Because I grew up in a place where I woke up to the whistling of braceros going down to the fields to work, the men who taught me Spanish…
Because I cause I saw a redwood home set alight by fire, burning white-hot, like a diamond, in the middle of the night—a home built, out of devotion, by the sons of a woman who’d come to the Arroyo Grande Valley in 1837, where the principal inhabitants were grizzly bears, irritable and possessive and hungry…
Because I was lucky enough to grow up in a Valley still populated by mule deer, red-tailed hawks, flat red weasels (after my Plymouth Rocks), parade lines of baby quail following their mothers; marauding parties of of multigenerational raccoons; barn owls asleep, one’s head on the other’s shoulder; once a king snake, upright and menacing, but dead; once a mountain lioness sniffing along the baselines of our school’s softball field…
Because I grew up learning to love sushi and lumpias made by the mothers of friends and, in high school, girlfriends…
Because of those, I was arrogant enough to believe that no one could possibly feel the feelings I feel for my home for a place like Monterey Park, California. That’s a place, I assumed, that is overrun by strip malls.
I was flat wrong.
CBS ran this brief interview with an incredibly eloquent young man about his home, which is of course Monterey Park.
I admit that I was, terribly guilty to be sure, relieved that the shooter was not a White man.
In a powerful way, the young man reveals that the perp’s ancestry is almost irrelevant. The man who shot 20 people wounded all of us, because our ancestry is irrelevant, too. We are all of us Americans.
This is only about a minute long. It is a stunning piece of journalism.
A Work in Progress 