SPECIAL REPORT : The State of California : <i> California’s </i> VISION : The Dragon in the Dream Factory--the Native Born

Mexican kids stand on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills beside sandwich boards advertising “STAR MAPS.” They stare patiently toward private horizons as cars whiz past them.

There are two futures in California. There is the glamorous, the famous, the gaudy telling of time in California as possibility. There is also a tragic way of telling the future in California as limitation.

One future describes California as a series of problems--pesticide contamination; drugs; bad air--a future mired in the past. Tomorrow, when the new freeway opens, it will already be obsolete. In five years, the small farming towns in the Central Valley will be one suburban blur. By the end of the century, Californians will not be able to barbecue.

If California now entertains tragic possibilities, such was not always our way. For generations, since its American beginnings, California denied inevitability. The point of this place was that it represented an escape from certainty. Go to California and find gold. Go to California and find yourself a new life.

America seems the least tangible of countries in the world because it is built on expectation. You can start all over here. That is why people come to America--to become something new. Immigrant Americans put up with tenements and sweat shops and stoop labor not in resignation to tragedy, but in the name of the future (“. . . something better for my kids”).

At the edge of geographic possibility and under a paradisaical sun, California traditionally has played America’s wild child, America’s America. To people in Tulsa or Como, Miss., as much as to pilgrims from Vietnam or from Ireland, California has been the most extreme version of America.

Who can be surprised that the world came to California and still wants to come? Most immigrants in the world head for America, and more choose California. Or would. And not only foreigners; the restless come also from Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Californians are not in the mood to be flattered. Californians, like many other Americans, are troubled by the suspicion that something is dying. Call it the American Century.

Americans have seen Japanese economic and scientific ascendancy. When the Japanese came to town a few weeks ago and bought up Universal Pictures, the American response was worry, not flattery.

What on earth do the Japanese think they are buying when they buy up a Hollywood studio?

What the Japanese businessman knows is that the world goes to American movies. No one else in the world makes movies the world wants to see. The Italian businessman and the British mogul know this, too--they also have recently purchased Hollywood studios.

Did America invent the movies? It doesn’t matter. The movies invented America for the world. The movies have been our best advertisement. And, not coincidentally, the home of the movies was California.

The French make films about couples who go on picnics. And the British make movies about detectives in cardigans. Bombay has her elephantine soaps. But only the Americans seem to have understood the implications of the size of the movie screen.

The Japanese are famous for their skill at reduction and miniaturization, whether in horticulture or in the size of the TV screen or in the thrift of automobiles. Tokyo may well serve as a prophetic example to Los Angeles and San Francisco as urban life in California grows more crowded and space becomes the valued commodity.

It was the Jewish immigrants to America from Eastern Europe who established the scale of the movies and thereby taught us that our lives could aspire to scope and grandeur. Neal Gabler was too modest in his recent and excellent book, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.” The haberdasher’s son and the tobacconist’s son in fact invented America at the movies. They gave the democratic yearnings of Americans adequate range on the screen. A chandelier and a long car in every life, yes. But lips that were 10 feet long and faces that were 40 feet high became our best metaphors of democracy. The exaggeration flattered our private ambitions.

Who needed kings in such a world? Movies belonged to their own palaces. And the people on the screen, the “stars,” belonged uniquely to a place where you could become anything you wanted to be.

The divorcee on “Wheel of Fortune” who tells Pat Sajak that she’s “originally” from North Carolina came last year to California to get away from the past, as did the Joad family before her and as the Guatemalans are doing today. Their lives define California; restless lives are the point of California.

The newcomers embarrass those of us who are born here with that knowledge. For we are not the point of California. They are. John Sutter and Lucille Ball, John Fremont and Walt Disney--they are the famous Californians. They came here from some place else. They recreated themselves.

As a native-born son of California, I am under no illusions. I do not imagine that an editorial-page essayist is more important to the vitality of this state than a Mexican illegal immigrant who is, this day, working the artichoke fields around Salinas with an intensity we mistake for resignation. I think something closer to the reverse.

Native-born Californians, we have been looking at movies all our lives, but with a knowledge different than that of people who saw those same movies in faraway theaters. We recognized the street pictured on the screen, and we measured the exaggeration. Our movies became a kind of family album for us, marking the changes around us. The earliest films made in Niles or in Santa Barbara or in the San Fernando Valley (in those days when it could pass as the Old West) we saw with irony and regret for our dry, lovely landscape lost.

You do not have to be an old-timer (though, of course, in a state of much change you can easily become an old timer) when you remember orchards in the Santa Clara Valley or orange groves before Disneyland or the two-lane road where now there is freeway or searching dry creeks on Saturday mornings for arrowheads. And finding them.

Newcomers to California, those outsiders who are also our parents or our grandparents, leave us an impossible inheritance. The house is too big; the ambition too large to maintain.

Inevitably, the native-born Californian has a different sense of history than the newcomer. The native born discovers consequence, fears change as pollution or congestion or loss, the loss of the oak trees. The native born saw parents work and work to create a new life for their children. To the native-born Californian, however, paradise reduces to a three-bedroom house, a mother who knew how to drive, endemic sun, all were the given, not symbols of paradise. To mama and papa, California must have seemed a great deal like paradise after civil war in Hungary or the Oklahoma dust bowl or the segregated South.

Immigrants from China and from Mexico arrive in California today. And California seems to them to stretch to all-possibility. Those of us who are native born see only smog and remember when it was possible to get downtown in under 15 minutes.

The dilemma for California for coming years is that the state will be separated into two time zones, two competing futures. Already, native-born Californians are, on average, older than the newcomers. One California speaks of conservation, the other needs space. One California votes, the other does not. One is thinking of retirement, the other of jobs.

The native-born Californian ends up saving grandpa’s stucco bungalow, preserving as historical landmark what was for grandfather a symbol of progress. The native-born Californian’s best gift to this state is the wisdom of tragedy. We will be the ones who must speak of limits, of restrictions, of conservation. We will be the state’s finger-waggers, problem-solvers--an elect.

I do not think, however, that from the native born will come California’s great visionaries. What the newcomer offers California is comic vision. The newcomer’s gift to California has always been the audacity of optimism and the assurance that one can forget the past, put the feud between the Hatfields and the Capulets far behind. The newcomer has always taught California (as America taught the world) that you can re-invent history.

Each side must learn the wisdom of the other. California’s destiny depends on the melding of tragic and comic sensibilities. The land cannot sustain the unalloyed traditional immigrant optimism. On the other hand, those of us who are native born must know that we are an imposition on California.

All the time now one hears native-born Californians complain that they have had enough of this or that. Crowds. Prices. Traffic. They mean there are too many newcomers, too many immigrants. They tell you they are thinking of moving to Oregon or to Australia.

California is becoming as crowded with individual ambitions as 18th-Century London or Paris, but there is, as yet, no great satirist, no Jonathan Swift, to note the ironies of our state. Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was that the children of the poor could be sold to the rich as food. My own modest proposal for California is that there should be a limit to California. Every family in this state should be allowed no more than three generations here. When your time is up, you would have to move on--move to Australia or Argentina or your condo in Baja, move to Oregon. Is there, after all, any other way to “save” California for those newcomers who give California its dynamism?

The Japanese businessman perhaps does not understand that the movie company is now a second-generation affair. The Eastern European immigrant long ago passed away and has been succeeded by a committee of executive vice presidents. Hollywood is a second-generation affair. The actress is the daughter of the actress. The director is the son of the producer. Hollywood films are filled with allusions to other, earlier films. Or Hollywood films are stuttering repetitions of tried formulas. Lacking vision of its own, Hollywood buys options to other people’s lives.

Lacking confidence in a narrative line, second-generation Hollywood offers technology. The technological effect is meant to approximate the immigrant stories of an earlier generation.

Thus does THX Sound or Dolby stereo attempt to offer today’s moviegoer something of what we once recognized on the great screen at the movie palace when Henry Fonda and the rest of the Joad family got out of their smoking truck, to stare in wonder--as though at paradise--at California’s Central Valley.