chinatown and shop at City Lights Bookstore.

I am always impressed by how there is no place in the nation like San Francisco, a benefit of its unusual topography and its spirit of social openness and innovation. This, with a surprisingly small population of less than 900,000.  Some people tout its European, walkable vibe, an antidote to suburban sprawl. But I would argue that San Francisco is a most American place in its soul. I think about the Midwest servicemen who passed through in World War II and returned for a better and more interesting life. Gold Rush miners, jeans manufacturers, rock and rollers, immigrants from Asia and Latin America, refugees from sexual repression, IT brainiacs—they all embraced San Francisco and many successfully staked their claim on the American Dream.

Of course, my childhood enchantment was somewhat naïve, and my adulthood love for the City by the Bay has been tempered by reality. Over the 1970s and 1980s, San Francisco’s counterculture wilted and darkened. Haight-Ashbury became dangerous. The AIDS epidemic was a horror. Big Tech brought in money, but widened inequities and pushed rents beyond the reach of the artists and writers who had given San Francisco its bohemian flavor. Whitney could not have anticipated the grief of today’s homeless encampments, with so much suffering met with insufficient responses.

Yet, despite its current problems, a wonderful, beautiful city still exists amid the fog. It is worth fighting for. In Whitney’s book, the widow discovers a redeeming message inside the pottery cat statue—a note from the past, delivering solace. More important, for me, are the messages about San Francisco’s allure infused through my little paperback: “Fog drifted through the streets of San Francisco, so that every road looked wavery and mysterious, and even ordinary houses took on a ghostly aspect.”

That still happens. I still love it.

The post Beyond the ‘Dark Fog of Disdain,’ San Francisco Is Still There appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Late one afternoon last year, during a troubled time in my life, I took a long walk on the beach.

A day of rain was ending. Watery sunlight shone on glossy streets. It was a brief lull in California’s unrelenting winter. To the west, a layer of cirrus clouds announced another storm approaching. A high wind chased the departing rain, churning the sea into a tangle of waves.

I had been here—the Redondo Beach shoreline at the southern end of Santa Monica Bay—many times before. I spent most of my childhood in a small house about a mile away. Even after moving to Long Beach as a teenager, and eventually leaving California altogether to raise my family in New York City, I never stopped returning to Redondo Beach.

Why do some people return again and again to the places they grew up? Not everyone does. Some leave and never look back. Others never leave at all. Regardless, I think everyone has a place like this beach—a place where they go, even if only in their mind, when they are hurt, or lost, or lonely. A place where memories feel particularly vivid, and where the landscape is charged with an enduring goodness and rightness that is hard to put into words.

A need for such goodness and rightness had drawn me to the ocean on that winter afternoon. Earlier that day, my younger brother and I had moved my mom, who is 81, into a memory care facility.

It happened to be in Redondo Beach. We hadn’t set out to return to the place where our family started. It just worked out that way. This facility was one of the few memory care places we could find in Southern California that would accept my mother’s two beloved dogs. Now we were here at a time of endings.

My mom has dementia. She was diagnosed in 2018 and lived for several years in an assisted living place in Orange County, until her memory loss required a higher level of care. In her prime, she was a newspaper reporter with a generous heart, an observant mind, and a wised-up take on the world. My dad, until he suffered a massive stroke when I was 9, worked in newspapers too. He was more bookish and ruminative.

My mom supplied the energy, the fun, and a lot of the volatility in our household. After my dad’s stroke, she raised us singlehandedly, worked full time, and cared for my dad. She kept the house running, took us on vacations, and taught us to respect and be curious about other people, no matter who they were or where they came from.

To cope with caring for my dad, she also turned to drinking. Our childhood was a careening mix of love and chaos.

All caregiving is hard. Caregiving for a parent with whom you have a complicated relationship is harder. My mom’s dementia, doctors say, is caused in part by her drinking. She was like a storm that churned through our lives. Now we’re surveying the damage and doing our best to clean things up.

Given all those complicated feelings, you’d think I’d want little to do with the place I was raised. Yet that afternoon, after moving my mom into her room with just a few possessions so she didn’t hide or lose them, I knew exactly where I needed to go. I drove straight to the beach, parked the car, and started walking. I went in search of memories.

I am now the keeper of my family’s memories. All of my grandparents died when I was a child. My dad died in 2005. One of my cousins is delving into family genealogy, but I am the oldest one who remembers the days and years of that Redondo Beach childhood. It’s an unsettling responsibility. I tell stories to my own kids, but even as I tell them, I recognize how much the stories leave out.

The memories I sought walking along the beach were something other than stories. Memory, on its own, is not particularly reliable. It often takes the form of stories, which edit and package reality. Places are different. On their own, they tell no stories. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say they tell all the stories. At every moment, they are featuring in countless people’s experiences and memories.

If you return to the same place enough times, during every stage of your life, layers of memory accumulate. Viewed as a whole, those layers can begin to reveal truths deeper than any story. It can feel like stepping outside yourself and seeing the entirety of your life stacked like a pile of snapshots. There is no obvious connection between the snapshots, except that the same person and the same place are in each one. You could arrange them into a pattern and tell a story. You could just as easily mix them up and tell a different story. At a certain point, you give up editing and packaging.

The deeper truth that emerges from all of that has something to do with continuity and change existing simultaneously, not canceling each other out.

Redondo Beach has changed a lot in the decades since I was born. Its average home price is now close to $1.5 million. My parents bought their house in the early 1970s for $35,000. You could see a sliver of ocean from my bedroom but our street was not high class. Our neighbors were a biker gang, a family who worked in pest control, some retirees, and a guy who grew pot in his backyard. We duct-taped our shoes to make them last longer. The kids at my school were mostly stoners, metalheads, or, from the nicer part of town, children of Japanese aerospace engineers. There weren’t a lot of playgrounds, so we sought out construction sites, where we improvised BMX bike tracks and staged dirt-clod battles.

Because a zoning change in the 1970s lifted density limits throughout the city, there were many construction sites. Peeling bungalows gave way to glossy multistory complexes, school enrollment shrank and campuses closed. Redondo has never been as upscale as its South Bay neighbors, Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach, in part because the northern part of the city abuts a big oil refinery. Its pier, despite many attempted improvements, remains seemingly unalterably dilapidated. But Redondo Beach has grown more expensive, and more international. Today, a fifth of residents are foreign born. A bare majority are white. It’s like the rest of L.A., riding economic waves and growing ever more defined by a kaleidoscope of cultures.

So much change. And yet, at the same time, just as I remember. That winter afternoon last January, I parked at the southern end of the beach. Parts of the bike path were still submerged in pools of water. I walked to the sand, which was cold and wet. I took off my shoes and let the waves come up and around my legs.

There were sand pipers. Sea gulls. A few intrepid surfers rode the storm swell. The wind blew so hard, I could hear nothing but air and water. Walking along like that, I could have been five years old, or 50. The sea, the sand, the waves, and the wind were the same. Along the bluff top, I recognized most of the condo buildings. I had watched them go up as a child. There they were, unchanged.

People grow older, everything changes. And yet, inside, we peer out from the same place we peered from as a child. My father, near the end of his life, barely able to stand, shook his head and said, “You know, inside, I still feel like I’m in elementary school.”

I find such thoughts immensely comforting as I watch my mom decline. Her story, and maybe the story of our family, is not all that happy. It helps to see her life not as a story but as a totality, too complicated for stories. At the heart of all the change and loss, there remains a singular person, whom I love.

I return to Redondo Beach because it teaches me a great redeeming fact about life: That what is good and right about a person—maybe about the world itself—endures even as everything else changes and fades away. I need to be reminded of that, especially now. I hope you have a place that does the same for you.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Redondo Beach Brings Me Back to Myself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You’re lucky to have freeways—when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.

But that didn’t stop my brother and me from whining about congestion on the 10 during long drives to see her relatives in Redlands. She’d respond to our complaints with the Southern California version of “when I was your age, I had to walk six miles through the snow.”

“I grew up in Hawthorne,” a working-class town near LAX, she’d remind us, “and when we went to Redlands, we had to go via Imperial Highway and other surface streets.” In her telling, the trip took three hours.

Mom is 75 now, and her memory isn’t great. But I’ve never forgotten her story, and for years I’ve wondered what such a trip would be like. So, with her encouragement—she’s a retired newspaper editor who taught me the old journalists’ adage, “if your mother says she loves you, check it out”—I decided to do the reporting. I would drive from Hawthorne to the Inland Empire city of Redlands without getting on a freeway.

The drive would trigger memories, inspire emotions, and serve as a reminder how, when you’re traveling in California, time can slow down even as it hurtles ahead.

I start near Imperial Highway’s western end in El Segundo, from the former site of the North American Aviation plant where Grandma Edith, my mom’s mom, once worked the assembly line. From that spot, I see the office building that is now home to the L.A. Times, the paper my mom and I both worked for when it was headquartered in downtown L.A. From El Segundo, the highway proceeds underneath the 105 Freeway, which effectively replaced Imperial as an east-west thoroughfare when it opened in 1993.

Imperial Highway—really a collection of four- and six-lane county roads and state highways, with stoplights—was first conceived of a century ago by agricultural and business interests who wanted to connect L.A. with farms around Brawley, 220 miles southeast in Imperial County.

But building infrastructure was never easy in this state of too-many local jurisdictions; construction on the highway got started in 1931 but wasn’t finished until 1961. The Imperial Highway my mom and her parents relied on in the 1950s and ’60s slowly became obsolete as long stretches of the highway were replaced or subsumed by other freeways and highways. Today, Imperial Highway doesn’t come within 100 miles of Imperial County; its eastern end is at the border of Anaheim and the city of Orange.

Heading east from El Segundo on Imperial, I stop immediately in Hawthorne, at a small apartment building that occupies the lot where my mom grew up. I also swing by the monument to the Beach Boys, whom my mom knew at Hawthorne High School. From Hawthorne, Imperial passes briefly through Inglewood and then makes its way through South Los Angeles, the section of Southern California that has changed the most, and most consistently drawn my attention, throughout my career.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

To drive Imperial Highway today is to see Southern California as an unhealthy empire, at war with itself. There are more check cashing places than banks, and more liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, donut shops, and smoke shops than I can count, most in small strip malls with names like “Imperial Plaza.” Their sun-splashed marquees mix with newer health clinics and gleaming schools—public, charter, private, and religious—often fenced off.

This streetscape reflects dueling impulses. Will health care and education save us before we eat and drink ourselves to death?

Just as in the rest of California, there is not enough new housing here. Homes along Imperial are often stucco and mid-century, their ugliness hidden behind uglier walls that block the traffic noise. The two public housing projects I pass—Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts—are in better shape than the apartments and motels around them.

East of South L.A., after grabbing a burrito at Plaza de Mexico mall in Lynwood, I can’t help but stop when I see the street sign for Gary Beverly Court outside of an empty Lynwood High School building. The high school has moved, but the street sign remains, in honor of a beloved principal who was shot to death on his drive home 20 years ago. I covered the case, which remains haunting and unsolved.

With a multi-car accident blocking Imperial ahead, I take a mile-long detour south into Compton, which allows me to visit the tombs of my great-grandparents. When I return to the road, I head through South Gate, and battle traffic. The retail shops become more frequent and more middlebrow in Downey. There, a sign points me in the direction of the museum memorializing the Columbia Space Shuttle, which my grandmother helped assemble later in her aerospace career.

Traffic is slow in Norwalk, with county government buildings and churches that have taken over old hotels, auditoriums, and restaurants. The drivers go so fast in Santa Fe Springs and La Mirada, the last two L.A. County cities Imperial runs through, that I move over to the slower right-hand lane.

Forty-one miles in, when I cross into Orange County in La Habra, Imperial looks more prosperous. There are a couple of tech firm offices, as well as high-end retailers, gyms and yoga studios full of pretty people, and an Amazon Fresh. I push through Brea into Yorba Linda for a bit, and see a few horse trails, along with signs for the Nixon library, devoted to the only California-born president, a kid from Whittier who weirdly embodied the promise and paranoia of his home state.

My total drive time, not counting stops, has reached two hours. And Imperial Highway would only get me halfway to Redlands, in the northeast corner of the L.A. basin that is part of San Bernardino County.

So, I turn north and head through Brea Canyon on a dusty, traffic-crammed road paralleling the 57 Freeway. Upon reaching the San Gabriel Valley, I take surface streets in a northeast direction through Diamond Bar, Pomona, and Claremont—passing a familiar mix of fast-food joints and donuts and schools.

Without a map, I drive in search of Base Line, where I’ll turn eastward. It’s the road my mom remembers most from those long-ago drives.

It also was once among the most important routes in all of California.

Indeed, Base Line is older than almost everything now standing in the Los Angeles basin. In the 1850s, U.S. government surveyors, charged with establishing an “initial point” for Southern California surveys (they chose Mt. San Bernardino), established a north-south meridian line and an east-west baseline to guide future surveys.

That baseline became Baseline, which today goes by various names—Base Line or Baseline, Baseline Avenue or Baseline Street, or, in Upland, 16^th Street. At the point beyond Claremont where I reach Baseline, I find a dustier, less dense version of Imperial Highway, with three lanes and too many liquor stores, but with more parks and trees and vacant lots. Just as the 105 Freeway shadows Imperial, the 210 tracks the Baseline corridor it replaced over the past two generations.

The housing is newer here—my mom recalls the Base Line as a strip of development and services, running largely through groves and farms. But the buildings seem sun-bleached and in need of repair—a reminder that California’s housing stock is older than that of the Rust Belt states.

I head through Upland, with ranch houses and a few parks, and then into Rancho Cucamonga, which seems to have an abundance of dental practices along Baseline. “Why all the dentists?” I ask myself, before answering my own question: it’s all the donut shops!

I am through Etiwanda and into Fontana before I spot new housing construction, a development calling itself “The Encore at Providence,” which sounds like the last song before the show ends and you get your audience with God.

But then in Rialto, Baseline becomes a divide. On the south side are homes, protected by sound walls. On the north side are warehouses. These facilities grow more massive as I move further east; the “Now Hiring” signs on their walls also get bigger as I head deeper into the Inland Empire, now an American center for logistics.

Sidewalks are replaced by dust, and the landscape gets browner, except for the brilliant green colors of Eisenhower High School. I feel like I’m in the country, with things spread out—until I cross the 215 and enter the west side of San Bernardino.

To this point, the roads have been relatively smooth, but San Bernardino is a poor city, even after emerging from one of America’s worst municipal bankruptcies in 2017. Baseline here is full of ruts and potholes, and my Prius bounces up and down. Many of the storefronts are empty. Even in the Inland Empire, one of California’s fastest-growing areas, San Bernardino seems stagnant; it’s been eclipsed by its inland urban rival, Riverside, which has grown faster and richer since the 1980s.

I’ve been driving for more than three hours, and I’m getting close to my destination. I head through the city of Highland, home of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, who sponsor the new event space back in L.A. that the media nonprofit for which I now work helps program. I drive a few miles past their newly renamed casino and I’m in East Highlands, where my grandmother, great-grandmother and other relatives worked in the orange groves and packing houses after arriving from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The packing company provided a small green house for the family to live in here in East Highlands; that’s where my mom was heading from Hawthorne six decades ago. That green house, in a line of houses once known as the Green Row, is long gone, but I find the spot, on a hillside in a planned community.

Baseline dead-ends at an orange grove, which provides a bit of agricultural respite, and beauty, between the development and a dry hillside crisscrossed with hiking trails. Many of the oranges lay unpicked, rotting on the ground.

My great aunt and uncle, Fern and Don, remain in Redlands, near the 800-square-foot house my great-grandparents saved up to buy and which we would visit on those traffic-choked drives on the 10. I turn south, taking Orange Street through the Redlands downtown and up to the retirement community where Fern and Don now live.

More than eight hours have passed since I started. My total drive time, excluding stops, has been more than four hours. But the journey has felt even longer, with time moving in reverse as I retrace my mom’s family drives from six decades ago, and follow thoroughfares that date to the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries.

After navigating the community’s COVID checks, I knock on my aunt and uncle’s door. I hug Fern, and spend a half hour arguing good-naturedly with Don about what he’s watching on Fox News. But I am eager to get home, without delay.

In less than five minutes of driving, I’m on the 10, heading west toward L.A. This drive will take me only 90 minutes, because of some traffic around West Covina. The route is not particularly scenic. But as I drive home, I suddenly feel fresher and renewed—with new memories of Southern California surface streets, and with my mother’s enduring gratitude for our freeways.

The post Why I Drove 80 Miles Across Southern California on Surface Streets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Two things are funny about this: First, I didn’t actually experience Andrew, because I didn’t move to Florida until 1993. Second, that was the extent of hurricane preparations back then—duct tape to be sure that if the windows shattered, the glass would stick together, instead of splintering into tiny and dangerous little pieces. When you’ve grown up with hurricanes, their memories—like the tape residue—never quite go away.

My first real hurricane was Erin in 1995. Then nine years old, I had no idea what to expect, but figured that all hurricanes were the same and this one would tear my house apart. So I took matters into my own hands. I got that green plastic mover’s wrap you can find at U-Haul, fully wrapped the 13-inch CRT television I’d negotiated having in my bedroom, and put all of my books, Barbies, and beanie babies in plastic storage bins.

During Erin, every window in our home was covered with plywood, so inside the house it felt like it was 2 a.m. even during the day. I plopped down to watch the living room TV, but all broadcasts had the same information on loop until the next National Hurricane Center forecast was released (every 6 hours). After several hours of this, I decided that my house was not going to flood and that I could unwrap my bedroom television and go back to watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

I don’t mean to be flip—I know that hurricanes can kill people and destroy entire regions, and, when response and relief are slow to arrive, the aftermath of these storms can be even deadlier, as Puerto Rico is tragically experiencing right now.

The author as a child in front of her family home in Davie, Florida, October 28, 1994. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

But for those who have lived in hurricane-prone places, these epic disasters can come to feel routine. For me ever since Erin, hurricanes have been business as usual to me. Floridians rarely flinch at anything weaker than a Category 3. You go through the motions: put plywood on the windows, get enough water and non-perishable goods, fill every car you own with gas to the brim, and hope for the best.

As a kid, I always hoped the hurricanes would come during the week so school would get cancelled. If we were really lucky (which I was a few times), the storm would hit on a test day and I’d have a few extra days to study.

The familiarity of the pre-hurricane procedure was, in its way, comforting. My family would sit on the couch and flip between The Weather Channel and Spanish news. My mom would go up to the TV and point to all possible trajectories, always deciding that we’d be a direct hit. My dad would then reason with her. But we were all experiencing it together.

The feeling that this was a holiday continued during the lull after the storm passed through. It almost feels like Christmas morning, where everything is quiet, and no one is in the streets yet and riding their bicycles.

The storms, like birthdays or holidays, eventually become part of the way you remember life.

In 2004, there was Ivan, which made me late for my first day of college in Chicago. The airport didn’t reopen until an hour after my flight was supposed to take off. Similarly, Ernesto in 2006 made me one week late to my study-abroad program in Paris.

I remember Katrina. My mother’s prediction of our home being a direct hit finally came true in August 2005 when the eye of Katrina made its first landfall just north of Miami as “only” a category 1. It was nothing compared to what happened in Louisiana, but it still managed to leave a million Floridians without power and cause $630 million dollars’ worth of damage.

In the lull after that storm, sitting in my bedroom, I managed to write to one of my dorm mates from college, who lived in New Orleans. I warned that as a category 1 storm, it’d been very powerful, and hoped he’d be careful. He wrote back to confirm he and his family had evacuated to north Florida. When we got back to school a few weeks later he let us know that his home was under 6 feet of water and was a total loss.

That same season was when I experienced my first hurricane from afar. Wilma ripped through Florida later in 2005. It was one of the latest-forming storms I can remember, hitting in late October. Comfortably welcoming fall in Chicago, I talked with my parents every day. They called to say they were safe and had a generator to power the fridge. Within a few days, my dad had run hundreds of feet of extension cords to power our three neighbors’ refrigerators. It took three weeks for their power to get restored.

A map showing the author’s family home during Hurricane Irma, September 6, 2017. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

I still visit often, but I haven’t lived in Florida since 2005. As it happens, no major hurricane since Wilma in 2005 had made direct landfall in Florida, until this year. Over the last 12 years, my family had dealt with warnings and evacuations, and my parents, instead of scurrying to Home Depot for plywood, replaced those outdated jalousie windows with some double paned windows with beautiful colonial grilles. To protect them, they invested their tax refunds on accordion shutters that take no more than 5 minutes per window to close.

But Irma brought the hurricanes back home. From Los Angeles, where I live, I started tracking Irma as soon as it became a category 5 storm. On Monday, my mom texted “Looks like pinche Irma is coming.” Harvey had just destroyed Houston, and this was poised to be an even stronger hurricane, so there I was again, every six hours looking for the next National Hurricane Center forecast update.

On Tuesday, I asked my mom if they wanted to evacuate, and volunteered to book their flights. She said they’d wait and make a call on Thursday. On Wednesday, I sent my mom a graphic of the latest trajectory, which showed Irma blowing directly through their house. I asked again if they wanted to evacuate.

On Thursday my mom said she wanted to evacuate but my dad didn’t want to. My anxiety and frustration grew. That night I had a dream that the roof of our home tore off. On Friday, I took action and told mom that the safest place in the house was in the bathroom (most inner, central place in the house, without windows). I wasn’t sure if that’s true or not, but it made me feel better.

On Saturday, my aunt, uncle, and cousin came to my parents’ house—they live in a mobile home and those are always unsafe. Curfew started at 4 p.m.

On Sunday, as soon as I woke up and still in bed, I texted my mom to check in, but my iMessages were not going through. That meant they lost power and/or cell service. I started to panic. I texted everyone else in the house: Mom, Dad, brother, cousin, aunt. Nothing. Finally, after what seemed like the longest 20 minutes of my life, a message finally came through. All were safe. Relief.

Through the whole process, every ounce of me wanted to be there, in the storm with my family.

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