Three Authors Analyze the California Conundrum in New Books

California is the Rubik's Cube of the United States. You can analyze it for a lifetime and may never figure it out. Here are three authors who have visualized some alignments in their new books about the confounding state.


Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
By William Deverell
University of California Press, 330 pages

If you were to stroll across a quaint old courtyard somewhere in Southern California and look down to see a brick embossed with the name "Simons," would you know how significant a piece of local history is under foot? Historian William Deverell knows and he shares his considerable knowledge in his book, Whitewashed Adobe.

Deverell, an associate professor at Cal Tech in Pasadena, tells anecdotally how Los Angeles came of age from the 1850 until World War II and he does so with an edge. Deverell is particularly interested in how the city-building Anglos with social, political and economic power responded to the region's Mexican people, Mexican past and Mexican landscape. Deverell argues that this "ethnic stance" frequently lead to programs and institutions that isolated Mexicans in time and place.

His examples are fascinating, and none more so than the Simons Brick Company. Just after the turn of the 20th century, industrialist Walter Simons established a huge brickyard in Montebello, east of Los Angeles, and an additional yard producing roofing tiles in Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles. It was the Montebello brickyard that became a social and industrial experiment in worker dwelling. Simons built housing in the same complex as the massive brick kilns and sprawling drying warehouses, ensuring that employees could walk to their jobs. A self-contained enclave developed, with its own church, medical facility, school, post office, store, dance hall, even a "marital relations court." There was a Simons company musical band and baseball team. Commercial transactions were conducted with company script or credit. As accommodating as this arrangement might seem to be, the result was a form of social balkanizing. There was almost no commingling of the 3,000 or so residents of the Simons village and the developing community of Montebello surrounding them. Labor organizers were not allowed into the brickyard. Simons workers and their families lived and died in relative isolation.

Simons suffered an irreparable blow to business when the 1933 Long Beach earthquake triggered new building codes outlawing all brick construction. Eventually the 250 acre brickyard and the "town" of Simons was sold for $2.5 million. Deverell writes that Simons was "a place where human potential was never allowed to flower. Workers at the brickyard worked entire lives trying to get hold of something approximating the California Dream... Simons, the brick, is barely remembered. Simons, the place and its workers, is wholly forgotten."


Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003
By Kevin Starr
Alfred A. Knopf, 768 pages, $35.00

No one has attempted as ambitious a chronicling of the golden state as Kevin Starr has in his California Dream series of books. His last half dozen volumes have covered the history of California up to 1950. In his current release, Starr has put a wrinkle in time by leapfrogging the post-World War II decades and skipping directly to 1990. Even if none of the previous works are in your library, this one should be. It contains the most relevant material yet presented in this daunting literary franchise.

Starr, who has served vigorously in the post of State Librarian in Sacramento and is currently a professor of history at USC, maintains his conversationally academic tone in Coast of Dreams to tell the bigger-than-life stories that are the stuff California is made of. Starr acknowledges that modern social and economic events may be harbingers that the state has "gone seriously awry." But unlike Joan Didion and others who have recently thrown up their hands in disgust, Starr is such a true believer in the uniquely liberating aspects of life in California that he remains stubbornly optimistic.

Starr is keenly aware that lurking beneath the state's systemic ills are the natural threats of fire, flood, mudslide and earthquake. "True, nature had done its best in California to disguise such dangers, and what nature had not disguised, human engineering had glossed over," he writes. "The 1990s, however, witnessed such dangers plainly revealed. Californians were being challenged to evolve for themselves a much more complex and nuanced sense of place." Starr is an observer and historian with the capacity to wrap his mind as well as his arms around a subject as looming as California.


The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith
By David L. Ulin
Viking, 290 pages, $24.95

Journalist and author David Ulin, who is becoming an essential voice of Los Angeles, has turned the scientific probing of earthquakes into a near-religious experience in his book, The Myth of Solid Ground.

Take, for example, this passage about halfway into his journey: "Faced with all these layers, I can't help feeling a bit of mental vertigo, as if I were trapped in an intellectual Mobius strip. It's hard to keep my equilibrium, to know where I am standing, hard to know what I expect from earthquakes, what, exactly, I am looking for. I want to know the facts, but then, with earthquakes, facts dissolve into contradiction also--or, perhaps more accurately, into fallacy. I don't mean facts are irrelevant, just that they're slippery, elusive, fragments of information we can use to support almost anything if we frame them properly." Not since the fictional protagonists of The Razor's Edge or Under The Volcano has a man found the very ground beneath him so undulating with uncertainty.

If is fascinating to follow a writer as good as Ulin endeavoring to get a psychological handle on a threat so latent, yet so inevitable. He expected his research to lead to one of two conclusions: either teach him enough about earthquakes to stay comfortably in California, or teach him so much that he'd have to move away. "I came to the former conclusion," he writes. California is all the richer for it.