Whenever I describe California’s Central Valley to people, I stick out my arm and bend it a little into the shape of the state. The elbow is San Francisco, my wrist is Los Angeles, and my wiggling fingers are San Diego. The Central Valley is the forearm, the whole stretch of it. The size seems to surprise people who have never given the Valley much thought. How can a region take up so much space and remain largely unknown?
Geographically, the Valley might be central, but culturally, politically, and even creatively, it is relegated to the margins. The action is in the Bay Area, along the wealthy coastlines, and in the bustle of Los Angeles. Northern California has the mystery and solace of the redwoods, a doorway to the Pacific Northwest. The I-5 is the major road in the Central Valley, but it skirts the western edge, giving an incomplete picture of what is truly there. The real Valley is deeper inside California, along the older Highway 99, starting in Bakersfield and moving up through Delano, Visalia, Fresno, and Merced. A bevy of small, dusty towns pop up among the vineyards and the dirt canals, the Sierra Nevada in looming view over in the east if the skies are clear. But for many state residents, the Valley remains a place to bypass, a region they might not even visit. It becomes difficult to even imagine it.
That might be why, as a writer, I commit the sin of not always starting with character. Place becomes imperative. Like the opening shot of an epic film, the landscape demands attention, with the hope that the more I insist on its reality, the more we might feel kinship with the stories that take place there. The Depression-era itinerant workers of John Steinbeck’s novels, the hardscrabble survivors in Gary Soto’s poems, and the down-on-their-luck fighters in Leonard Gardner’s crumbling Stockton all emerge first from what dominates the Valley: the frighteningly dense Tule fog, the bone-searing summer heat, the fertile soil kicked up into relentless dust, the mind-boggling abundance of fruits and vegetables that feed the rest of the country. The landscape is labor. It might be that in this age of automation, manual labor is so hard for many to conceptualize that we avoid thinking about it altogether. Nature’s generosity of such magnitude requires hands—a lot of them, many more than most people realize. That’s why, in my writing, I start with the fields and the orchards and then populate them with people. I count on a reader to have the empathy to ask where these workers come from. How do they subsist, survive, and abide?
To not know or see a place is to not know or see its people. That remains the paradox of the Central Valley to me. Other parts of the state fix themselves onto the national imagination so easily that a sense of history and transformation springs naturally from their narratives, cycling and rejuvenating them in the process. Hollywood isn’t just Hollywood but the long story of its strivers, its moneymakers, its dreamers, and its rejects, told and retold over years. The Central Valley isn’t lacking a history, but being so out of sight and out of mind, it has become a void to those Californians who do not live there or rarely see it with their own eyes. Hence the precious nature of the Valley’s literature. So rarely does the Valley arrive on the page that the event often can feel like a turning point, a juncture by which more stories will be invited for inclusion. The Valley’s history is, in a sense, only just arriving on the page, and with it, an opportunity and a challenge to those writers who might shape the themes and chronologies that can define what was ignored but, thankfully, never lost.
The people in the Valley’s pages might be unfamiliar, vague, even strange, but they’re alive and brimming with what makes them human. It may be that the Valley’s consistent erasure keeps creating a pressure for us to re-create it in terms that are recognizable to those who are outside it. That would be a mistake. It’s true that there’s always been a here and a there, always aquí y allá. But that doesn’t mean that the center should always be elsewhere. The best writing about the Valley will remind us that it has its own places of reverie, its own locales of renewal, its own sites of potential and restoration. Sometimes, aquí is the entire world one might ever need to know.•
Join us on August 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Helena María Viramontes will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Manuel Muñoz to discuss Under the Feet of Jesus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
