The drive from Los Angeles to Fresno is one that some people would rather close their eyes and sleep through. Once you cross the Grapevine into the Central Valley, the road becomes mesmerizing, monotonous, and flat. A straight line for miles with orchards, vineyards, corralled cattle, eucalyptus trees, oleander bushes, big rigs, and boring beige box stores. Maybe you’ve read a romanticized description of it before in some long essay. Big-city people get all romantic when they pass through. Time moves slowly in the Valley, and that hits travelers hard as they drive the 99. They realize after miles and miles that the road is the same, and it feels like they’re going nowhere. For me, I feel like I’m in a time machine. I travel alongside past and future versions of myself and generations of ancestors. Our stories of movement and labor appear to me mile after mile along the road.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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THE BACKBONE
This is the part where people get sleepy, or maybe dissociate. And if it looks all the same to you, that’s because you’re looking straight down the road. There are movements and histories merging with the traffic.
ROADSIDE EATS
A darling of global produce exportation, the Valley also provides up to 40 percent of the nation’s fruits. You’d think we’d eat healthier because of that. But this is California, and we love a good pastrami cheeseburger.
AGRICULTURE
An orchard in Delano.
The architecture for liberation that was built in the Central Valley’s fields by the Filipino and Chicano farmworkers of the 1960s still stands strong. The view from the roadside reminds us of their power in the labor movement and the racial solidarity it took to establish the United Farm Workers union.
BEFORE I-5
Cyclists on the Old Road in Castaic.
There once were 347 curves on the Old Road. My grandpa, the youngest in his family, said they would strap him to the sideboard of their Model T whenever they’d cross between the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains in the 1920s. “I was the littlest one!” he told me. It could be true.
DREAM PALACE
The Valley sun soaks the brightness out of paint. Or maybe sun-faded is just the color of the Valley. Sun-faded is definitely the color of time. This theater was already faded pink, blue, and beige when I was a kid in the 1980s. I’d watch people coming in and out of it in the afternoons from behind the dark-tinted windows of the Fresno Learning Center, across the street. My grandma would bring me to work with her there, and the theater was the last thing I’d see before I fell asleep slumped in a vinyl lounge chair.
WATER FOR WORKERS
Grape workers Robert and Ruby in Delano.
The whole Valley is a workplace. Inside, outside, on the streets, and in parking lots just like in a crowded city but also beyond all that into big-sky spaces. Workers’ cars line up along the edges of the fields in the mornings, two car lanes away from the highway. A big water cooler is usually perched on somebody’s tailgate. It’s there by state regulation to prevent heat-related illness.
HEARTFELT CRAFTS
Bead Central in Selma.
The senior citizens at the Fresno Learning Center included Chinese immigrants, Dust Bowl settlers, and generations-deep Black and Chicana west-siders. They’d assemble quilts, paint wooden crafts, and make jewelry to sell in the gift shop at the entryway. Their crafting supplies radiated with potential.
LIFE LINES
Madam Sophia on Highway 99 in Fowler.
I’ve traveled these roads my entire life. At this point, it isn’t a road trip anymore. There’s ritual to it. Stories and histories to remember along the way. Well-worn passages. Landmarks tell me where I am and remind me where I’m coming from. There’s a mysticism about it, and it’s personal to each of us travelers.
IN TRIBUTE
Roadside memorial in Selma.
The route from L.A. to Fresno keeps me close to my family, our stories and our culture. The road will never let me forget. Our stories go back seven generations to the ceding of Alta California from Mexico to the United States. It’s a lived history and visible in every part of the state. The machinery of extraction and dispersion that has taken over the Valley is mostly invisible to travelers. But don’t think they’re traversing through it untouched.
RITUAL MARKER
Highway 99 passing under the Bridge to Nowhere, just south of Fresno.
On the road, the ritual is sequential in geography but leaps back and forth in time. The future is visible when I pass the Bridge to Nowhere. I’m not sure if the bridge actually has a name, but that’s what I call it. Right on the outskirts of Fresno, its clean, pale concrete sits ready above Highway 99. One day, when the world gets its shit together, a high-speed rail will cross over that bridge, taking people in and out of the Valley with ease. And a new ritual will begin.•
Teresa Flores is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work examines her Californio roots and the relationship between wellness, identity, and accessibility through drawing, video, and social practices. Flores has led programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Spike Art Magazine in Berlin, and her artwork was featured in the exhibition Centennial: 100 Years of Otis College Alumni. Flores has taught visual culture at Cal State Fresno and for the Armory Center for the Arts, in Pasadena. She holds an MFA in public practice from Otis College of Art and Design and is a 2021–22 City of Los Angeles artist in residence.
