Review of West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State

West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
by Mark Arax
Public Affairs: 350 pp., $26.95

It’s coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst.

“Democracy,” Leonard Cohen

As America is to the world, so is California to America. If you’re looking for the greatest opportunities and the biggest dreams – along with the biggest absurdities and the greatest atrocities – well, you go to the U.S. of A. And if you’re already there, in one of the other forty-nine states, why then, you go west. Or, more precisely, as author Mark Arax notes, you go west of the West which is where Teddy Roosevelt said he felt he was when he was in California. You might say that California is America to the next degree – America squared.

Much of the rest of the country’s knowledge of the Golden State is limited to the Pacific Coast from San Francisco down to Los Angeles or maybe San Diego. Not that this doesn’t encompass a lot – this 550 mile stretch includes the country’s largest county, Los Angeles (whose nearly ten million population almost doubles that of runner-up Cook County, Illinois) along with four of America’s thirteen most populous cities. Arax wrote for the Los Angeles Times for twenty-seven years, so his new collection of essays, “West of the West” does cover this well known California, but ultimately he is not of it and his writing on it is not his best work.

“Eyre of the Storm,” for instance, is a bit of stereotyped mockery of the “far out” Bay Area that covers “Naked Day” in Berkeley, a convention of conspiracy theorists, and an old family friend in Berkeley who is “a believer in UFOs and past lives,” including her own past life as Mary Magdalene. Arax ends the piece lamenting the decline of meaningful political activism and “[t]he social transformation of San Francisco and Berkeley, its iconic foot bath and organic tampon self-absorption, [and] the inexhaustible consumption made possible by the ascent of the silicon chip.”

Unfortunately he appears not to have examined much past his preconceptions, otherwise he would have found a left wing majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actively involved in creating programs like a municipal minimum wage, maintaining rent control, and generally grappling with the problem of ensuring that the city’s working class and poor population is not swept away by the waves of wealth washing up from Silicon Valley. And quality aromatherapy is not high on their agenda.

Arax himself originally hails from Fresno, whose population of nearly half a million makes it California’s largest city not bordering on the Pacific Ocean — in other words, California’s largest unknown city. “If you want to see concentrated poverty,” he writes, “unlike any other city – Fresno number one, New Orleans number two – or witness the nation’s highest per capita IV drug use, come to our inner city.”
And it is in his reporting on the unknown California that Arax shines. As the state’s banks repossessed $100 billion worth of houses over a two-year period – 1,300 houses emptying each business day – he tells us that no area was hit harder than the Central Valley where Kern County had become so pro-growth that it abolished its planning commission, helping to make “Bakersfield, the most sprawled city in the West.”

Leading up to the crash, “[f]or every dollar the boom was generating,” he writes, “cities were spending roughly two dollars to provide streets and sewers and cops to serve the new suburbs. … When the city’s [Fresno’s] own economic impact studies began showing that each housing tract was putting Fresno deeper in the red, Mayor Jim Patterson stepped in. The city, he said, could no longer afford to do economic analysis.”

But the best parts of “West of the West” concern California agriculture – and its amazing extremes. “The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman” is a story of migrant farmworkers. Now, most of America thinks it already knows that one; after all, United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez has even had his own postage stamp. But these are not Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers. Today one out of every five farmworkers in the Valley – 75,000 – are Mixtec Indians who have left behind villages in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla now largely depleted of working-age men. Their children often struggle in California schools not just because they don’t speak English, but because they don’t speak Spanish either, but rather Mixtec languages such as Triqui.

Arax rides a farmworker bus headed to the raisin fields filled with speakers of six indigenous languages. “They had left villages of slash-and-burn farming for the most technologically advanced agriculture in the world,” he writes, and yet “the work could not have been more primitive.” He found the fastest pickers earning between $10 and $12 an hour; they might make $10,000-12,000 in a summer. The slowest “were not even making $30 a day – somewhere between $2 and $3 an hour.” He concludes that “[w]e are more than happy to buy a bag of plums for the same $5 we paid in the 1990s but give no thought as to how that trickles down to the farmer and his field hand.”

“Highlands of Humboldt” covers the other end of California agriculture – geographically and economically. Arax visits a plot where no one earns “less than $40 an hour, likely the highest piece rate in all of American agriculture.” These farmworkers harvest marijuana, “the biggest single cash crop in all of California, dwarfing the $10 billion a year agricultural bounty of Fresno and Kern – the number one and two farm counties in the country.” In the geographic top of California – 7,081 square miles, 215,000 people, 85 percent of them white – “nearly every standing thing in a two-hundred-mile stretch from Ukiah to McKinleyville … was almost wholly reliant on the unfettered cultivation of marijuana.”

Although the marijuana-growing “Emerald Triangle” pre-existed it, the 1996 passage of Proposition 215, the state’s medical marijuana law, took the industry to a whole other level as it made it quasi-legal. That is to say, legal – with certain restrictions – under state law, but still illegal under federal law. And about once a decade the feds will attempt to assert themselves as they did on June 24, 2008 “when residents awoke to a convoy of 450 federal, state, and local police – cars, trucks, all-terrain vehicles, three-wheelers, a mobile communications center, portable toilets – roaring up the hillside” to raid the fields and grow houses.

Meanwhile, the Emerald Triangle has become home to a cultural divide that few outsiders would conceive of. Arax attends a community meeting, complete with a professional facilitator, called to discuss the problems of “diesel dope” in the Humboldt County town of Garberville. As a grower from Mendocino County to the south had told him, “Weed is a spiritual experience here. We grow it in a sustainable way. We grow it in the backyards using the sun. [In Humboldt t]hey build these huge indoor grow houses and use diesel generators to keep the lights burning.” With the estimated seventy-five gallons of fuel needed to produce one pound of indoor pot being about what an average car burns in a trip from California to Texas, bumper stickers have begun to appear that read: “Diesel Dope: Pollution Pot.”

The Humboldt “rasta rednecks,” as Arax dubs them, are “hill people, the sons and daughters of the old lumbermen and fishermen” whose industries have died out. And he notes that some chapters of the county’s history are of the sort that the nation prefers to speed read through; In 1854, four years after California’s admission to the Union, the Sinkyone, Yurok, and Karok Indians of Humboldt had not seen a white man; ten years later their societies had been destroyed by them. An early edition of the Humboldt Times describes “the red-skin scourge that has long been preying upon their [the colonists’] lives and property.” Arax describes a massacre of three hundred natives, driven by “the calculus that for every white man killed by an Indian, 150 Indians needed to die in return.” (A cynic might note a similarity to the nation’s post-9/11 policy in regard to Muslim nations.)

Where California goes from here is an ever-fascinating question. Just the other day a University of Southern California study reported that for the first time in its history, a majority of the state’s residents were born and raised there. Meanwhile, renewed efforts to cover farmworkers under federal labor law and to legalize and tax marijuana for general use have surfaced. For now, if you want to catch up on a few developments in the state that so often seems home to what is best and what is worst in America, Arax’s book is a good place to start.