RETHINKING
CALIFORNIA:
POLITICS AND POLICY IN THE GOLDEN STATE
CHAPTER 1: THE THREE STATES OF
CALIFORNIA: AN INTRODUCTION
Notes from a Native Daughter Joan Didion It was very easy to sit at the bar in, say, La Scala in
Beverly Hills, or Ernie’s in San Francisco, and to share in the pervasive
delusion that California is only five hours from New York by air. The truth is that La Scala and Ernie’s are
only five hours from New York by air.
California is somewhere else. Many
people in the East (or “back East”, as they say in California, although not in
La Scala or Ernie’s) do not believe this.
They have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, have driven through a
giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big
Sur, and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to
California. They have not been, and
they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many more ways a more
difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips on which
the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever
diminishing. I happen to know about
that trip because I come from California, come from a family, or a congeries of
families, that has always been in the Sacramento Valley. |
WEST OF THE WEST
California has always been considered somewhat different
than the rest of the nation. It is, as
Theodore Roosevelt pointed out, "west of the West." Yet, California has emerged as a dominant
trend setter, establishing models and approaches that are emulated throughout
the nation. California may be well west
of the traditional centers of power, but its size and influence has surpassed
all other states. Stretching 825 miles
from Crescent City to San Diego, and 215 miles from Monterey to Mono Lake,
California includes 164,000 square miles and 32 million people -- 12.3% of the total U.S. population.[1]
A Contested Terrain
Captured by the United States in 1846 with statehood
coming in 1850, California was a relative latecomer to national politics. As a consequence of both its distance from
established power centers in the East and its “frontier” culture California was
seen more as a repository of rich natural resources than as a partner in
policy. California was a terrain
contested by three nations and dozens of native American communities. Between Cabrillo’s claims on the Pacific
Coast in 1542 and the Mexican-American War in 1846, Spain, Mexico, and the
United States maneuvered, battled, and manipulated to gain control.
Spanish colonization of California began in 1769 when
Junipero Serra established the El Camino Real -- the Mission Trail, nine
Missions whose central function was to control Indian land on behalf of Spain
and convert native civilizations to Christianity. Spain actively recruited settlers from Mexico, drawing
fundamentally from the poorest mestizo communities.[2] Spain’s hold on California was weak, with only 3000 settlers --
most of whom were Mexican. When Mexico
became independent of Spain in 1821 California became a Mexican territory. City names like Mendicino, Sonoma, San
Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, and
San Diego reflect it’s native American, Spanish, and Mexican heritage -- and
its ethnic ambivalence. The 46 original
settlers of Los Angeles, for example, were mestizos
of Indian, African, and Spanish ancestry .[3] This ambivalence runs deep in part because the U.S. claim on
California was pushed by American squatters in what was then Mexico.[4]
THE THREE STATES OF CALIFORNIA
Many observers have noted that
California, with its complex network of communities and regional resources, may
in fact be composed of three states.
That is to say, if one were to explore how California’s many communities
related to each other it would be possible to identify clear regional cultures
within which unique subcultures interacted.
Politically, economically, socially, philosophically, even ethnically,
California is actually three different places: Southern California (San Diego
north to San Luis Obispo County) Northern California (Monterey County up
through Humboldt County), and the Central Valley (Kern and Inyo Counties north
to Oregon). Each of these regions
maintain unique economies, idiosyncratic political cultures, unique
micro-climates, even distinct language patterns and cultural reference
points. To fully understand California
one must understand its separate regional identities.
Southern California
Southern California may be
characterized as densely populated urban coastline, particularly between
Ventura and Orange Counties. With the
notable exception of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara Counties, Southern California
tends to vote republican. As a
consequence of the large metropolitan areas, Southern California remains
extremely diverse ethnically and religiously.
Traditional Southern California economic engines have been manufacturing
and light industry. Since the 1970s,
however, the Southern California economy has become more service oriented and
corporate in nature. The archetypal
Southern California job in the 1950s was industrial (shipyards, tire
manufacturing). The archetypal
Southern California job in the 1990s is service sector (low paying, including
food service and retail; high paying, including international banking and
consulting).
Add to these structural
phenomena the unique architectural and cultural edifices, and the Southern
California character is complete. Since
the region grew extremely quickly -- exponentially increasing in population
between 1940 and 1990 -- effectively planning infrastructure was
impossible. The result is evident in
both land planning and transportation. The mini-mall, a Southern California
invention, has come to dominate the landscape.
These strip malls, which typically include some combination of
convenience store, donut shop, dry cleaners, and hair & nail shop, were in
many ways predetermined by Southern California’s geography: quick growth and
conservative politics tends to preclude land and architectural planning; warm
weather encourages convenience shopping in open air storefronts; the reliance
on cars makes parking lots a necessity; and, the relatively cheap land in
outlying areas encourages the construction of multi-unit retail space (e.g.,
mini-malls) on speculation by small investors.
Southern California is defined
in many ways by its freeways. This,
however, was not always the case. As
early as 1924, Southern California’s Red Car system carried 100 million riders
annually between San Fernando, Newport Beach, Pasadena, and San Bernardino --
covering an area from Los Angeles and out some 75 miles in all directions. The fate of mass transit in Southern
California was doomed, however, for two central reasons. First, the short term success of the Red Car
actually precluded long term success.
This because the system encouraged building out rather than building up,
as in most cities. Home builders built
large tracts on cheap land, advertising “live in the country, work in the
city.” The Red Car made it possible to
buy a house in an inexpensive area, while commuting into the city. However, as development grew beyond train
stations in outlying areas, mass transit became less attractive. By the 1940s, home builders were advertising
garages with driveways rather than proximity to train stations.
Second, as a relatively new
urban area, Southern California’s major investment in its transportation
infrastructure came at time when cars were increasingly inexpensive and roads
were relatively uncongested. Related
issues such as energy and air quality were not yet significant concerns. In 1926, when Angelenos were asked to vote
on bond measures that would define Southern California’s transportation
infrastructure for the next century, rail construction lost out to freeway
construction. This was perhaps
preordained. Who in 1926 could have
predicted the growth Southern California would achieve over the next half
century.
In addition, Southern
California’s weather -- with a year round median temperature in the mid-70s and
little rainfall -- encourages an outdoor lifestyle. The architecture reflects this, as does the fashion, and even the
vernacular. Housing tracts --
reflecting two bedroom Spanish style bungalows in the 1920s and 1930s, larger
“modern” ranch style houses boasting three bedrooms and two bathrooms in the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and even larger Mediterranean styles in the 1970s,
1980s, and 1990s -- all suggest a Southern California style. Frontyards are dominated by garages and
driveways, with the notable absence of porches, suggesting a space of utility
rather than socializing with neighbors.
Backyards are dominated by “family space,” including BBQ areas,
swingsets, and dog runs.
The warm weather and proximity
to a swimmable coastline ensures an enduring relationship with the beach and
ocean. While the Aloha shirt may of may
not be fashionable throughout the state, it has never lost favor in Southern
California. Southern California vernacular has consistently included outdoor
references. From the Annette Funicello/
Frankie Avalon beach party movies to Bay Watch, Southern Californians have long
had to balance externally imposed stereotypes with organic homegrown
lifestyles. This hasn’t been easy, in
large part because the Southern California media persists in celebrating the
Bay Watch ideal, and because of the high number of transplants who have flocked
to Southern California in search of this idealized lifestyle. While many outsiders see Malibu or Santa
Monica as quintessential Southern California, the real Southern California is a
quilt of cultures, alive and well in places like Ventura and Oxnard, San
Fernando, Inglewood, Monterey Park, San Pedro, Long Beach, San Clemente, and
Oceanside.
Northern California
Mark Twain once commented that
the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Where Southern California is often warm and
dry, Northern California is often cold and damp. But the differences go far beyond weather. Northern California tends to vote
democratic, albeit with distinct enclaves of conservative voters. While architecture dominates the Southern
California landscape, in Northern California landscape dominates
architecture. The “Little Boxes” that
dot Daly City’s residential tracts are dictated by the urban density of the San
Francisco peninsula. Bordered by the
Bay and the Ocean, the available space to build is severely limited.
The earthtones of Marin
architecture, and the unobtrusive style of Big Sur architecture reflect the
regions comfort with nature -- and its desire to live within, rather than in
place of, the traditional landscape. This
is itself a function of lower density and cooler weather. Southern Californians spend much of the year
indoors to avoid the heat. Northern
Californians spend much of the year indoors to avoid the rain. Each climate requires a different
architectural response. Functional
fashion may be a result as well. Hiking
boots and flannel make more sense in Humboldt than in San Diego.
Northern California may itself
represent two different places. The Bay
Area is distinctly different than the north coast. The high tech industries along the San Jose-San Francisco
corridor lead the nation in new technology Research and Development and in high
tech manufacturing. The income
generated in Silicon Valley is illustrated by a local housing market that is
two to three times higher than the Bay Area generally. At the same time, the timber based economy
of the north is extremely vulnerable.
Median income in Santa Clara County (including Silicon Valley) is
$54,672. Median income in Glenn County
is $25,648.[5]
In the same way, Northern
California’s urban centers reflect the diversity of Southern California, but
its rural northwest does not. The Bay Area
is extremely diverse, incorporating strong and politicized Black, Latino,
Asian, and Native American communities.
Cities like Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose are among the nation’s
premier Multicultural centers. At the
same time, the northwest coast from Mendicino to Crescent City looks more like
Oregon than California: predominantly white, modest incomes, largely
Christian.
If there is a unique
vernacular to Northern California it may be due to politicized university
students from Santa Cruz, Stanford, Berkeley, San Francisco, San Jose, Hayward,
Sonoma, and Humboldt State. These
institutions have a long history of activism, particularly with regard to
environmental issues and civil rights.
A case in point: the tired phrase “politically correct” originated on
Northern California campuses as an affectionate jab by campus leftists at their
more programmatic colleagues. In a bit
of Orwellian double-speak, it has since been highjacked by conservatives to
marginalize progressive concerns generally.
The Central Valley
The Central Valley is
California’s Heartland. It is primarily
agricultural, with small cities separated by miles of farmland. Density is low outside of its major cities. It is the home of the Central Valley
Project, the primary delivery system for agricultural water diverted from the
Sacramento Delta. The relatively narrow valley, bordered east and west by
mountains is home to a thick, pea soup fog every winter. This Tule
fog is both an institution and a hazard.
Most of us know the Central Valley at 70 mph as we drive between the Bay
Area and Southern California along Interstate 5. Relatively few travel off the Interstate, making the Valley
unknown to most Californians.
The Central Valley includes
vast rural areas, with growing urban areas in Bakersfield, Fresno, and of
course, the greater Sacramento Area.
Fresno and Sacramento are among the state’s ten largest cities, with
populations of 405,100 and 396,000 respectively. Fresno County is one of the state’s fastest growing areas,
predicted to grow from its current population of 765,000 to 2.5 million over
the next forty years.[6] And, while many small cities in the Central Valley are
predominately white and Latino, the larger cities are extremely diverse. Bakersfield, Fresno, Stockton, and
Sacramento reflect the diversity of the rest of the state. Stockton, for example, is 23% Asian,
comparing to San Francisco’s 29%, and greatly exceeding Los Angeles’ 9.6%. 55% of Stockton’s 48,000 Asians are
Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian.[7]
Politically, the Central
Valley tends to be split. The
agricultural counties tend to vote Republican, the urban counties vote
Democratic. The Central Valley’s
economic engine is primarily agricultural, from the farms in Kern, Kings, and
Fresno Counties in the South up to the northern counties that unfold along the
Sacramento River -- Colusa, Butte, and Tehama Counties. Stockton and Sacramento remain active port
cities, with light industry and related services. The Sacramento, American, and Feather Rivers spill into the
Sacramento Delta, a vast maze of bayous and tributaries, invoking the flavor of
Louisiana in California.
If there is a “beltway” in
California it is Sacramento. With the
high number of state offices, and the influx of representatives, staff,
lobbyists, and the public, Sacramento at times looks more like Washington than
the sleepy Central Valley river town it once was. As the political nexus of the state, downtown Sacramento has been
able to remake itself in the image of every Californian. This is remarkable considering how different
Californians are from one another. The
warm weather and urban sprawl is familiar to Southern Californians, the heavy
tree covering and lush gardens is familiar to Northern Californians, and to the
Central Valley, Sacramento is -- well, home.
How Many Californias?
Some observers see even more
than three states within California’s borders.
Philip Fradkin, for example, identifies seven.[8] Fradkin sees differing landscapes as critical determinants of
cultural expression. Fradkin’s first
California is the Deserts, along the south eastern corridor of the state from
Mono Lake south to the Salton Sea. The
Deserts are defined by drought, little population, untamed open space, and
ghosts of past civilizations. His
second California is the Sierra, encompassing the Sierra Nevada from Donner
Pass to Bakersfield. This 430 mile long
mountain region is distinguished by vast wilderness, even fewer people, and
characterized by a pioneer past. The
Sierra Nevadas, while never tamed, had to be understood to allow westward
immigration. The hard lessons of the
Donner Party[9] underscore life in this
California.
Fradkin’s third California,
“the Land of Fire,” is the volcanic Cascade region in the northeastern most
section of the state. His fourth
California, “the Land of Water,” is the northwest coastal area from Crescent City
to Point Arena. This California is
dominated by forests, wind, fog, and rain.
The population is centered in Crescent City, Arcata, Humboldt, and
Eureka. Separated by thick forests from
the rest of the state there is a palpable sense of isolation. California number
five is the “Great Valley.” The central
valley between Redding and Bakersfield is the state’s bread basket, making up
one of the largest regions of sustained agriculture in the nation. Population is greatest in the greater
Sacramento area, inclusive of Stockton, and in the Fresno/ Bakersfield area,
which is the fast growing region of the state, but is distributed throughout the region. California number six includes the northern California coastline
from Point Reyes to Point Conception.
The “Fractured Province” is defined in large measure by the frequency of
earthquake fault lines.
Finally, California number
seven, Southern California from Point Conception to San Diego, is Fradkin’s
“Profligate Province.” This region is
the most populated, and in Fradkin’s view, the most wildly extravagant. The cycle of earthquake, fire, and flood is
somehow a function of Southern California’s hubris. In this Fradkin anticipates Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear.[10] Whether one accepts the notion of multiple California’s or not,
it is clear that regional difference has emerged as an important element of
California’s diversity.
Urban California, Urban Peripheries, and Rural California
Some observers note that while
there are different Californias, it is not geography that distinguishes
them. Rather, the very different types
of cities and towns throughout the state can be included in communities of
interest based on economic base, demographics, and size. More specifically, communities throughout
the state can be divided into Urban California, Urban Peripheries, and Rural
California. According to this analysis,
cities of like size, demography, and structure have more in common than those
cities that share a geographic region.
San Francisco, for example, has much more in common with Los Angeles
than with Willits, a small lumber town in Mendicino. Similarly, Vista, in northern San Diego County, has much more in
common with Concord, in the Bay Area, than with San Diego.
Urban centers tend to share
common concerns, as do urban peripheries, and rural areas. Urban cores are concerned with race
relations, economic revitalization, international commerce, crime, and
crumbling school districts. Urban
peripheries, those suburbs that ring urban cores, depend on the central city
for economic sustenance, but struggle with issues of open space, zoning, and
retail “flavor” of boutique downtown areas.
Crime is a major preoccupation, but typically in the context of
containing “city crime” from spreading into the periphery neighborhoods. Rural areas share a concern for agricultural
and timber resources, tend to oppose environmental restrictions, and fear the
continual spread of “urban sprawl,” where urban peripheries begin to extend
into agricultural areas. At the same
time, rural communities battle periphery cities over open space issues. Newly incorporated cities in outlying areas
hope to preserve open space in perpetuity, while rural communities often assert
a right to develop open space as the market dictates.
California Divide
Whether one agrees with
Fradkin’s borders, or a more modest set of borders, there clearly are
significant regional differences within the state. With 58 distinctive counties this is, perhaps, no surprise. How these different communities interact as
a common state, however, often is.
Intraregional relations, interregional relations, and region to state
relations all depend on the unique cultures and politics that dominate the
region. As we explore these
relationships we must keep an eye toward the regional idiosyncracies which make
California unique.
THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK
This book explores the evolving role of politics and policy in California. To achieve this the book seeks to do the impossible: to convey the taste, smell, and feel of the state at the dawn of the 21st century. As the most populous state, California has emerged as a leader of national and international politics, economics, and culture. The following chapters review California's unique institutional structure on both the state and local levels, as well as California's unique cultural legacy.
Part One provides an overview of California’s unique history and culture, with special attention paid to political culture, people and diversity, and politics and economics. Part Two introduces the institutional infrastructure. These chapters explore the Constitutional makeup of California, the governor, state legislature, and state judiciary, as well as local governments. Part Three focuses on the policy players -- those individuals and organizations who work to influence politics and policy throughout the state, including interest groups, the media, parties, campaigns, and elections. Part Four assesses the major policy issues affecting the state, including education, environment, immigration, and civil rights. California’s political culture is as vast and complicated as its terrain. It is its people that make it special, and its natural resources that make it unique. The following pages will introduce you to the personalities and ideas that are essential to an understanding of the Golden State, from its early history to the controversies that shape political conflict in the present day.
Continued from page 1. Reading 1:
“Notes from a
Native Daughter,” Joan Didion
From Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968)
(Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, Incorporated, this edition 1990)
Reprinted
by Permission (pending)
You might protest that no family has been in the Sacramento Valley for anything approaching “always.” But it is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past as if it had simultaneously begun, tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagons started west. Eureka -- “I Have Found It” -- as the state motto has it. Such a view of history casts a certain melancholia over those who participate in it; my own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to have come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspension that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
In 1847 Sacramento was no more than an adobe enclosure, Sutter’s Fort, standing alone on the prairie; cut off from San Francisco and the sea by the Coast Range and from the rest of the continent by the Sierra Nevada, the Sacramento Valley was then a true sea of grass, grass so high a man riding into it could tie it across his saddle. A year later gold was discovered in the Sierra foothills, and abruptly Sacramento was a town, a town any moviegoer could map tonight in his dreams -- a dusty collage of assay offices and wagonmakers and saloons. Call that Phase Two. Then the settlers came -- the farmers, the people who for two hundred years had been moving west of the frontier, the peculiar flawed strain who had cleared Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri; they made Sacramento a farm town. Because the land was rich, Sacramento became eventually a rich farm town, which meant houses in town, Cadillac dealers, a country club. In that gentle sleep Sacramento dreamed until perhaps 1950, when something happened. What happened was that Sacramento woke to the fact that the outside world was moving in, fast and hard. At the moment of its waking Sacramento lost, for better or for worse, its character, and that is part of what I want to tell you about.
But the change in not what I remember first. First I remember running a boxer dog of my brother’s over the same flat fields that our great-great-grandfather had found virgin and had planted; I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error) the same rivers we had swum for a century: the Sacramento, so rich with silt that we could barely see our hands a few inches beneath the surface; the American, running clean and fast with melted Sierra snow until July, when it would slow down, and rattlesnakes would sun themselves on its newly exposed rocks. The Sacramento, the American, sometimes the Cosumnes, occasionally the Feather. Incautious children died every day in those rivers; we had read about it in the paper, how they had miscalculated a current or stepped into a hole down where the American runs into the Sacramento, how the Berry Brothers had been called in from Yolo County to drag the river but how the bodies remained unrecovered. “They were from away,” my grandmother would extrapolate from the newspaper stories. “Their parents had no business letting them in the river. They were visitors from Omaha.” It was not a bad lesson, although a less than reliable one; children we knew died in the rivers too...
Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weights heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because in at least one respect California -- the California we are talking about -- resembles Eden: It is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?
I have said that the trip back is difficult, and it is -- difficult in a way that magnifies the ordinary ambiguities of sentimental journeys. Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one’s own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears....
It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else’s memory, stories handed down on the family network. I have an indelibly vivid “memory,” for example, of how Prohibition affected the hop growers around Sacramento: The sister of a grower my family knew brought home a mink coat from San Francisco, and was told to take it back, and sat on the floor of the parlor cradling that coat and crying. Although I was not born until a year after Repeal, that scene is more “real” to me than many I have played myself.
I
remember one trip home, when I sat alone on a night jet from New York and read
over and over some lines from a W.S. Merwin poem I had come across in a
magazine, a poem about a man who had been a long time in another country and
knew that he must go home:
…But
it should be
Soon.
Already I defend hotly
Certain
of our indefensible faults,
Resent
being reminded; already in my mind
Our
language becomes freighted with a richness
No
common tongue could offer, while the mountains
Are
like nowhere on earth, and the wide rivers.
You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
It should be clear by now that the truth about the place is elusive, and must be tracked with caution. You might go to Sacramento tomorrow and someone (although no one I know) might take you out to Aerojet-General, which has, in the Sacramento phase, “something to do with rockets.” Fifteen thousand people work for Aerojet, almost all of them imported; a Sacramento lawyer’s wife told me, as evidence of how Sacramento was opening up, that she believed she had met one of them, at an open house two Decembers ago. (“Couldn’t have been nicer, actually,” she added enthusiastically. “I think he and his wife bought the house next door to Mary and Al, something like that, which of course was how they met him.”) So you might go to Aerojet and stand in the big vendors’ lobby where a couple of thousand components salesmen try every week to sell their wares and you might look up at the electrical wallboard that lists Aerojet personnel, their projects and their location at any given time, and you might wonder if I have been in Sacramento lately. MINUTEMAN, POLARIS, TITAN, the lights flash, and all the coffee tables are littered with airline schedules, very now, very much in touch.
But
I could take you a few miles from here into towns where the banks still bear
names like The Bank of Alex Brown, into towns where the one hotel still has an
octagonal-tile floor in the dining room and dusty potted palms and big ceiling
fans; into towns where everything -- the seed business, the Harvester
franchise, the hotel, the department store and the main street-carries a single
name, the name of the man who built the town.
A few Sundays ago I was in a town like that, a town smaller than that,
really, no hotel, no Harvester franchise, the bank burned out, a river
town. It was the golden anniversary of
some of my relatives and it was 110 and
the guests of honor sat on straight-backed chairs in front of a sheaf of
gladioluses in the Rebekah Hall. I
mentioned visiting Aerojet-General to a cousin I saw there, who listened to me
with interested disbelief. Which is the
true California? That is what we all
wonder.
Reprinted from Joan Didion, “Notes from a Native Daughter,”
from Slouching Towards
Bethlehem
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1961, 1965, 1968.
[1]California Department of Finance, Population Research Unit, California Statistical Abstract Report 95
E-1.
[2]Mestizos were subsistence farmers of mixed
native and European ancestry.
[3]Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1993) and Clyde Milner II, Carol O’Connor, Martha
Sandweiss eds., The Oxford History of the
American West (NY: Oxford University Press, 1994).
[4]Takaki, A
Different Mirror
[5]California Franchise Tax Board, 1995; California Department of Finance, Population Research Unit, California Statistical Abstract Report 95 E-1, 95 E-2.
[6]California Department of Finances, Population
Research Unit, Reports 92-E-2 and 95 E-1.
[7]United States Census Bureau. 1990 Census.
[8]Philip Fradkin.
The Seven States of California: A
Natural and Human History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).
[9]The Donner Party were a group of California pioneers who were trapped in a blizzard in the winter of 1846 while transiting what is now Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada range. Members of the Party were reduced to cannibalism in order to survive.
[10]Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York : Metropolitan Books, 1998).