California has inspired the works of acclaimed writers John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Isabel Allende, and Joan Didion. Now, a just-published book features a new generation of creatives ready to tell the state’s ongoing story.
“Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California” invites 24 authors to recount their lived experiences, including subjects of race, class and disability, that tell a broader history of the state. Each author’s contribution provides a unique perspective that pushes beyond the stereotypical sunny skies, beaches and palm trees of one of the most populous states in the union. Essays such as Wendy Cheng’s “In Rancho Santa Fe, We Were Orientals” explore how the state’s handling of immigration shapes complicated childhood feelings of home and belonging. David Helps’ “In the Rubble: Picturing LA’s Housing Crisis” examines how the war on drugs accelerated Los Angeles’ housing crises, with Black and Brown residents suffering the brunt of its policies.
The book, released Aug. 20, was edited by Samine Joudat, Carribean Fragoza and Romeo Guzmán, both of who are co-directors of South El Monte Art Posse, a collective of artists, writers, urban planners, educators, scholars, farmers, ecologists and swap meet vendors. Their collective mission is to engage with the community through the arts and rethink how each person inhabits space. The editors put this foundational philosophy into practice during an open call to writers.
“One of our goals was to provide a venue for writers that we know, but also writers that are emerging and are having a hard time pitching or getting their pieces accepted, and providing them a safe space to offer editing that guides them through the process,” Guzmán said in a recent Zoom call. “One of the greatest things about editing this book was that we had pitches from folks we didn’t know, particularly young writers, and we could work with them to publish the pieces. It’s also pretty mixed in terms of disciplines. There are a few academics here, so I think it also provided a space for them to write in a genre that may be new to them. We are very much committed to providing spaces for folks to experiment.”
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Guzmán is an assistant professor of U.S. history at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, specializing in “Chicano history,” Mexican migration, and California. He also taught fourth-grade teachers in Fresno how to teach California history to their students and framed the lessons by exploring fundamental questions such as: What is California, and what makes it unique?
He said there are many frameworks to try and answer questions about the state’s identity. The most prominent are often ceased by politicians who paint the state as nearing a dystopia or a utopia. Views like these often come from lived experiences, and with the state being so diverse and populous, there is a vast spectrum of experiences. This book seeks to increase the visibility of those marginalized histories and how they fit into the future.
“What was beautiful about the essays is that while some of them hold on to the (vision of what California could be), more of them are concerned with building that and have a very realistic approach about what California is,” Guzmán said. “There was a beauty of seeing folks struggling to build a home here but building it nonetheless. The question of, ‘What is home? Can you stay in your home?’ was a nice through line that perhaps we didn’t expect to see so prevalent, but it’s there.”
Guzmán’s lived experiences have shaped his story and how it relates to California’s, a state that has seen an influx of migrant workers from several parts of the world over its existence. He was born in Goleta, California, to migrant parents from Guadalajara and grew up in Pomona but frequently visited El Monte and South El Monte for family parties.
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“I have an emotional attachment to different places and locations that remind me of different things,” he said. “I can map my life onto a personal place, but that doesn’t have this deep knowledge that expands generations. Another big inspiration was to think about what it means to tell firsthand narratives about a place that’s personal and deeply connected to bodies of knowledge and all their forms. Some of the essays at their best have this intimate and personal relationship with those places.”
One of the most powerful pieces includes author Peter Sebastian Chesney’s “Good Vibrations From California’s Deaf Geographies,” which delves into the state’s history of its deaf population. The essay spans from the late 1890s and includes how deaf people struggled to access education at the turn of the 20th century. It further examines how deafness intersected with the Black Lives Matter Movement, and The Beach Boys. For studied California historians, such as Guzmán, these stories were a reminder of all that there is left to learn for everyone, whether they study history or not.
“These authors take us on these journeys to these different places and places that in some cases we think we know, but they’re led from an author’s perspective, and they illuminate things that we didn’t know about it,” he said. “The book for us was also about learning about California and made the editing process so enjoyable.”
When: 4-6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28.
Where: Matilija Lending Library, 3571 Lexington Ave., El Monte.
Info: matilijabooks.org.
