Ground Zero of the New California

My three daughters became obsessed with my high school yearbook last month. They spent hours studying the pictures and laughing at the hairstyles of their father and me and our friends. Their father had a big Afro, as did most of the African American kids, and I had Farrah Fawcett-style wings, though mine weren’t as impressive as those of the other blond girls. They made fun of the long hair of one guy who still lives nearby. His mother is Salvadoran and his father Polish, and the kids took that picture out to show another neighbor who is working on our house; his father is from Hermosillo, Mexico, and his Anglo mother is from Tucson, Ariz.

The high school is the one my daughters will likely attend, and, like our neighborhood, it is just as ethnically mixed today as it was back then. Our children are part of the 4% of Californians who checked more than one box in last year’s Census, whose just-released figures show that more and more Californians are multiracial, young and living in the inland areas of the state.

But out here in Riverside, we’ve been reflecting these statistics for decades. I find it funny, and affirming, that everyone else is finally catching up.

The yearbook was unearthed during my mother’s recent move into a brand-new house in a master-planned community on the edge of Riverside, between the established city and the burgeoning community of Moreno Valley, which is where many black and Latino families have settled after moving from too-pricey or crime-ridden areas of Los Angeles. My mother’s house has fresh carpet, that smell of new drywall. When we step outside, yearbook in hand, we see acres of raw, decomposed granite being molded into banks and flattened for driveways, another reality of the new California reflected in the census.

The girls and I agree that we wouldn’t trade our home in an old neighborhood in Riverside for all this newness. We live three blocks from the hospital where two of my girls were born. I was born there, too, in 1960, and their father in 1959. Even back then, we were a multiracial community, largely because of nearby March Air Force Base, whose planes still cruise over the new tracts that have added thousands of residents to Riverside.

In the living room of my 1910 Craftsman house, originally surrounded by orange groves, but now by other small bungalows, my girls and I page through the yearbook. They see the senior portrait of Virgie Saucedo, now Burroughs, who lives on the next block. She is Chicano, married to an Anglo man, and their three kids played on a trampoline we admired for several seasons. They see a goofy freshman photo of my brother’s best friend Mark, who just painted our house. His mother is Filipino and father Anglo. They see my childhood neighbor Ed, whose mom is Japanese and dad Filipino.

When we get to the basketball team photo, all those young men standing in a semicircle on the court, it’s a perfect photo opportunity for multiracial California: Richard, German mother and African American father; George, Japanese mother, African American father; John, Mexican-born mother, white father, and a host of others--Irish American, Mississippi-born black, Jewish and Alaskan Indian and every mix you could imagine.

At forward stands their father, whose ancestors are Creek and Cherokee, Irish and African. In the game shots, I am at the scorekeeper’s table, just behind him. My father is American of French descent, my stepfather was born in Canada, and my mother is from Switzerland. She used to sit in the bleachers during these basketball games and knit, while my husband’s father, Oklahoma-born, sat near her and yelled, “Fall, ball!” We were already connected as a couple, as a family, in 1978, and when I moved to Los Angeles to attend USC, I was astonished that so many people questioned our relationship.

“In our neighborhood, everybody’s mixed already,” I found myself saying over and over, discovering that the rest of California wasn’t like Riverside. It seemed so puzzling why they hadn’t figured out how to live together.

Throughout the last century, people of all races and ethnicities came to Riverside, to the Inland Empire, for the climate and abundance--of land, of jobs. And when they came, they married each other.

At the turn of the century, the citrus industry employed Japanese, Chinese, Italian, black and Mexican workers, many of whom settled here and intermarried and had children whose children I grew up with. At Sav-On the other day, I stood in line behind two elderly Mexican-born women whom I recognized from my childhood. While we waited endlessly for prescriptions, I listened to them talk about working for the Blue Banner packing house, where they’d sorted oranges for decades.

Our basketball team looked like that because so many men who’d been stationed at March Air Force Base decided never to return to Louisiana or Mississippi or Florida, where life was so harsh for African Americans in the 1960s. They stayed in Riverside, and their children married the children of European and Mexican immigrants.

We all have our own kids now, and many of us live in old neighborhoods like mine. I see friends from high school every day, like Jaimie and her husband Bobby, white and black, whose kids are shades of gold and brown. My neighbor Arleen, whose parents are Chicano, born in California of Mexican descent, married Darryl, who was black and Indian. Her three daughters are slightly older than mine, slightly darker-skinned than mine, and already talking to boys when we see them walking home from school.

My girls are all in elementary school, and they play frequently on a street two blocks over with their best friends. Three of those friends have Mexican American fathers and white mothers. The other friend is the father whose photo is in the yearbook; his daughter reflects his wife’s blond fairness and his own Salvadoran mother’s expressive dark eyes.

I cannot catalogue the racial mixtures of all their friends, but I can tell of their supreme indifference to this entire discussion. They play baseball and Barbies, and they eat foods from every continent. They are oblivious to categories and hues.

The smell of lumpia and barbecue and hamburgers drifts over our faded asphalt street, and on the sidewalks, all the kids ride bikes and scooters, shouting at each other, oblivious to what they look like or what city they live in, I’m sure. They just know the carob trees and pepper trees, planted by the city fathers who moved here from New England and the Midwest at the turn of the last century, are dropping brown pods and red fragrant berries whose scent rises under their wheels.