Where Things Can Happen: California and Writing
1999; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1999.0088
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
Resumo1 5 0 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) SUMMER 1 9 9 9 now “glocal,” that is, there are many, many disparate cultures, from all over the planet (“glo-”), and they are set down intact, locally (“-cal”). Black, Chicano/Latin American, Hmong, Viet, Korean, Russian diasporas . There is little cross-fertilization as yet. Simultaneous, alternate realities that interpenetrate only during and after disaster. Humanity may be won from pain and loss. Nothing new here. Old Los Angeles of the 1920-40 boom grew from 2 Anglo diasporas/hegiras from the Midwest: (1) the Okies hung a right, north to Bakersfield (see the Joads, Grapes of Wrath); (2) those from Iowa with a little cash or a pension— one rung up— stayed in sunny LA (see Homer Simpson, Day of the Locust). More of the same pattern, at greater tempo, with complex variation. Los Angeles is our immediate present and your future— the Capi tal of the Californias, with all the hope and grandeur of Brazilia. Watch these literary names for a work near you: Carolyn See, Cynthia Kadohata, Wanda Coleman, Jervy Tervalon, Yxta Mae Murray, Lucha Corpi, Susan Straight, Steve Erickson, Hector Tobar, Walter Mosley, Kem Nunn, Danny Santiago, Kate Braverman, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, D. J. Waldie, and many, many more. WELCOME! " I ^ J a c k Hicks is Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis, where he founded and runs “The Art of the Wild,” an annual Lake Tahoe summer conference in writing with nature and wilder ness. With James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kigston, and Al Young, he is coeditor of the forthcoming The Literature of California. W h e r e T h i n g s C a n H a p p e n : C a l i f o r n i a a n d W r i t i n g L o u i s O w e n s Here in this pinon-juniper crease of the Manzano Mountains in New Mexico, where I’ve lived now off and on for 15 years, I consider myself a California writer, expatriate. I was born in a federal prison hospital near Lompoc, California, reared from age 7 on in the bean fields and beet fields and tomato fields and chicken and cattle ranches of the Salinas Valley, in a farmworkers’ tent encampment on the outskirts of Delano with 8 brothers and sisters, in the county housing project in Paso Robles along the central coast. I gleaned C a l i f o r n i a D r e a m i n g Tom Craig (1909-1969). INTO THE SUN. Ca. 1933. Oil on canvas. 30" x 35". The Buck Collection, Laguna Hills, California. • Bom and raised in Cali fornia, Craig focused on California landscapes and painted watercolors for Life. potatoes in fields near Shafter and spent part of one summer in a bracero camp on the edge of Merced, picking green tomatoes and worrying about the racist citizens of Merced burning our camp out, which in fact they tried to do. I worked graveyard shift for United Can Company in the Bay Area. Built fences, bucked hay, castrated and branded cattle, inoculated turkeys. Fought forest fires on a hotshot crew up and down the Sierra Nevada. Thinned timber for the U S Forest Service. Ran the marina in the Santa Lucia mountains as a sunburned teen. Measured the tide and berm crest as a seasonal park ranger at San Simeon, south of Big Sur. Remodeled homes as a construction worker in the posh parts of Santa Barbara. Attended junior college near San Luis Obispo and then the University of Cali fornia at Santa Barbara and Davis. Taught as a professor of English at Cal State Northridge and U C Santa Cruz. I love California and cannot grasp it even from afar. Try to wrap your thoughts around California and it slips away. Into those high 1 5 2 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) SUMMER 1 9 9 9 cloud banks that hover off Big Sur, the tule fogs that drift up the San Joaquin, the redwood shadows and deep rains of the North and blind...
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