Online NewsHour: Essay: California Dreamin' -- February 5, 2001



	CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

	February 5, 2001
	Essayist Richard Rodriguez considers the California energy crisis.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: California and New York: Surely there are no more self-dramatizing regions of this nation, the yin and yang of America. And yet it's worth noting that while New York loves to see itself in concrete and steel, California is fascinated by its insubstantiality, appropriate to a dreamscape.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has assembled a mammoth exhibit on California in the 20th century. From beginning to end, one is struck by wry images of destruction, from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake to the post-modern suburb in flames, or the broken freeway, or the carnivorous earth-- all the work of humans undone. A special poignancy thus attaches to the vacant California landscape, whether of poppy fields or mountains or seashore.

Here is California as only the Indians knew it, before millions of others of us came to make California the largest state in the union by mid-century. Early railroad posters-- the New York Central, the Santa Fe-- advertised California as a state of leisure, but the Joad Family, the Okies who came in the '30s, saw California as a job. California became both-- and more than both.

Here was a place that experimented with nakedness, and a place where Mexican kids would cross over a dangerous border to get a prosaic job. Only in one respect do I disagree with the curators of this exhibition -- to call their show "made in California" is to miss the larger point. California was invented elsewhere and brought here, across the Pacific, over the Sierra, across the desert. California was invented in China.

Hollywood was invented on the steps of a Brooklyn brownstone. After all, the famous Californians, the archetypal Californians, are from far away-- Walt Disney, Lucille Ball, Jonas Salk. Most of the famous painters of California were also not native-born, which is perhaps why an eerie vacancy often attaches to their vision of this place: English-born David Hockney's swimming pool; Oklahoma-born Edward Ruscha's Hollywood sign; Oregon-born Richard Diebenkorn's empty freeway.

From the meeting of so many singular dreams, tragedy often resulted. The Chinese were persecuted in California for coming at America from the wrong side; thus, too, were Japanese Americans rounded up by their fellow Americans during World War II as likely subversives. During the Depression, working men marched up the streets of California, even while Hollywood's factories invented glamorous dreams.

Under a cloudless sky, watts would burn three decades later, and later still, California would see the largest race riot in American history on a spring afternoon. My California is forever post- war California, the '50s. Young men who had seen terrible tragedy wanted the relief of California and the assurance of the warm winter sun; the great valleys filled with monotonous tract houses, but each house was filled as the freeways were crowded with dreams. On the other side of America, New York would always see itself as soaring, romantic skyscrapers.

By contrast, California invented the horizontal city, where Marlene Dietrich lived just down Sunset Boulevard from surfers in one direction and from Chinatown in the other. Recently, non-white minorities became the new majority of California. Better said, there is no majority in California-- never has been, not really. I grew up listening to my Mexican father describe California as el norte, even while the lady next door from Minnesota insisted we lived in the West.

Here was a place where the beatniks called the Pacific Coast highway the "end of the road," even while the Chinese were describing this coastline as the beginning of America. In 20th-century California, separate dreams were constructed side by side, as at Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom, where Tomorrowland was right next door to Frontierland. Disharmony became California's theme and our humor. In this new century, our separate dreams are sliding together. The surfer grows up knowing, without having to learn, chopsticks and Spanish, and the Korean diner on Whittier Boulevard serves tofu burritos. I'm Richard Rodriguez.

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