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Racial hate and discrimination are serious problems in California’s Inland Empire—and solving them begins at the most fundamental levels. This was the conclusion of a panel of people who study and fight against hate crimes at “How Does the Inland Empire Strike Back Against Hate?,” a Zócalo/California Humanities event at UCR ARTS in Riverside, California. The speakers agreed that acts of racism and hatred go underreported across the region, and that building strong institutions that promote understanding begins in schools.

The discussion was moderated by Brian Levin, professor emeritus at the Cal State San Bernardino School of Criminal Justice, who studies extremism and hate crimes. He opened the discussion by noting that hate crimes “increased at double digit levels in major American cities” in 2023. This year isn’t likely to get better given that hate crimes have increased in every election year since 1991. Levin asked the panelists to speak to how California—which perhaps should be “a shining city on the hill for the rest of the country”—is combating hate.

California State Assemblymember Corey A. Jackson said that his goal is to build anti-racist, anti-xenophobic infrastructure around the state. He pointed to two bills recently signed by Governor Gavin Newsom—AB 1078, which pushed back against book banning (and which Jackson wrote) and AB 1955, which bars schools from notifying parents about student gender identity—as well as the state’s Civil Rights Department’s Commission on the State of Hate as examples. “Overall, what are we saying in the state of California? Not on our watch. We are making sure we are upholding what other generations did for us. When hate, racism, [or] xenophobia raises its ugly head, we are going to beat it back in the shadows where it belongs,” he said.

Turning to Candice Mays, project director of Black Voice News’ Mapping Black California, Levin asked how local institutions are fighting hate, and what they can do to combat skepticism and distrust of law enforcement and government.

The first hurdle, said Mays, is “How do you tell the police on the police?” Currently, the responsibility to report an incident is on the victim—who may not want to report a violent interaction to the organization perpetrating it. And law enforcement itself might not tick the proper boxes to characterize a violent act as a hate crime. Who holds the people who are mandated to report hate crimes accountable for their reports? Mays asked. She added, “It’s not as much as, how do we fix the Black community’s opinion of law enforcement; it’s how does government hold law enforcement accountable, so it’s not on us to deal with that.”

Levin concurred, pointing out that over the last few years, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department—the nation’s 10th largest law enforcement agency—has reported just a handful of hate crimes each year, while the Los Angeles Police Department reported over 800 in 2023.

Xenophobia has a long history in the Inland Empire, said ACLU Southern California Inland Empire Office senior policy advocate and organizer Luis Nolasco. He sees his work as “ensuring that the Inland Empire is welcoming and is not anti-immigrant,” he said. “The hate comes from lack of knowledge or interfacing with the group.” He added, “A lot of that can be solved by talking to a person that’s an immigrant.” Some of his work has been with young people—including a lawsuit challenging how law enforcement and schools punish Black and brown students—but he is also working on recognizing racism as a public health crisis.

Mays said that unequal healthcare access is a major issue in both Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, though it’s significantly worse in the latter. She said that people by and large have health insurance. But new arrivals from Los Angeles County—many of them Black and brown, and without local networks—lack access to resources and providers. They often end up going to urgent care, for instance, instead of a primary care doctor.

Levin turned the discussion toward solutions. “What can we do to hone allyship?” he asked.

Jackson said that Black people are always at the top of any list of hate crime victims—but they are not alone there. “We are all on the menu. It depends what the dish of the day is. As a matter of fact, this is starting to become a buffet, when it comes to hate,” he said. He urged people to band together—but also to “hold onto your own humanity. Speak up against other people who are being targeted, even if you have nothing to win or lose.”

In the face of extreme hate, allyship has to be active, said Nolasco. “We’ve lost that sense of really putting ourselves on the line for our other communities,” he said. “This is something we all need to do for each other.”

Mays echoed that sentiment in response to a question from an audience member about helping people who want to fight hate but feel too overwhelmed to take action.

“I’m exhausted, too. I look at bad numbers all day,” she said. “It’s important to work in collaboration and connection with other people because then you’re restoring each other.” Surround yourself in community, she added, and remember that other people did this work before you.

Another audience member asked the panelists whether anti-hate, anti-racism movements needed better marketing—slogans like “Occupy,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Defund the Police” are triggering, or easy to push back on.

Mays didn’t deny the need for better marketing but pointed out that “desegregation” and “integration” got pushback in the civil rights era. “Whatever we’re going to push for next, no matter how we word it, is going to upset people, she said. “Honestly if it’s not, I don’t think we’re pushing the right things or pushing hard enough.”

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How did we forget about the first Koreatown, USA?

In the early 20th century, Korean Americans flocked to Pachappa Camp in citrus-rich Riverside, California, to gather, live and work together, and keep the Korean identity alive. During its short stretch of existence, this self-governed community made for and by Korean Americans became a mecca for the Korean independence movement and a bulwark against anti-Asian racism in America. But Pachappa Camp’s significance was forgotten about until the early 2000s, when students at the University of California, Riverside, located the camp’s name on an old map. Intrigued, Edward—a Korean American studies scholar—and a team of researchers and students dug through archives of Korean newspapers and historic documents to uncover an amazing tale of survival and perseverance.

In 1902, the first married Korean couple to come to the United States, Dosan Ahn Chang Ho and Heyryon Lee, also known as Helen Lee Ahn, arrived in San Francisco. Dosan (his pen name) was a Korean independence activist who had made the voyage, in part, to learn about democratic ideals. At the time, Korea was struggling to remain an independent nation. Activists like Dosan were looking for ways to preserve Korea’s sovereignty as an empire and a monarchy, and prevent Japan from taking over their homeland.

The couple eventually settled in Riverside, enticed by its warm climate and job opportunities- not to mention its burgeoning Korean population. Once there, Dosan founded a Korean labor bureau, which offered economic opportunities to entice more Koreans to come to Riverside. As more came to the area, Dosan got started on creating a Korean community all their own: Pachappa Camp.

Located at 1532 Pachappa Avenue next to a railroad track, Pachappa had previously been the site of a labor camp for Chinese railroad workers. When Dosan founded the camp in 1905, it consisted of about 20 vernacular, single-story, wood-frame buildings, in addition to a one-and-a-half story community center duplex. At first, living conditions were harsh: In her memoir Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, Pachappa Camp resident Mary Paik Lee recalled the cold and lack of amenities, including no running water or electricity, in the “shanties.” But even from the start, Korean Americans flooded the site with warmth and welcome. They built a community hall, held Korean language and culture classes, and the Calvary Presbyterian Church, which took an interest in the diaspora, provided English classes.

When Pachappa was founded, Korean Americans found themselves suddenly a people without a country. That same year, in 1905, Japan annexed Korea under military rule; by 1910, Korea was officially folded into Japan’s empire. Pachappa, in response, became an active site of Korean independence activities led by Dosan himself, who continued to distinguish himself as a leader of the movement that sought to unify overseas Koreans to preserve their national identity and community. Many came to refer to Pachappa as “Dosan’s Republic” because of the community regulations he implemented and the independence organizations he started there. The most significant of them was the cooperative association Gongnip Hyeophoe, which laid foundations for the development of the Korean National Association (KNA)—a political organization that represented the interest of Koreans in the United States, Russia, and Manchuria.

In 1911, the KNA hosted a major 10-day conference at Pachappa, where chapter presidents from around the United States laid out the principles that would go into the founding of the Republic of Korea 37 years later. KNA members agreed on 21 articles of governance for Koreans, including guidelines on social practices, internal policing mechanisms, and the establishment of committees that helped organize and regulate Koreans on everything from the way they dressed, to curfew times.

Throughout Pachappa Camp’s existence, residents continued to agitate for Korean independence. When Japan’s Prince Ito was assassinated at the hands of Korean nationalist Chung-kun Ahn, camp residents collected funds for Ahn’s defense and held nightly meetings full of speeches, promises, and stories of past heroics to express their support. Anecdotally, one married couple even pledged a horse and buggy to the cause—though the wife took her husband to task for his generosity afterward. But such a protest would have been half-hearted; everyone in the camp was aligned in support of Ahn.

Pachappa Camp’s residents were a people fighting for their rights in both their home country and their new country. Asians were the first minority community to be targeted specifically by U.S. immigration laws, beginning with the1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Pachappa Camp residents experienced the rampant anti-Asian hatred that permeated the country firsthand. Lee, in her memoir, recalled how other students sang racist songs toward her at school. Jacob Thun, another resident and child at Pachappa, wrote about being ridiculed for his racial identity and called slurs like “Jap.” The Riverside Daily Press also reported on anti-Asian hate crimes and other incidents—an article in early 1906 titled “Villainous Spite Work,” for example, reported on five Korean boys whose bicycle tires had been “slashed to pieces.”

Still, Pachappa Camp maintained its robust community and resilience. Korean newspapers noted that residents continued to conduct Korean independence movement meetings and cultural classes, hold weddings, and generally operate as an extension of Korea. Pachappa likely would have continued to flourish had it not been for the 1913 Great Citrus Freeze, which decimated crops and forced laborers to leave Riverside. Over the next five years, the camp’s numbers dwindled until Pachappa finally closed in 1918. But its influence lived on long past its end, with former residents spreading the spirit of Korea’s independence movement with them wherever they went, whether it was to nearby Vine Street, up north to the Bay, or down south to Los Angeles.

Almost exactly a century after its closure, in December 2016, the city of Riverside formally recognized Pachappa Camp as its first Point of Cultural Interest. On March 23, 2017, the city celebrated the designation. Among the attendees was Dosan’s youngest son, Ralph Ahn.  “Pachappa Camp was the site of the First Organized Korean American Settlement founded by Dosan Ahn Chang Ho in 1905” announces the sign commemorating the first Koreatown, USA. The sign and the designation—coming thanks to the research of Edward and his colleagues—ensure that Pachappa Camp itself, its role in the Korean independence movement, and its place in Korean American history will not be forgotten again.

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I understand your desire to leave California.

Your complaints—about the high costs of being here, the state’s low levels of public investment, the obstacles to building housing—all have merit. If you’re a Californian or a California entity and you haven’t thought of departure, then you probably don’t belong in the Golden State.

What I don’t understand is why you are asking your voters to endorse secession on the November ballot in order to make San Bernardino County its very own state, America’s 51^st.

Because your biggest problem is that you’re too much like an American state.

Already you’re the size of one. Extending from L.A. to the Nevada and Arizona borders, you are the largest county in the United States by area. You are as big as West Virginia or Switzerland, and you occupy more land than New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island put together. With nearly 2.2 million people, you have more residents than New Mexico and 14 other states.

You have many of the problems of an American state. You are politically polarized and thus hard to govern, with no clear majority party (your voters are 41 percent Democratic and 29 percent Republican, with the rest non-partisans or members of smaller parties). You’re plagued by economic inequality that matches that of the developing world (gauging by the World Bank’s Gini Index, the country you come closest to is Venezuela).

And you’re geographically divided, into regions that have little in common with one another. Almost all of your people—some 80 percent—are packed into dense urbanized areas in your southwest corner, living in cities that are effectively part of suburban, metro Los Angeles. Another 400,000 or so of your residents live in the exurbs of the high desert, in the Victor Valley. The rest are rural occupants of the vast and empty mountains and deserts of your interior.

Now, I know the people leading this push for secession—county supervisors and real estate developers—imagine that being a state will free you from the edicts coming down from Sacramento. But don’t they read the papers? American states, and especially California, are increasingly at the mercy of a massively powerful, ever-expanding federal government, and constantly must fight against the whims of whichever political partisans are in charge in D.C.

It’s surprising that you don’t understand this, because you, San Bernardino County, are already under the federal thumb. Indeed, with all your national parks and wilderness areas, more than 80 percent of your land is owned by the U.S. government. The Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Defense basically control you. Of the 50 states, only Nevada is as much of a federal protectorate as you are.

Given these realities, statehood won’t mean independence. It may even make you more of a colony of Washington, since you won’t have the rest of California to fight the feds on your behalf.

If you really want independence and greater public investment, you need to think bigger: why not become your own nation? That way, all that federal land you sit on would become yours to exploit, for tourism or mining or other development. And you could provide more services and invest more in your own infrastructure if you could print your own money, which I presume would be called the ’dino.

Such a country could be an attractive place to live, especially for this columnist. Given America’s decline, and the facts that my mom is a county native and that her family—from retired schoolteachers in Redlands to milk truck drivers in Apple Valley—remain residents, I could imagine myself immigrating to Loma Linda and seeking citizenship in the new nation.

Sadly, it’s never going to happen. San Bernardino statehood would require a political miracle—the approval of the state of California, both houses of Congress, and the president. But nationhood would be even harder. Which is why we’ll never enjoy the spectacle of a delegation from your national capital—Barstow, right?—arriving in Brussels to demand membership in NATO.

So, you’ll have to resort to a second option:

Instead of splitting away from the state of California, split yourself up.

Since you are unhappy with yourself as a county, why not sell yourself off, in pieces, to your neighbors? You’d find plenty of takers. California is overdue for a resetting of its county boundaries, which were mostly determined back in the late 19^th century, when there were only a million or so people living here.

Many of your communities might do better under different management. Your cities near your western border, from Chino Hills and Upland up through Victorville to Barstow, should return to Los Angeles, where they could be more easily linked to the growing Metro transit system.

Your mountain resorts and the cities on your southern border, like San Bernardino and Redlands, might become more prosperous by joining up with Riverside County, which has been more successful economically than you for the past two generations.

You could pass off your vast and sparsely populated desert precincts—everything north of Interstate 40—to Inyo or Kern Counties, which have long histories of governing empty spaces. And, in order to increase your housing supply, you could deed your land near the Nevada border to Clark County, whose dynamic developers would soon build new suburbs of Las Vegas. (This might require a land swap between states—maybe California could trade away San Bernardino land in exchange for the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.)

Some might call this breakup the end of the county, but it actually would be a new beginning. And a rare win-win for your region. Your communities would find themselves with new options and possibilities. And you’d spare yourself the indignities of being a California county, or becoming an American state.

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The association’s brand-new Adam’s Track was supposed to promote commerce and community relations. Japanese-American cyclists arrived at the track riding the latest racing models and dressed in bold cycling uniforms. Residents of all backgrounds arrived from throughout Southern California to celebrate opening day, an event preceded by fireworks and a military band. The debut of the track, which was designed for fast-paced, exciting racing, celebrated competitive cycling among Japanese-American riders, who were moving to Riverside county in increasing numbers.

In the 1890s, cycling became a popular pastime all over the U.S., in immigrant and nonimmigrant communities. It was particularly widespread in the semirural communities of inland California, where workers used country roads that connected scenic groves to navigate the flagship citrus industry.

In the town of Riverside, where 75 percent of Riverside County’s Japanese and Japanese-American population resided, bicycling brought the community together, elevating their place in the broader local society. But within a short period of time Riverside’s bicycle friendly roads also became treacherous places where police used surveillance and racially targeted laws to limit Japanese-Americans’ movements and to enforce their separation from their white neighbors.

Riverside Wheelmen. Courtesy of the Museum of Riverside, Riverside, California.

The Adam’s Track opening represented a high point in Japanese-American relations in Riverside. Some 1,590 people had come to the town from Japan by 1910, and cycling’s rise paralleled the sport’s popularity in Japan, where business owners established sporting goods and repair shops, manufacturers developed Japanese-branded models, and the national army was newly equipped with bicycles.

Likewise, a Japanese-American bicycling culture thrived in Riverside. Recent immigrants, including the Nishida and Yoshida families established bicycle shops soon after arriving to the community. Oral histories suggest these stores serviced not only the community, but also the multiracial populations who lived nearby. As time passed, these bicycle services evolved into motorized services. The Nishida family turned their bicycle shop turned into an automotive shop and the Yoshida family established a motorcycle agency and a garage.

The Riverside Japanese Association planned the inaugural bicycle races at the Adam’s Track as part of a grand gala honoring the birthday of the Meiji emperor, who advanced capitalist industrialization and Japanese expansion across the Pacific. A highlight of the event was an invitation-only celebration at the downtown Loring Opera House, a Romanesque theater specially decorated in Japanese lanterns, flags, and flowers. Local dignitaries made speeches, and the association presented a display of Japanese arts and technology, including daytime fireworks.

As the birthday gala’s formal program concluded, organizers invited participants to head to the newly built Adam’s Track to watch the races: in individual heats of one to eight laps around the three-eighth mile oval track, which was banked on the curves to maximize speed. There were six races in total, ranging from three miles to a mile-and-a-half sprint, which spectators watched from a newly constructed clubhouse and grandstand overlooking the track. Races were restricted to Japanese-American participants, with the exception of a single two-mile race opened to “everybody, Japanese, Americans, Indians and even Russians,” as noted by the local press.

The races were much anticipated. Regional news sources followed the opening of the track closely, detailed the race schedule, and highlighted event sponsors and prizes. The press lauded the energy and high speeds of the bicyclists. The Riverside Daily Press reported before the event: “The Japanese are enthusiastic sportsmen, and particularly enthusiastic bicycle riders, and as they promise a revival of the old sport … Their first race meet will undoubtedly be attended by an interested crowd of spectators.”

Japanese laborer riding through the groves on his bicycle. Courtesy of the Riverside Public Library, Riverside, California.

Previously, cycling races in Riverside had been held in the Athletic Park downtown, but local leagues of riders with Asian surnames were never present. This reflected a color line set by the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), a membership organization, founded in Rhode Island, which oversaw national bicycle racing regulations. LAW explicitly excluded African-American cyclists beginning in 1893. Racial exclusion also took hold in the Southwest, where bicycling was so thoroughly internalized as a white sport that the exclusion of nonwhite riders did not need to be articulated in formal guidelines. Consider one invitational meet in Riverside around 1897, which drew 88 riders from across the region. Only two registrants had Spanish surnames. None had Asian surnames.

Adam’s Track races were intended as an answer to this exclusion. Judged, officiated, and featuring men from the Japanese-American community, these races showed off these riders’ skill in a forum where they alone determined the grounds of success. The event’s judges included prominent community members like Ulysses Kaneko, a successful business owner and court translator, and—in a rarity for an era that denied U.S. citizenship to Asian immigrants—a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Built four miles away from the downtown Athletic Park, the Adam’s Track was near the Japanese camp of the Arlington Heights Fruit Company, which employed hundreds of recent arrivals to tend citrus plants and pick fruit each year, many eager to race.

Racers arrived at the track with elite U.S. racing bikes, including Pierce Cycles, a beautifully designed line based in New York that sold bicycles at $50 a piece. The cyclists earned awards for their victories, such as a $10 suitcase from Reynolds Department Store for first prize in the three-mile race, a $7 silver watch from Pollock Brothers for first place in the two-and-a half-mile race, and expensive clothing from cycling stores for sprints. In a period when sport was often used to express white racial dominance and national strength, Japanese-American boosters promoted the cyclists’ successes and lauded their athletic ability.

It is difficult to know if Japanese-American women joined in the craze; they are notably missing from public accounts of cycling activities in Riverside during this era. That is a stark departure from reports of cycling practices in Japan—where bourgeois women commonly rode bicycles in public spaces—and throughout the United States, where women cycled independently and in clubs from the 1890s onward.

Studio portrait of boy on bicycle. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

For all the potential for cooperation displayed at the Japanese emperor’s birthday gala and Adam Track’s opening race in 1905, the following years saw a distinct backlash against Japanese-American cyclists. And that backlash became part of a more general push for racial exclusion. In the city of Riverside, over half of all arrests of Japanese-Americans over the next decade were for bicycle violations.

An important turning point in cycling enforcement came in 1910, with the passage of a traffic ordinance. In the media coverage leading up to passage of the 20-page local law, public safety and police enforcement against speeding motorists were emphasized. But the ordinance itself placed heavy regulations on common cycling behaviors, including speeding, racing, riding on sidewalks, and cycling at night without a light.

The cycling ordinance also marked a new era of police enforcement and surveillance. Notably, the city equipped its police with motorcycles, “for use in running down traffic violators.” This was a significant early investment, at a time when the largest motorbike manufacturers only produced a few hundred units a year. The ordinance also extended special privileges to officers, such as requiring privately owned vehicles (including bicycles and horse-drawn carts) to surrender the right of way.

Violation of bicycle ordinances, a misdemeanor, carried heavy fees and penalties. For a first offense, cyclists could be fined up to $100 and imprisoned for up to 30 days. Three or more offenses heightened the penalties to as much as $500 and up to six months’ imprisonment. Although there is nothing in writing that explicitly targeted Japanese-Americans, police and the community clashed with great frequency in everyday enforcement.

Original arrest numbers carefully recorded by sociologist Morrison Wong reveal that Japanese-Americans were cited for cycling infractions at rates as high as 22 percent of their share of the population—a stark figure given that they had relatively lower arrest records in the county. In fact, cycling infractions accounted for 58 percent of all arrests of people with Japanese surnames. When riding bicycles in downtown spaces, where restrictions were starkest, or in multiracial neighborhoods, where a lack of infrastructure created incentives for prohibited practices, Japanese-American men were particularly vulnerable to traffic laws, which required police discretion of subjective acts like speeding.

The cycling ordinances represented just one of many ways Japanese immigrants were policed by forces of the state. Better known examples included the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement banning the immigration of Japanese laborers to the United States, and the 1913 California Alien Land Law, which prohibited Asian immigrants from owning land.

Today, more than a century later, many people still wrongly associate cycling with white middle-class hipsters—perhaps because history has buried the cycling stories of immigrants and nonwhites. But if you look hard enough, in places like Riverside, you will find rich stories of bicycling for pleasure, sport, and work—and of riding as an enduring method of resistance for people on the move.

The post When Police Clamped Down on Southern California’s Japanese-American Bicycling Craze appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s too beautiful, and too important, for the likes of you.

It’s true that, as a legal matter, I don’t own Lake Mathews. But I’ve always felt a special kinship with a Riverside County reservoir that spells our mutual name the correct way, with just one “t.” And, what’s more, Lake Mathews serves as the beating heart of the system that supplies water for me and millions of my fellow Southern Californians.

Lake Mathews represents an end and a beginning. It’s both the terminus of the 242-mile aqueduct that sends water from the Colorado River at Lake Havasu, and a distribution center, sending that water, via gravity, from its elevation of 1,500 feet, around the region.

Most intriguingly, it’s a singularly forbidden place. All over California, rivers, canals, and reservoirs double as sites for recreation and leisure. But not Lake Mathews. It’s completely fenced off, and decades of efforts in Riverside to secure public access have been denied by its owner and operator, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

In an era when seemingly every body of water inspires plans for public access or development or both, Lake Mathews retains a special mystique. My lake is like an old-time movie star—deliberately unknowable. And that’s probably the way it should remain.

The special status of Lake Mathews is the product of its history. The area, known as Cajalco Canyon, was little but orchards when the Met identified it as the perfect elevated spot to build a reservoir for Colorado River water that could then flow downhill into Southern California. But one landowner, who believed the property contained tin that would make him and his heirs rich, waged an epic legal fight against eminent domain. The Met eventually secured the land—completing a dam and intake structure in 1939 and starting water deliveries in 1941—but the effort it required is one reason why the Water District has been unwilling to share its hard-won lake with the public.

That tough stance embodies the lake’s namesake, William Burgess “Billy” Mathews, who, with contemporaries William Mulholland and Ezra Scattergood, fathered the water and power of modern L.A. (While Billy doesn’t show up in my Mathews family genealogy, L.A. history is malleable enough for me to claim him.) After arriving from Ohio in 1889, Mathews was elected city attorney in L.A. in 1900, served as general counsel of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power from 1909 to 1929 (doing the legal dirty work that secured Owens Valley water), and then quietly obtained Colorado River water and formed the Metropolitan Water District—in secretive meetings at the Huntington Hotel in the Pasadena neighborhood where I later grew up. But he died in 1931, as the project that would bear his name was just getting underway.

With the goals of preventing contamination and protecting water quality, the Met has repeatedly fortified Lake Mathews—both by adding to its capacity and by buying up the surrounding land to prevent surging Inland Empire development from getting too close. The lake got further protection in 1982 with the establishment of Lake Mathews and the area around it as a nature reserve; expanded in 1995, the reserve, jointly managed by the Met and county, state, and federal agencies, protects habitat for some 65 plant and animal species, including bald eagles.

While other reservoirs in the region—Lake Perris, Lake Skinner, Diamond Valley Lake—were opened for recreation in some forms, Lake Mathews has remained off limits. Not even Hollywood has managed to convince the Met to give it access for filming: the 1953 film Fair Wind to Java sought to turn Mathews into the Indian Ocean, but had to use Mono Lake instead. Riverside County and the city of Riverside have been seeking public access since 1960. The idea remains popular and talked about in the area. But the Met hasn’t budged.

Former Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge says the city probably made a mistake in failing to annex Lake Mathews back in the 1960s, which would have provided local leverage for public access. “We didn’t do that, and probably should have—might have been a different story,” he said. “I don’t know why Lake Mathews is any different than other lakes, but it is.”

In 2012, local assemblyman Kevin Jeffries introduced state legislation to open the lake. Jeffries told me then that the Met had slapped down his effort forcefully. Even if it passed, the legal protections against public access appeared bulletproof.

Other waterways in California have very limited public access, too—for example, there are limits on access to Hetch Hetchy, the Yosemite-adjacent valley that provides San Francisco with water. But there is something especially pristine about Lake Mathews. “A lot of times you have to make compromises and tradeoffs,” says Jeffrey Kightlinger, the general manager of the Met, and allow hiking or other public uses of a reservoir. But why should the Met do it at Lake Mathews, where it doesn’t have to?

Recently at the lake, a couple miles off the 15 as it makes its way down to San Diego, I drove around the fenced-off shoreline, and then got out and walked for a couple miles. Despite the posted warnings against trespassing, it felt idyllic, the water deeply blue, and birds chirping everywhere. In the lake, the fish, unmolested by visiting humans, grow so big that they are sometimes removed and used to seed other waterways where the public can fish.

The Met offered me a chance to get inside the fence and get a tour. But I declined. It seemed wrong to intrude on a place that, because it belongs so profoundly to California, doesn’t really belong to any of us.

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