Letter to California

Meditations on your possibilites and your retos

Here’s a picture that is three quarters blue sky with a thin s shaped cloud in the middle. At the bottom of the picture is a wooden pier and the glinting surf. There’s a a bird in midflight and a human in a balloon barely visible below the bird slightly below the middle. The sun’r rays come in from the top left of the picture. I put it here because this is one of the views of the Pacific in California that I associate with openess and possibility.

I’ve been missing you. Not just your Pacific skirts that held me when I most needed to cry. Not just your San Gabriel mountain backs that helped me gather strength when I most wanted to give up. But also the meeting place that brought together native Ohlone, Tongva, Chumash medicines and technologies with the seeds and songs that migrants brought sewn into their huipiles, strung into their prayer beads, painted onto their maracas, etched into their drum skins, patted into their corn masas, strung into their pasteles and tamales, entralazados into their lyrics, poems, chistes and speech or like me in my treasured books I carted across the country from the Bronx to scaffold my existence in a country that I was born in but that did not feel mine.

How we got here is brutal: colonization, enslavement, exploitation. Military interventions and economic exploitation making it impossible to stay home and pulling us into the centrifuge. Multiple violations that continue to cut us into pieces.

Side by side, co-existing. And you, California, a site of possibility.

And in April 2022, I had to leave you.

I’ve prayed under your redwoods, danced rumba in your uppermost coast, taken pictures in your old towns enraged, skin erizada, by the forced labor that constructed the mission walls. There’s a lot to consider as I leave you-I’ve known so much of you but in reality so little. There is so much yet to know.