UNION-TRIBUNE
March 31, 2005
Several years ago, my wife and I drove along the Chilean coast.
In a travel article, I tried in vain to describe the astonishing physical grandeur of the slim South American country.
In the end, the best I could do was evoke the most various terrain I know.
"It's like an anorexic California," I typed.
Of course, that punch-drunk line merely evokes the geography – the desert to the north, the Andes to the east, the lakes to the south.
Advertisement In terms of ethnic makeup, the simile is absurd. Compared to California's, the handsome people of Chile are as homogenous as Japan's.
When it comes to DNA, California has an embarrassment of riches. As a melting pot, it's on perpetual boil. Fully half of its residents were born someplace else, 26 percent in another country. Many of the newcomers assimilate rapidly; others never do.
How we respond to the state's human variety dictates, to a large degree, whether we love California as it is or as it was in a nostalgic past – or in an unlikely future.
California, coming to grips with itself.
There is no more important theme for the state's artists, poets and historians.
That's why the monthlong "California Stories Uncovered," which begins tomorrow in libraries and community centers up and down the state, makes common sense in an uncommon state of being.
As environmental writer Edward Abbey observed: "There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California."
Three years ago, you may recall, the California Council for the Humanities called for Californians to read and discuss John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
In April, that rifle shot into the state's Depression era will be replaced with a shotgun blast into the whole golden pot.
Instead of vicariously traveling with the Joads on Route 66 to the citrus groves, the council is sponsoring "our state's largest cultural dig," said Jim Quay, its executive director.
To commemorate the launching of hundreds of multimedia events around the state – consult the Web site www.californiastories.org for the huge menu of programs – the council has published an anthology of writers called "California Stories Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century."
While authors you might expect – Steinbeck, Joan Dideon, Maxine Hong Kingston and Robinson Jeffers – are included, hot new voices are being rolled out. Of special interest to San Diegans is an excerpt from "Gangsters We Are All Looking For" by Le Thi Diem Thuy, a writer who grew up in Linda Vista. This collection is a great gift for a bookish California kid.
In a muscular boost to the project's star power, it was announced yesterday that Maria Shriver, California's first lady and wife of the state's most imposing immigrant, is serving as honorary chairwoman.
Which brings us to the first North County event in the California Stories project.
Four student-produced documentaries, which I previewed yesterday, will be aired at Orange Glen High School at 6 p.m. April 8. The focus of the four short films is strictly local:
Escondido's largely overlooked Latino history, a work in progress at the National Latino Research Center at Cal State San Marcos.
The non-Latino stranglehold on political power, despite a Latino population in the city of more than 40 percent.
The obstacles in the education of Latino students, an alarming percentage of whom drop out to seek menial work or to help at home.
The difficulties in obtaining health care when confronted by a language barrier.
All in all, the films are a remarkable accomplishment that, according to Orange Glen faculty sponsor Arturo Cabello, earned an award at a recent Latino film festival.
In "Nuestra Historia," my favorite, archival photographs and interviews tell of a city built in large part with Latino labor and cultural influence.
Bill de la Fuente recalls that what is now the transit center on West Valley Parkway (I look at it out my window) was once the city's migrant camp, a shantytown for the people whose sweat fueled the agricultural economy.
On Cesar Chavez Day, it seems fitting that someday a memorial plaque be erected at the transit center, near the redeveloped downtown.
This sort of flavorful story, uncovered by Orange Glen's earnest students, should be thrown into the melting pot.
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Logan Jenkins can be reached at (760) 737-7555 or by e-mail at logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
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