Indigenous: Growing Up Californian: The introduction

Displaced

By Cris Mazza

On a snowy January evening in Elmhurst, a far western suburb of Chicago, I watched an A&E documentary called California and the Dream Seekers. But I didn’t need to be reminded that the world reflects on California from the perspective of those who yearned to be there. California’s history is a linear succession of great migrations: conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries, gold-rush prospectors, Chinese laborers escaping their country’s exhausted resources, midwestern dust bowl farmers fleeing both environmental and financial ruin, movie star pipe-dreamers, and contemporary migrant agricultural workers. The state’s growth into a region with the world’s eighth largest economy is credited to those and other pilgrim castle-builders who came to it as a place of unbounded possibilities. Over nearly a century and a half, hundreds of thousands of people elected to turn toward California for what they wanted or who they aspired to be.

But what of those who were born there? Jostling for space with the transplants and snowbirds and immigrants and “zonies” (a special word for those escaping Arizona’s heat), we haven’t really known a wow-look-where-I-am wonderment, an I’m-lucky-to-be-here glow. We’re there because we’ve always been there. Media’s depiction of the place may engulf or dupe us; but for many natives, it does not. We scoff at, even rebel against the notion of California as land of the ocean-view condo, land of the forever-young Coppertone beachbaby, land of the year-round after-work buffed-out executive surfer, land of the sunglassed convertible-driving blond aerobics instructor, land of the cult-of-the-month, of palm-treed boulevards made just for rollerbladers, of psychedelic black-lit drug parties begun in the 60’s that have never ended, of drive-in churches and drive-through espresso bars, of crystalline blue cloudless skies sailed everlastingly by a hang-glider (and his dog), a vegetation restaurant on every block, a guru on every corner, a Lana Turner on every drugstore stool. But if we didn’t choose this enchanted place to live out or chase our visions, if we are a generation or two removed from those that dared to hunt a dream, does it mean we don’t dream? Or don’t have the same quality of dream? Or don’t have the same fortitude because we’re not required to uproot and resettle in this unique region in order to help make our dreams possible? Does it mean California, either the real or the fanciful, doesn’t influence or put its distinct mythic stamp on our dreams — and on who we become?

In August 1993, a moving van left a small postwar slab house in East San Diego, followed by my white Mazda pick-up, its aluminum shell packed to the roof. I was moving to Illinois. My fourth book of fiction had just been released and I’d accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

I’d left California before, always for temporary stints, for a second graduate degree in Brooklyn, as a writer-in-residence in Tennessee and then Pennsylvania. At one time the reasons for these ventures, including the latest, had caused a bitter sentiment for my own state: Off to Brooklyn because, advisors told me, I couldn’t be well-rounded if my education was concentrated in Southern California. To Tennessee and Pennsylvania and now Illinois because California had become so accustomed to being the aspired-for destination of so many, the state had developed a sweeping attitude that jobs could be filled with the highest caliber candidate only when not filled by a native. “No Man can be a prophet in his own land,” someone advised, and it seemed especially true of California. It looked as if one had to either be educated elsewhere and/or gain experience elsewhere before expecting to come home and be given credit for accomplishments. Or just go elsewhere. Southern California and San Diego in particular — beneficiaries (or victims) of a literal flood of “new blood” that hasn’t abated since the Depression — didn’t give me a second look. There were so many exotic non-locals to choose from! But should my bitterness have been aimed at California, or the people who’d moved there then turned it into their icon of Land of Banished Free-Thinkers-From-Elsewhere? Wasn’t there another California that had, after all, given me a more subtle and priceless endowment?

Free-thinkers-from-elsewhere. Hadn’t another population of indigenous people endured this kind of guest (who never went home)? I recall hearing of the Native Americans who once populated San Diego County as culturally uninspiring, “merely” nomadic gatherers without the imagination of more sublime native peoples who built pueblos or hunted bison. Was a new breed of “natives” now doomed to carry this mantle as well — had each passing generation’s energy and hope and inspiration somehow been diluted? I don’t know how this perception of the original people of California came about, but I can guess: It seemed the natives docilely accepted the new order imposed by Franciscan missionaries, became virtual slaves in the mission compounds, and, except for minor uprisings and skirmishes, were basically easily subjugated. Simply put, the native people didn’t have an organized enough society to wage a war. Thus they have been generally regarded as fundamentally uninteresting, and were even classified as such by European anthropologists of the era.

When I arrived at Brooklyn College in the early 80’s, a fellow student, upon hearing I was from California, responded: “Oh, California? Isn’t everything really laid back there?”

Laid back? Oh course I’d heard the term. But had never been asked to apply it to myself or my experience, or even to give a particular example of its manifestation. Laid back: chill-out, mellow-out, everything’s-cool, go-with-the-flow, whatever-makes-you-happy, have-a-nice-day, find-yourself, get-in-touch-with-the-inner-child, take-it-easy, I’d-rather-be-surfing, hey-dude-whatever. Did my life fit on a bumper-sticker? Was it laid-back to plug my ears during the detonation of the shotgun but keep my eyes trained on the falling bird so I could retrieve it, decapitate and drain the blood? To take away the hammer and hand my father the knife after he’d cracked a rabbit’s skull? To throw not just balls, but sticks by the thousands and even rocks into the tumbleweedy, foxtail-filled canyon to be retrieved by a pedigreed dog whose ancestors had strutted in dog show rings? To spend teenaged afternoons marching with a trombone under an oppressive glare of sunshine, and spend teenaged weekends doing the same in full dress wool uniform being judged on musical and military precision? To participate in family outings gathering the rejects of a farmer’s harvest that’s been dumped behind the trucking docks? To earn minimum wage spoonfeeding pureed spinach into a profoundly handicapped imbecile’s mouth after you’ve changed his diapers? To hike miles up and down a Sierra creekbed with a rod and reel, engrossed body-and-mind solely in a contest with wily native trout? To watch one’s husband, dressed in white tie and black tails, pace in a picket line outside Symphony Hall? To see the clear ripples of heat in the air, watch the rain of ashes and stand in the current of fleeing grasshoppers as the yearly brushfire thunders up the hill toward our property line? To have one’s grandmother drown in a swimming pool? To sit like a stone during sex therapy while a charlatan pigeonholes you as a puritan? To time and again attempt to make pets of lizards, crawdads, snakes, frogs, tortoises, horned toads, and other indigenous things that slithered through seasonal run-off creeks or crawled through the brush of the arid coastal scrub which the rest of the world doesn’t seem to know isn’t a lush, palm-treed tropical paradise?

I was, at first, dismayed that my state-citizenship had been called to the test, and that I would fail, right out of the gate, to really be what the world seemed to hold so dear: a Californian.

I would evolve to realize that my non laid-back experience has, in fact, been a variation of — my particular rendition of — the real thing.

During the 1998 World Series between San Diego and New York, the predictable scorn reined forth from the “superior” metropolis toward the one on the West Coast. New York newspaper columnists alleged that San Diego has no image and has nothing to offer but weather. They claimed that everyone except New Yorkers shops only in malls and considers Denny’s to be fine dining, that everyone except New Yorkers smiles too much, and that San Diego doesn’t even have enough infamy to make the city interesting or the citizens “smart.” At once boasting of New York’s diversity then slamming a place that chooses to neither compete with nor emulate it. One columnist spoke of our jealousy that we don’t live in New York. Don’t bullies pick on other kids because they themselves feel uncertain? Would a truly superior place speak with such venom against another if it didn’t feel some insecurity?

Moving to Chicago in 1993, I was not-too-obliquely informed that displaced Californians are presumed to be ashamed of where we’ve come from, and should only admit to missing the weather. During my interview, I was asked if I would “be able to” leave San Diego’s weather. Eight months later, at a department reception during the first week of my first semester in Chicago, a senior member of my department sidled up to me to make introductory small-talk. She politely asked where I’d chosen to live. With only slightly guarded verve, I informed her I’d found a one-bedroom cottage with a big yard in Elmhurst, eighteen miles west of the loop.

“Why there?” she responded, not bothering or unable to conceal her disgust, “there’s nothing there you couldn’t find in Southern California.”

Ouch ... in one breath she’d cast aspersions on not only where I’m now living but where I came from as well. Long after my stammered response (something about my dogs needing space), I realized that this person, who obviously had the stock intellectual’s intolerant view of Chicago’s suburbs, had an even dimmer stereotyped opinion of Southern California. Looking askance at the suburbs might come naturally for an academic in Chicago, but where might her view of California have come from? What sources are there except inane TV shows, magazines and slick popular novels that depict Southern California as either a witless wasteland, or a vast tract of bland white middle-class with no deeper thought than what color stucco should houses in the community be made of, and no nobler pursuit than getting a tan during lunch hours? If this college professor seemed to actually hold pop-media’s shallow view, what does it reveal about her and all the tens of thousands like her: what must she have been reading or watching in order to develop such a view?

This attitude continues to be displayed in my presence. At a meeting where the business at hand was devising a flier to promote the department, someone described a circular they’d received from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Not only was it a slick, four-color brochure, but it dared to contain photographs of the coast. This information immediately won scoffs and laughter from several of the professors around the table, as well as a comment that Santa Barbara’s faculty was likely out surfing. Our discussion, meanwhile, had determined that our brochure should show some kind of cityscape, to promote the fact that the university is in Chicago. There is no doubt that the city of Chicago with all its resources is one of the advantages of an education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But why is admitting (or promoting) that your university exists in a coastal landscape automatically denotative of low intellect while a cityscape is indicative of important serious thought? Perhaps we should consider that the existence of the coastline so near the University of California speaks highly of its scholars’ intellectual abilities, if they don’t need to be locked inside a winter-bound city of concrete, steel and glass in order to produce music, art, literature, scientific breakthroughs or academic research of the same caliber as work completed in Chicago.

What indeed does Southern California possess that either isn’t found in greater Chicago and/or could be worthy of notice by an educated person — and could I possibly miss anything other than the weather? That’s how shallow Californians presumably are: oh, dude, where’s my sunshine? So I must be just slightly more profound than that mythical Californian. Among the things I miss are canyons, hills, bluffs, and mountains, a soft tawny color most of the year, until days after a rainfall when a tint of fuzzy green begins to pervade, then overwhelms the brown. I miss the sharp scent and graceful silhouette of eucalyptus trees and the midnight caterwaul of a coyote pack making a kill. I miss ranch houses with walls of picture windows overlooking valleys or canyons or with views of hazy hills. I miss college campuses and museums built in red-roofed Spanish style architecture, the dry furor of Santa Ana winds, and the zinging white streak over green grass of another Tony Gwynn opposite-field single.

Of course I love my home state. But I love a different state than the image-hologramed place I left. And a different state than the one now being covered on every available flat place, and some not-so flat, with big boxy houses, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, or condos crusted like barnacles on sandstone bluffs. My feelings are for the state whose indigenous people were “a disappointment” because they didn’t declare war over proprietorship of the fragile yet durable landscape. The state where you might have to go outside to get warm in December because the night’s chill has refrigerated little slab houses without central heat. A state whose seasons are named fire and rain. The state in which there are parcels of land that were originally a “throw in” free offer for anyone who bought a dictionary or encyclopedia from a Depression-era door-to-door salesman somewhere in the East. A place where the real value is a little harder to see.

A&E’s California and the Dream Seekers said California is best represented and characterized by visionaries who had the boldness, vigor and imagination to pioneer what would become great industries, great movements, great development, or just greatness. But that idea only seems to consider what it meant, fifty to two-hundred years ago, to become a Californian or for California to become what the world thinks it is. And, of course, there’s even a substantial amount of truth — truth that admittedly feels good — in the observation that no other place on earth has inspired so many different migrations of people seeking a better life. So maybe there’s something to the Conquistador legend that said there was no other alloy there but gold.

For those of us who didn’t have to become but are, understanding the state is not a task of expressing enough aggrandizement, but of locating the words at all, a delicate endeavor to extract the state we know from the romance and hoopla. Perhaps the indigenous people, overwhelmed with the pomposity of the Spanish explorers and missionaries, would agree.

I can’t begrudge California to those who sought it as a source of hope, as the last romance of the last western frontier, or simply for its unrivaled resources from agriculture to precious metals to recreation. After all, if my parents hadn’t come — one with a family reeling from the Depression, the other as a implicit gesture of post war personal independence for women — I wouldn’t have been one of the fortunate, one of the upshots of someone’s flight of fancy: to be born there.

But like those who have left hometowns and home-states and now call themselves Californians — those who sit in the stadium in San Diego and cheer for the Chicago Cubs or New York Mets; those who dock their sailboats at Quivera Basin, De Anza Cove or Shelter Island and send yearly contributions to orchestras or museums back east, tsk-tsking the bankruptcy of the symphony in San Diego — like their life-long allegiances to other “more worthy” places, no matter where else I am, I’ll not ever not be a Californian.

Excerpted with permission from Indigenous: Growing up Californian (City Lights Publishing/2003)

The writer: A native of Southern California, Cris Mazza grew up in San Diego County. She completed her BA and MA at San Diego State University, then crossed the country to finish an MFA in writing at Brooklyn College before returning to San Diego where she lived several years training and showing her dogs, completing her first four books, and teaching at various local colleges and universities. Indigenous: Growing Up Californian was released in May 2003 from City Lights Press. Homeland, a novel set in San Diego County, will follow in 2004. Her other titles include Girl Beside Him, Dog People, How to Leave a Country, and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She also is co-editor of Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction (1995), and Chick-Lit 2 (No Chick Vics) (1996), anthologies of women's fiction. Mazza is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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