Orange County in Writing the Golden State

Orange County is just like the rest of California – and entirely different. We are unique and we fit into patterns, so the more carefully we observe the whole state, the better we can understand our own space. I don’t mean the sort of observations offered by Disney’s “Soarin’ Over California” ride, signifying the state with the Golden Gate Bridge, Half Dome, Napa Valley, then San Diego Harbor, each reified icon reproduced into meaninglessness, sold to tourists who want to believe each region is separate and quickly knowable. I mean deeper observations such as the new anthology Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California.

Editors Romeo Guzman, Carribean Fragoza, and Sarmine Joudat declare in their introduction that this anthology foregoes cliched promises of the California dream in favor of ground-level considerations of communities with conflicts over displacement and belonging: “a California not often portrayed on the Hollywood screen… a taste of California that is deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal… [with] fig trees, war, pogroms, punk shows, block parties, and immigrants refusing to conform to lesser-than subjectivities.” It’s as different from “Soarin’ Over California” as it is possible to be. It’s us.

Each essay is a postcard, originating with the “Postcards” series in the erstwhile journal Boom California, with insights about home, ecology, memory, alienation, and the ordinary extraordinary spaces that shape life in California. Vibrantly illustrated with original drawings by Fernando Mendez Corona, this book chronicles specific places that echo in many spaces.

 “In Rancho Santa Fe, We Were Orientals,” Wendy Cheng recalls growing up in one of San Diego’s elite suburbs: “As in so many places, the land tells the history. But we couldn’t see—didn’t know—the Native people, the colonizers, the pros­elytizers, the developers, and the workers who had made it so…” Because Cheng has now learned to see and know those forces, this book helps us to also see the personal impact of historic landscape politics. Grief, joy, borders, militarization, colonialism, real estate capital, community, diaspora, automation, fires, fault lines, erasure, family, and solidarity: all those forces become visible in these postcards that are both academic and literary. Some of the authors are already famous chroniclers of southern California, including Wendy Cheng, Myriam Gurba, and David Ulin – but most are lesser-known voices, sparkling, specific, insightful.

Learning to question the previously taken-for-granted airplanes booming overhead, searching for a sense of home in suburbia, following LA’s garbage to where it burns next to migratory farm workers who have high rates of asthma: these stories are particular, and they resonate with Orange County stories. If you’ve ever discovered surprising foods on the shelves of an unassuming convenience store, struggled with the ethics of your local real estate market, or attended a punk show in an unpretentious place, then you will understand what I mean. I myself have an essay here about trespassing in order to walk my dog in the privatized Home-Owner Associations of San Diego County, HOAs that I understand because of researching the history of HOAs in Orange County. As Jennifer Carr writes about hearing the memories of others who labor on the Los Angeles waterfront: “this worked as a different kind of neural network, the individual stories binding us all in one greater story.”

Listen to Annabelle Long’s description of Berkeley: “The earliest outside settlers built their homes along creeks, which they eventually paved over and largely erased from maps. On rainy days, the creeks try to make themselves known again.” That describes Orange County too, especially when Long adds, “The cliché goes that history repeats itself, but it feels more accurate to say that history overlaps with itself, that it builds on top of itself and erases itself and reveals itself again.”  

Or, as Marco Vera explains in “Memories of my Tata’s Frutería,” “There are landmarks that serve as living documents, testaments to when you and I were unstable and precarious. We’ve all driven past them after years of public transport to fall back in love with ourselves. My tata’s frutería was one of those chaotic commerce places that you could say was such without having to face your own mess at home. There’s one like it in your town.”

There’s an essay like home here for you, too, if you’re lucky. It’s a remarkable anthology.

Elaine Lewinnek is professor of American Studies and chair of the Environmental Studies program at California State University Fullerton. She is co-author of A People's Guide to Orange County and also author of The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl.  Her essay, "Park Place Material: Privatization, Homeowners Associations, and My Dog," appears in Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California.