The Lancaster Without the Skinheads

I stood in a driveway in Lancaster with two stubble-haired young white men, just talking about life as the sun went down on the Antelope Valley.

They looked and dressed something like the youths portrayed in an article last November in the New Yorker magazine, which described an apocalyptic Antelope Valley where skinhead gangs wage race war on minorities.

Minorities like me.

It feels like there’s a tug of war going on between that media vision of the Antelope Valley as a fearful place of pipe bombs and swastika-tattooed thugs and the real Antelope Valley I have been visiting and enjoying for years.

What I see is a place that draws hard-working whites and minorities alike simply because they can afford a bigger slice of the American dream than they could in the city.

A place that does not frighten me a bit.

I’ll plead guilty to being part of the media conspiracy. I’ve written my share of stories about crime, race and evil in the Antelope Valley. So put what follows on the other side of the scale.

*

As we stood around talking in that driveway, I could not keep the Nazi youth images out of my mind.

One of the guys was named Sunny. I had worked with him years ago at a boys camp in the Sierra Nevada. I remembered him as a tall and slender kid with fair skin and a shaved head who even then wore Army pants and combat boots.

He also wore a red Navy Seals shirt. We teased him because, despite his goal of one day becoming a part of the elite Navy group, he was afraid to jump into the rivers we encountered on packing trips.

He was friendly and eager to learn Spanish, frequently asking for lessons from me and other Latino kids.

But years have passed since we were children in the woods. I couldn’t help wondering whether Sunny had turned into one of those louts in the New Yorker article. He looked the part.

The conversation turned to Lancaster life, and gradually, I felt more at ease. These were not Hitler’s children. I heard no tales of hell-raising and white power. Their stories were of long workdays and the daily struggles common to most normal working-class young men in Middle America.

Sunny and his buddy work construction at sites scattered all over Southern California, from Long Beach to Bakersfield. Sunny is a superintendent, as he proudly pointed out.

His friend, shorter and stockier, admitted that he still lives at his mother’s home so he can afford to make the $700-a-month payments on the $35,000 truck we had gathered around, the truck that brought him popularity with a group of friends he drives to a lake on weekends.

When the subject changed to current events and a recent police chase in Lancaster, they talked about victims’ rights and social responsibility. No cop-hating skinheads here.

“I think police should have more authority,” Sunny said to my surprise.

Women and children walked past the two-story house as the stars came out.

“See this?” Sunny asked. “People don’t understand, but this is why we put up driving 100 miles to work. Things are slower here.”

It was a pleasant Antelope Valley evening of the kind I remember from 1990, when I began visiting a friend who moved to Palmdale.

Hers was not a middle-class white family running away from urban minorities. Hers was a hard-working Latino family from a modest corner of the San Fernando Valley simply looking for a better life.

They found it on a quiet street two lots away from a cul-de-sac in a two-story house her father, a longtime pool maintenance worker, bought for less than the selling price of their old home.

Many of my friend’s new neighbors were Latino and African American families who also found in the desert their own big homes, clean streets and safe parks and schools.

Over the years I enjoyed my trips to what I always thought of as a new city. Everything shined: the theaters, the mall, the houses and the streets.

In this small-town environment, high school football games were played the traditional way: at night under bright lights before cheering home crowds, unlike so many security-conscious L.A. campuses.

Nearly a decade after moving there, my friend’s parents still work hard, commuting to Los Angeles, returning to their comfortable homes each evening.

*

As I relaxed it became my turn to be put on the spot. I struggled to explain to Sunny why the media seem to report so many negative stories about race relations in the Antelope Valley.

To be sure, the stories are true. There really are skinheads and hate crimes and random violence. But they are stories that can be told about virtually any sizable town in America. Somehow, the Antelope Valley--Los Angeles’ frontier, isolated on the fringe of the Mojave--becomes an easier place for us in the city to stereotype.

I’d rather think that despite its enormous population growth in the past decade, it remains a place where I can sit with Sunny and his friends, open a beer, talk about life and watch the stars come out. Normal guys living normal American lives. That usually doesn’t get said in news stories from the Antelope Valley. So I’m saying it here.