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Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Harper's, The New York Times, Kenyon Review, The Dublin Review, Brick, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Saveur. He's the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay Everything We Don't Know, and the forthcoming book Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California. @AaronGilbreath

The Couple Who Turned a California Desert Into a Multi-Billion Dollar Snack Empire

AP Photo/The Porterville Recorder, Chieko Hara

Have you eaten a California almond lately? Or drank one of those pomegranate juices in the orb-shaped bottle, or enjoyed a “Halo” brand mandarin? Well, thank a California farmer and read Mark Arax’s 20,000-word feature in The California Sunday Magazine to understand your role in draining the groundwater of California’s interior.

In the works for 20 years, Arax’s phenomenal story, “A Kingdom From Dust,” profiles Stewart and Lynda Resnick, billionaires who grow almonds, pistachios, citrus and pomegranates on desert land they have never tilled or irrigated themselves, land that taxpayers and state and federal water have helped them turn into a dangerous and lucrative agricultural gamble. Stewart is the landowner and Lynda the brains behind the marketing of their company, providing employee-friendly brands with healthy snacks. After all, the Los Angeles market sits just 130 miles from their San Joaquin Valley fields.

When Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman co-wrote the 2003 book The King of California, it was J.G. Boswell who owned more land and water than anyone else in the San Joaquin Valley. Today, Stewart Resnick is the world’s largest irrigated farmer. Arax’s new piece examines the methods of Boswell’s de facto heir. The Resnicks are people who, in Arax’s words, “control more land and water — 130 billion gallons a year — than any other man and woman in California and still believe it isn’t enough.” So how much land does Resnick have?

Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. That’s 281 square miles. He is irrigating 121,000 of those acres. This doesn’t count the 21,000 acres of grapefruits and limes he’s growing in Texas and Mexico. He uses more water than any other person in the West. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. The city of Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes 587,000 acre-feet.

It’s hard to comprehend this sense of scale, and equally hard to understand this huge rural valley itself. Arax is a native of the San Joaquin Valley; his family farmed the land. If you eat California produce — and you likely do — you need to read this to appreciate the economic and ecological cost of that food and the way private interests increasingly control the liquid commodity we all need to survive.

But Arax does more than profile America’s biggest farmer. This piece offers an intimate portrait of life in a region ignored by most outsiders, an area considered the flyover country of the Golden State, what Bakersfield author Gerald Haslam calls the “Other California.” Few outsiders really take the time to look at the Valley. It mystifies those who do. To help, Arax collapses four hundred years of history in prose both poetic and concise.

There’s a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earth’s surface in human history took place here. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the 800 square miles of Tulare Lake dry.

He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. Once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. The farmer moved the rain. The more water he got, the more crops he planted, and the more crops he planted, the more water he needed to plant more crops, and on and on. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees.

After establishing this peculiar setting, Arax pursues one central question: How did the Resnick’s irrigated acres thrive during the catastrophic five-year drought, when irrigation water was scarce to non-existent, and overpumping kept dropping the water table? Arax finds the answer in the kind of off-limits area whose “vastness makes you feel safe and in jeopardy at the same time.”

I pull over into the dirt of a pomegranate orchard, the ancient fruit that the Resnicks have turned into POMWonderful, the sweet purple juice inside a swell-upon-swell bottle. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. I study the terrain. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. Sure enough, cozied up next to the bank of the aqueduct, I see a glint. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun.

The Resnicks control 65 percent of the American pistachio market, processing nuts at a facility the size of seven super Walmarts. Farming on a large scale in California involves a caste system: Off-site landowners hire Mexican families to irrigate, fumigate, pick, and prune to generate profits. So where will all these farm workers go — men and women who paid coyotes thousands to smuggle them from Mexico to Lost Hills — when the water can longer support these crops? Despite the Resnick’s contentious use of water, their fields create a lot of jobs. They pour a lot of money into Lost Hills, where their parent farm company, Wonderful, has branded their new additions the Wonderful Park and Wonderful Community Center. Arax talked to one farm worker outside El Toro Loco supermarket.

Inside sits a young man named Pablo. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was 18. He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. That was eight or nine years ago. He lives down the road in Wasco, the “Rose Capital of America,” though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. He works year-round for Wonderful. This means he can avoid the thievery of a labor contractor who acts as a middleman between the farmer and the farmworker and charges for rides and drinks and doesn’t always pay minimum wage. Pablo prunes and irrigates the almond and pistachio trees and applies the chemicals that cannot be applied by helicopter. He makes $10.50 an hour, and the company provides him with a 401(k) plan and medical insurance.

He’s thankful to the Resnicks, especially “Lady Lynda,” for that. “I saw her a few months ago. She is here and there, but I have never seen her up close. She owns this place.” He goes on to explain what he means by own. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. Four thousand people — more than double the number on the highway sign — live in town, and three out of every four rely on a payday from Wonderful. All but a handful come from Mexico. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. U.S. immigration has little say-so here. Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. It was Lynda who teamed up with the USDA to develop 21 new single-family homes and 60 new townhouses on a couple of acres of almonds that Wonderful tore out. The neighborhoods didn’t have sidewalks; when it rained, the kids had to walk to school in the mud. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. So the way Pablo uses own isn’t necessarily a pejorative. “When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here,” he says. “Now there’s something here. We had gangs and murders, but that’s better, too.”

In addition to 401(k)s, the Resnick’s Wonderful factory pushes a healthy lifestyle on its workers, from cafeteria food to a free wellness center that includes a gym, dietician, doctors, and therapists. This level of care — or control — is unprecedented among Valley farm workers. So are the Resnicks shaping the future of agriculture, by treating laborers as more than disposable cheap labor? Or are they simply savvy business people who know that equitable treatment of employees means a stronger company and better brand?

To the Resnicks, crops are no different than the Franklin Mint dolls they once sold, or the keepsake teapots their flower-delivery company sold roses in. “I’m from Beverly Hills,” Stewart says. “I didn’t know good land from bad land.” The difference, now that they’re dealing with public water and California’s ability to continue to feed the country, is to generate more revenue than most countries and support its growing cities. Agriculture is not just any other product. Yes, it deals in fruit and nuts, but it really deals in water. And that commodity has a large enough socio-economic impact that governments cannot leave it in the hands of a few wealthy landowners.

If you think this is just a California problem, you’re wrong. One day water will be more valuable than oil, and like oil it will start wars. It’s already the source of battles between farmers whose wells reach for the same diminishing groundwater. The big players know this. That’s why they buy land that has water they can sell to the highest bidders, be they farmers or cities, especially during a drought. And in California, global warming or not, there will always be another drought.

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Maternity Clothes for Women Who Hate Maternity Clothes

Katie Collins/PA Wire URN: 33728751

When my other half was pregnant last year, she relied on Zofran and pants with stretchy waistlines to survive. Her policy on maternity clothes was: “To buy things that I would still be able to wear after, and to buy secondhand.” Why invest in an expensive niche wardrobe for a body that won’t even be around next season?

At Racked, Stephie Grob Plante writes the ultimate cultural history of maternity clothes, what she calls the “temporary wardrobe” that cause endless stress, self-loathing and irritation for pregnant women. Seamlessly weaving the personal with the reportorial, Plante wrote this piece while eight months pregnant between doctor’s visits, staring into various mirrors, examining her concerns. She isn’t what she calls “the glamorous pregnant person you’ve seen on Instagram,” though she speaks with the people behind new fashionable maternity brands to understand how this $2 billion industry is and is not evolving. For centuries in Western countries, pregnancy was something women were supposed to hide. The first commercial maternity items arrived in 1904 with the Lane Bryant brand’s drawstring waistband dresses, designed to disguise. Plante shows how the pendulum has swung, so that maternity clothes accentuate and celebrate what pop culture has named the baby bump. America has become bump-obsessed. But the old fear of looking “dowdy” in these clothes, the expenses and cultural pressures to stay both healthy and trendy, to read all the baby books and keep working, persist.

If clothes designed specifically for maternity are a relatively new phenomenon, maternity clothes that meet trends head-on are even newer. After all, this is an apparel segment that retail has long tackled as a nuisance, not an opportunity.

“Fashion doesn’t want to acknowledge women with changing figures,” Goldman told Elle in a 2016 interview. “What I’m trying to do is defy the perception that this is a dreaded year of your life where you’re not allowed to look good. I’m trying to make it sexy and okay and lovely and interesting because that’s what it is. How cool is it? You’re having a baby!”

I do feel powerful, I must admit. It’s not just me that I speak for now; I have backup. At 24 weeks, I use some birthday money I’d squirreled away in my desk drawer for a prenatal massage, justifying the expense to my husband, “We need this.” During my session, the massage therapist confides that he loves doing prenatal massage because it’s like working on two people at once.

I laugh and the baby pummels my side. Every decision I’ve made over the past months — washing my hands until they chap and bleed, rescheduling a dental appointment from the chair when the hygienist reveals that she’s “a little under the weather” — I’ve made not for my own benefit, but for the kicking, punching, blood sugar-spiking creature wreaking havoc beneath my skin. To me, wearing body-hugging clothing right now is a declaration of dependence. Here we are! Please don’t sneeze on us!

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The Woman Who Helped Daniel Mendelsohn Become a Writer

Dave Thompson/PA Wire URN:32251193

All writers start their writing lives in different ways. Musicians who prefer writing poetry to writing lyrics; English majors obsessed with Charlotte Brontë; established doctors with stories to tell ─ but some beginnings are marked by subtler shifts of consciousness than others. For The New Yorker, critic Daniel Mendelsohn narrates the improbable origins of his writing career: by getting close with a worldly 70-year-old French women who liked to dance at the music clubs of Charlottesville, Virginia. When Mendelsohn met Ghislaine Signard de Poyen Bellisle Neale, aka Chouky, as an undergraduate classics major, the stories she told about her life were the first time he realized “that the things I’d read about in novels actually happened to real people.” Her influence on him wasn’t simply about finding material, though, or that she taught him how to write. She taught him to think differently about how he spent his waking life, and she showed him that, in his words, “If you open yourself to the world, there will be stories to tell.”

After a while, when she was off somewhere—the swimming pool (“I do my lap every day!”), or Foods of All Nations, the only place she could get certain things that she liked to eat—I’d force myself, as if doing a physical exercise, to do as she did: I’d sit at the table and stare at the patio. Of course, I felt foolish, and, at first, I wasn’t particularly moved; I wondered just what she saw in all this. But one day I found that I’d stopped thinking about what time it was, what I needed to get done, and was actually just sitting there looking at the lilies of the valley. When she got back from her shopping trip, I told her about my little epiphany. She beamed. “Dan_iel_,” she said, in her slightly croaking voice, pronouncing my name the French way. “See? You always are sinking about your life! But I sink about the muguet, and he make me happy.”

She didn’t let me stay home on weekend nights reading. Because she insisted that I take her dancing—straight clubs, gay clubs, tiny dives where rockabilly bands played, motel ballrooms where swing bands swang, she didn’t really care—I started to dance, too; this, inevitably, led me to the next step, which was talking to people in strange places. She took me to my first gay dance at U.V.A., held in a building that was papered with notices for meetings of the Gay Student Union; I’d walked by often but never had the courage to enter. That night, she sent me home with a tall and wiry Kentuckian who’d spent two hours fruitlessly smiling at me until Chouky marched me over to his car and introduced us. The Kentuckian’s father did business in Asia; he had beautiful, beautiful kimonos hanging by bamboo rods along the walls of his bedroom. Above the bed was a woodblock print of squirrels huddling on a winter branch.

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Hurricane Harvey Made Strange Bedfellows in Texas

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Outside of Houston, Cambodian immigrants built a small community in the unincorporated town of Rosharon, growing water spinach, called trakuon, for the Cambodian community. Then Hurricane Harvey hit and flooded the town’s homes and its farms.

For the Texas Observer, Michael Hardy reports on a surprising, uneasy alliance in the rebuilding efforts: Volunteer assistance from white far-right groups wearing Confederate flag jackets and camouflage. These anti-government neo-Confederates arrived to help Rosharon before the local government or the Red Cross arrived, and they took over the rebuilding effort so firmly that they initially refused to let in FEMA. Who were these people, and did they really just want to help?

The groups are affiliated with the so-called Patriot movement, which emerged in the early ’90s from the ashes of Ruby Ridge and Waco’s Branch Davidian compound, and whose ranks expanded dramatically during the Obama administration. The Freedom Keepers are an Oregon-based group whose members appeared at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer brandishing assault rifles and wearing body armor. (Marion, the Freedom Keepers and the New York Light Foot Militia are among the defendants currently being sued by Charlottesville and Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection to prevent them from returning. They’re also being sued by two women injured in the car attack that killed Heather Heyer.) The Confederate Riders, a Missouri-based group, travel the country protesting the removal of Confederate monuments. The two groups share information and coordinate protests mainly through their Facebook pages, which each have 10,000-plus followers.

Both groups harbor extreme anti-government views and believe the Constitution is under siege by a range of nefarious forces. On the Freedom Keepers’ weekly Facebook Live broadcast, “The American Radio Show,” Marion rails against Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Muslims and undocumented immigrants. He portrays the Patriot movement as America’s last line of defense. “This country will fall if we don’t get into the middle of it and change it from within,” he said on the show in December. “We have to become a disease. Some bacteria and some infections are beneficial. And we need to become an infection inside the body.”

Having infected Little Cambodia, the far-right groups were not eager to give it up. They didn’t see an impoverished community that had been shamefully underserved for decades and abandoned by the government in its time of greatest need; they saw a proudly self-reliant people who had built a libertarian paradise. “It’s been a really awakening experience to see what it means for people to live on their own, live their way, make their choices,” Marion said in a Facebook Live video from Rosharon. “It really is the American dream.”

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Silicon Valley’s Spin Master

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From setting the talking points in interviews to addressing negative publicity before it leaks, an effective communications agent can help build a troubled brand and save a CEO. After doing her job in Silicon Valley for over two decades, Margit Wennmachers has helped companies like Skype, Etsy, Facebook, and Amazon shape their public identity.

For Wired, Jessi Hempel makes Wennmachers the focus of an article, instead of letting Wennmachers be the one behind the article, to describe how communications agencies shape our perception of startups and their founders, and how communications works. As tech’s old reputation changes from a group of nerdy outcasts to a greedy power center run by sexist, gentrifying capitalists, she’s now helping shape the narrative of tech itself. She’s angling for something driven by the old maxim that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Controlling the message of tech has become both easier and harder. In the early days, Wennmachers needed to hustle to put the firm’s founders at the center of tech conversations, which often happened in the pages of a short list of reputable publications. Yes, Andreessen Horowitz had a blog, but its most powerful ideas were conveyed by the traditional press. Consider Andreessen’s iconic August 2011 missive announcing that “software is eating the world,” which became the rallying cry for the generation of tech startups that followed. It was first published as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

That media ecosystem has now been upended and the path to success has changed. Wennmachers’ ability to push out a narrative no longer depends on having an editor’s ear. Andreessen Horowitz can advance its own editorial ideas through blog posts, podcasts, social media, and a newly launched YouTube channel independent of the media, connecting directly with people starting or building companies.

Its founders write frequent blog posts, and they have access to enough social channels that they no longer need a Wall Street Journal to push out their perspective. A former WIRED editor produces a regular podcast that is downloaded and listened to by a wide audience of aspiring founders, business people, policymakers, and tech enthusiasts. “The running joke of the firm is that we’re a media company that monetizes through venture capital,” Andreessen says. It’s a joke, but also an inevitable evolution of Wennmachers’ role—in which a communications lead begins to look much more like a media tycoon.

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A House of Refuge Marred by Violence

Jenna Vonhofe/Lincoln Journal Star via AP

In 2016, three young Sudanese immigrants were shot inside the old three-story Victorian where many immigrants lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In 1957, a Southern man shot his wife and himself in that same house. Sixty years after her grandparents’ death, the couple’s granddaughter, Tanisha C. Ford, returns to her old family home for Elle to examine the parallel ambitions and roadblocks America presents for both of these communities. For the young Sudanese men, the house was the place they started their new lives in America, away from the routine bombings and incessant violence back home. For Ford’s family, it was the place they and many people of color lived after leaving the Jim Crow South for industrial jobs further north. For both groups, it became a symbol of all the roadblocks to freedom and respect that people of color still face.

Every time I saw another mention of the murders, my heart mourned for the families of Taha, Adam, and Muhannad. I thought of their devastating loss, and of the trauma I can still see in my father and his siblings. Growing up, I didn’t hear many stories about my grandparents; living with that type of tragedy numbs you, atrophying your emotions, and it was too painful for my family to talk about. My father was only 4 when he lost his parents. He can’t recall his mother’s face.

But despite our family’s attempts to keep our history at bay, those memories percolated just under the surface. And after details of the three murders filtered out, my dad and his siblings started to discuss the night my grandparents died. The motives weren’t directly connected: One was a grisly murder of three African immigrants, and the other a grim story of domestic violence. Still, my family noticed parallels. My grandparents’ generation fled the dusty plantations of Jim Crow Alabama for industrial jobs up north. Taha’s family survived daily bombings in Darfur, sometimes sleeping in ditches, to escape the genocide; they’d sold everything they had to come to the United States. For both families, Fort Wayne was supposed to be a place of refuge and new possibilities. Neither family knew that the price of freedom would be death.

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Jesus Is Everywhere in Port-au-Prince, but So Is Vodou

(Daniel Morel/AP Photo)

The massive earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010 left thousands homeless and desperate, struggling to find the strength to rebuild their lives. As usual, opportunistic preachers emerged to sell them comfort and make sense of it all. Ecclésias Donatien at Tabernacle de Louange and André Muscadin, founding pastor of Shalom Tabernacle de Gloire, are two of Haiti’s biggest and richest. People say Muscadin is connected to the police, that he’s Mafia, has political ambitions. People fear him. He said he based his religious business off of “the McDonald’s model.”

For the newly relaunched Believer, Susana Ferreira reports on the way Haiti’s booming evangelism business deals with Vodou, Haiti’s African Creole spiritual practice. Violent tensions and distrust have existed between Vodouisants and missionary Christians for centuries, but these tensions are not only about religion. They’re about autonomy, about whether native Haitians get to determine their own religious identity and success, and about missionary evangelicalism’s continued colonial power over Haiti, be they crooked megachurch pastors or well-meaning American teens volunteering in the cleanup efforts.

“Evangelicals arrive, and the first thing they do is destroy trees. They say that in that tree there is the devil,” he said, practically spitting his words. The act of desecrating the kingdom below for the sake of the kingdom above, he said, went beyond sacrilege. Josué told me he wasn’t anti-Christian, but he classified the actions of the Jeunes and many foreign missionaries as anti-Haitian.

“The words that the evangelicals bring discourage peasants from working for the earth, but to work for heaven. That’s the sin. It’s the missionary that’s in sin,” Josué said, his voice tired, body slumped in a plastic chair, the lingering dusk casting sharp shadows across the angles of his face. “The real paradise is here on earth. In our Vodou tradition, this is your paradise, where you live.”

Josué is one of several high-profile people from Haiti’s Vodou communities pressing the state to declare August 14 a national holiday—not for its religious significance, but specifically to mark the role of the gathering at Bois Caïman in the abolition of slavery and the end of colonial rule. Of this fact Josué was sure every Haitian could be proud, regardless of their faith. His fact-finding mission with the ethnography staff would go toward preparing a proposal for facilities to be built to receive groups of international tourists at the site and a permanent memorial to the twenty-one nations who came together to buck the course of history—the same number of evil spirits the Jeunes claimed to have exorcised.

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Stewards of the Blood

A memorial for one of the four young men killed in Long Island in April 2017. The street gang MS-13 has been blamed for the deaths. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

 

Caille Millner | Michigan Quarterly Review | Winter 2016 | 16 minutes (4,329 words)

I need to tell you about someone whose name I can’t speak. The lack of a name is inconvenient, but it’s not the most important thing about him; he gave it up so long ago. Everything important that I can tell you has been a fight against time and language, and I’m still only halfway there.

Halfway. We were half-grown when we met: eleven years old. Some concerned adult had determined that he was at risk. We all are, but in his case there were metrics. He had immigrated from Mexico. He lived with too many siblings; there was a rotating cast of uncles and cousins in his life. This seemed dangerous ─ we lived in San Jose before it became a booming city, when it was still threaded with apricot orchards and poverty. Some of his uncles and cousins had joined La Nuestra Familia, the Norteños, the gangs that offer protection to Chicanos and Mexicans who lived in Northern California. Joining the gang meant that they had joined a violent feud, with the Sureños from Southern California and also with the Salvadoran gangs — La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

I should have asked him questions about this. The truth is that I failed to find the language to do so. The first reason for this failure is that I was impressed with the ornate speech used by so many of these uncles and cousins. They never spoke about gangs or violence or illegal anything. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men. To my 11-year-old ears these were ancient, powerful words; it sounded like the language of legend. Warriors and glory.

I could only speak about homework and grades. Such words could not compete with theirs even in my own imagination. How could I use them to convince someone else?

When I was near all of them I couldn’t even say what it was that captivated me about the drudgery I was supposed to be championing. When I was alone it became all too clear: That drudgery was my way to be special. What I really liked was the approval I received from those concerned adults for caring. The kind of regard that allowed me to be chosen as a positive influence in another 11-year-old’s life was intoxicating.

Looking back, of course, I made sense as a translator of this other life. I was going places even then. My family was steady and ambitious. They were teaching me the language of the higher classes, but more importantly, they were teaching me their timelines. I understood that for many years my life would be a slowly unfolding landscape of education and that in the distant future I would have nothing to do with boys like him.

Not that this mattered in our moment. I fell hopelessly and immediately in love with him. He was smaller than I was: a thin body, all angles like an arrow tip. His was a face of beveled edges rather than common features — the only curve on him was a radiant smile. As soon as I met him I wanted to see more of it, and I hung around for as long as I could.

To even speak about it now is to risk embarrassment, for this was eleven-year-old love: a love that bloomed over secondhand video game consoles and dimly lit strip malls. We gawked at passing teenagers; we pooled our quarters to split Orange Juliuses and McDonald’s French fries. It was the love of one child — puffy, awkward, patiently hoping to bloom into beauty — for another child who was beautiful and lean and waiting only for others to be overcome by his charm. He never had to wait long. Where I was aloof and serious, he was open and easy.

He knew how to be eleven years old. He took joy in the moment — in the good slice of pizza, the trip to the arcade, the tickle fight. As part of a big family he was happy to be in company with lots of people. To his relatives I must have seemed like the strange one: quiet, introverted, demanding of difficult pleasures that were a long time in coming. I never talked to him, or to them, about love.

The next year he joined the feud.

We lost him, one of those concerned adults told me.

I found the judgment unfair. Even today I can tell you in which prison his body may be found.

He is doing time. Yet I wonder if he sees time in the way that I do, in the way that all of those concerned adults do. We cling to years because our imagination does not extend to the language of duty and obligation. We hoard our years because they belong to us alone, not to the ages.

At 11 years old it is easy to believe in the ages; I was enthralled by them myself. And in many ways, his transformation happened much faster than mine did. At 12 years old he had a new name, new clothes, new friends, a new body. New constraints and intimacies. He had a duty now, and it stood as an immutable fact of life, something beyond individuality. When it was clear to me that I should abandon him so that I could continue on my own slow line of time I did so without regret, and for many years I stopped trying to find words to talk about him. I spent much time on my education and my goals. I busied myself with the intricacies of language and the books of long-dead men.

They never spoke about gangs or violence. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men.

Then as our paths diverged my own line of time sped up. The years that are ticking slowly for him, in his cell, are moving much faster on the outside. Time has become a relentless crush for skill and for money, at least in the land of his feud. San Jose has changed. Like me, it became educated and upper-middle-class. The orchards were paved over for expensive housing; the immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador moved to cheaper cities further south. The crime rates dropped, the feud grew quiet.

Things were different now, I thought. The wounds from the feud would heal. There would be no need for these battles that seemed to have no purpose. Too many were gone but at least it would slow down.

* * *

Years passed. I moved to San Francisco. I chose to live in a neighborhood that seemed to have the familiarity of my birth neighborhood and none of its problems. My neighbors came from Mexico and Panama and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Brazil. It was a neighborhood of modest and miraculous prosperity. Everyone worked as often as they could. Their children played on the sidewalks day and night and they were full of memories of the children they had left behind in the old countries. Their lives ran on the rhythms of phone cards and remittance payments and scratch-off lottery tickets.

When I moved in I asked many of them about the feud. We had similar worries about it, and similar feelings of denial. It was close but we believed that it was far enough away. Two gangs — one linked to MS-13, the other linked to the Norteños — operated on the blocks that bounded us. But because there had been no violence in our small bubble for years we thought that they would always remain there.

Around 8 pm on June 16, 2007, a 15-year-old named Edivaldo Sanchez was standing with a friend outside of his family’s apartment on 24th Street. Eddie, as we called him, often stood outside of that apartment in the evenings. It was a practical choice. He had five siblings and a rotating cast of relatives in his life. He needed space, like any teenager.

Eddie was a student at Horace Mann Middle School. He was a recent immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, a city whose important industries include maquiladoras and drug trafficking.  After her husband died, Eddie’s mother had brought the family to San Francisco. She thought that the move would give her children the peaceful years they needed for an education and a more prosperous future.

What is there to say about him. Eddie made friends in the neighborhood fast. His personality was gentle. He was crazy about soccer and music, eager to help fellow students fix their old electronics or put together a pick-up game. He smiled easily and often. I remember thinking how delightful it was to see that. He was at the age for boys when smiling tends to stop.

We had a nodding acquaintance when we passed each other on the street. He was shy, and being a recent immigrant he was also tentative about the way he sounded. I didn’t want to make him feel nervous by speaking too often. It was another one of my failures of language.

Two men in a stolen Honda pulled up beside the boys that night. We will never know what they said, or if they said anything at all. In the neighborhood, we decided that the men asked who they claimed. We decided that because we knew that the boys claimed no gang associations, and because it was the only question we knew that fit with what happened next.

The passenger in the car pulled out a gun. The boys ran for their lives and he shot at their backs.

Eddie’s friend escaped.

Eddie was hit. He staggered for half a block, collapsed, and bled out in front of a taqueria on 24th Street at the corner of Balmy. He was dead before the emergency response team arrived.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world. It’s the first mural at the entrance to Balmy, a short block that’s also a gallery for more than 60 murals. These bright, splashy scenes stretch from the roof to the foundation of almost every building. The murals were begun by a collective of artists known as La Mujeres Muralistas, whose desire to add more peaceful, domestic images to the macho mural art scene in San Francisco during the 1970s grew into a massive visual celebration of Latin American myth and history. Eddie died among a kaleidoscope of life from all around the Americas, the red of his blood joining an explosion of yellows and blues and purples and greens. While he died he was watched over by Archbishop Oscar Romero, by Frida Kahlo, by Diego Rivera, by La Virgencita of Guadalupe, by children escaping war and poverty, and above all by weeping women, women who are weeping for Mexico and for El Salvador and for the innocents massacred in those countries and in this one.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world.

When I stepped out of my house the next morning the altar for Eddie had already been assembled. The sun was bright but the red candles were blazing. Most of them filled tall glass cases to the brim and were plastered with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Every corner store on 24th Street sold these candles, but that day they handed them out for free.

Within a few hours it was impossible to walk down that strip of sidewalk. The mourners spread a blanket of flowers and candles and homemade signs that crowded out all of the space in front of the taqueria. Eddie’s family members hung small cardboard signs to rest his soul in peace on the lampposts nearby. The schoolgirls he had helped at Horace taped up pictures of him.

For a few weeks, I passed by him every day. We all looked up when we saw him. I think the memory of seeing him on the same corner, alive and wiry, kept us from cleaning up his memorial in the normal frame of time. We left Eddie’s altar up until it had fully disintegrated. As the days and then weeks passed it underwent a metamorphosis. Bunches of flowers shrank and died. They stained the sidewalk with the violet colors of exploded petals and the yellow powder of broken stamens. The cathedral of candles melted onto the sidewalk, spreading out into red gooey puddles. The goo hardened into something brittle, geological. If I squinted, the sidewalk in front of the taqueria looked like a mural on Balmy.

And above the mess floated Eddie’s face — thin, a little pimpled, forever smiling.

* * *

After Eddie’s time stopped and I was yanked back into an age of ruined myths and false legends I began to look for the language that would help me speak about it. Though I’ve read many pieces about MS-13 and the Norteños, most of them are disappointing. I’m not looking for lurid chronicles or patronizing analysis of the young men who join what is, for them, a ritual battle that exists not just in our time but in all of the ages before us.

Where I’ve found the language to express this has been a matter of accident: like the 1978 novel Broken April. I picked up this book because I was curious about its author, the great Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare. I wondered how a learned, upper-class man (his author photos show him reclining in his Parisian apartment, clad in cashmere sweaters) had found the words to chronicle the martial traditions of his tiny, impoverished country. Kadare’s work is awash in blood and violence — war, feuds, sieges, occupation, brutality — and he writes it all with the calm candor of a professional and the deep passion of a lover.

So I picked up Broken April and I discovered that, for Kadare, it’s partly a matter of translation. The novel is all about making clear the circumstances of the blood feuds that still take place in Albania today, feuds that seem strange to outsiders yet indispensable to those who act them out. As usual, Kadare doesn’t shy away from the horrible toll: Broken April opens with the premeditated murder of an innocent man.

On an early spring day in Albania’s High Plateau region, Gjorg of the Berisha has been perched behind a ridge overlooking the highway since daybreak. As the hours drag on, he’s startled over and over by passerby. He pulls out his rifle at each disturbance.

He’s waiting for a man named Zef Kryeqyqe. Zef Kryeqyqe and Gjorg of the Berisha barely know each other and have no personal animosity, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened the previous year, when one of Zef Kryeqyqe’s relatives killed Gjorg of the Berisha’s elder brother, Mehill. In keeping with the blood feud that their families have been engaged in for generations, it’s now Gjorg’s duty to kill Zef.

The fated man doesn’t appear until dusk. He wasn’t expecting to meet Gjorg near the highway. When Gjorg appears before him, rifle cocked, Kryeqyqe fumbles uselessly for a defense.

Gjorg shoots him. He falls. Gjorg steps out of hiding onto a deserted road and stares at the fallen body.

The crucial act of violence takes place over the first ten pages. By swiftly dispensing with the murder, Kadare can expand at length on the real subject of Broken April: the culture that surrounds and maintains the blood feud. It is a culture that, above all, depends on a strange sense of time. Its rituals are measured in moments and days but its sense of value and consequence stretches over centuries. We learn that the Berishas are villagers in a part of the country that has seen little social change since the Dark Ages. The economy is subsistence agriculture; the residents abide by a medieval code of conduct known as the Kanun. The Kanun regulates manners, marriages, and above all the blood feud in which the Berishas have found themselves.

After Gjorg kills Zef, Kadare flashes back to the weeks after Mehill’s death. Abiding by the age-old custom, the Berisha matriarch hangs her dead son’s bloody shirt up on the family clothesline. She leaves this shirt on the line so that the neighborhood, and Gjorg, can see it. They need the sight of the bloodstain to torment Gjorg until he avenges his brother.

It works. Gjorg has an extended, Hamlet-like season of agonized inaction, but when the winter ends he leaves his family and goes to the highway. In killing Zef Kryeqyqe, Gjorg knows that he is launching his final cycle in the feud. After a month’s truce, he will no longer be the killer but the prey.

Still, when Gjorg walks back into the village he can walk with pride. He has returned honor to his family and banished humiliation, its dark twin. For a long, slow moment in his short life, he is envied and feared and powerful. The villagers spread the word that he has “taken back his brother’s blood.” His mother pulls the stained shirt down from the clothesline and washes it. His father can look at the neighbors with satisfaction. A brief expansiveness opens his family’s existence even as Gjorg feels the looming constriction of certain death.

Zef Kryeqyqe’s death launches another series of actions set forth by the Kanun. The two families fulfill their roles solemnly, without emotion, as though what were at stake was not a murder but a legal transaction. Everything is prescribed and organized, including the fine, or blood tax, that Gjorg of the Berisha’s family must pay. They must pay this tax not to the Kryeqyqe family but to the prince. So, after the men of the village have negotiated the 30-day truce, Gjorg of the Berishas embarks on a long walk across the Plateau to present this payment.

Gjorg’s only possibility for escaping death would be to hide in one of the 74 Towers of Refuge. These towers dot the bleak landscape that we travel through with him. With their comfortless cells and desperate inhabitants, they resemble prisons: “scattered, dark forbidding, with their black loopholes and their heavy doors.” The values of the Plateau villagers assure that their purpose is to function as places of incarceration as well. There’s a special shame for the men inside, one that is visited on their families. Deprived of their prideful place in the community for as long as they have unredeemed blood, these families do not farm: “Whole clans allowed their fields to go uncultivated and themselves to suffer hunger so that the blood might be redeemed….Each man chose between corn and vengeance.” Despite the business-like aspects of the feud, the concepts of comfort and profit are foreign to its priorities of duty and pride. Comfort and profit are concepts for another time, another moment, outside of the feud.

Eventually, we make it to the castle and to one of the most loathsome characters in the book: Mark Ukacierra, the prince’s first cousin. Ukacierra is the “steward of the blood,” the man who is responsible for keeping accounts of all blood feuds on the High Plateau. His archives, which stretch back for centuries, detail every feud that has gone settled or unsettled, and every murder that has maintained it. Ukacierra loves the feud with a possessive madness, fears for its survival, and looks upon the incursions of the contemporary world with hatred. An educated man, he reads contemporary books and journals from the capital city, Tirana, and stokes the flames of his hatred with their interpretations of the blood feud. In the opinion of these learned authors, the feud has been “changing gradually into an inhuman machine, to the point of being reduced at last, according to the author of the article, to a capitalist enterprise carried on for the sake of profit.” The idea that the ancient feud can be reduced to something so shallow, so contemporary, as capitalism — that, to Ukacierra, is outrageous.

Thanks to the impertinence of these outsiders, as well as a general worry that the men of Albania have grown soft and do not take the feud as seriously as they used to, Ukacierra looks on the pale, shaking Gjorg with the closest approximation to love that we see in Broken April. To him, Gjorg is the future of an age, an actor in a long tradition that he adores. Meanwhile, the writers of the contemporary books live in a “weakening” time “without honor.”

The time that Ukacierra lives in is expansive and everlasting. Meanwhile, Gjorg’s time is growing precarious and short. Once he has paid his fee and began the trek back to his village, he has already used up many precious days of his truce. While he walks, Zef Kryqeqye’s family is watching the calendar and making their preparations. Should they miss their son, they may visit his murnanë — a small stone altar that passerby built to mark the place where the dead man fell.

* * *

In the seventh year after Eddie’s death I requested the public documents for a murder case that had started just a few blocks away from where he was murdered. The U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco released these documents in October 2014, after the three young defendants were each sentenced to 27 years in federal prison on charges related to the murder of Alexander Temaj-Castanon.

It was a strange moment to see a case like this one. I still thought about Eddie, though seven years on it was clear to that he would never get any justice. No arrests were ever made in his case. No murderer was ever found. His family had moved back to Mexico, torn by their grief, to face their uncertain future in a more familiar country.

There were few people left in the neighborhood who remembered Eddie, or had any knowledge of what the feud was.

Time had transformed another place. Many of my neighbors were long gone. They left for a less tragic reason than Eddie’s family had: they simply could not afford to live there anymore. The new residents were upper-middle-class and educated. They needed things that would help them thrive on a faster line of time ─ coffee shops, express workouts, places that sold the latest technology. The neighborhood sped up to reflect their needs.

Yet for all that time was speeding up something was still happening in a slower and more ancient era.

On the night of June 21, 2010, Davie Jimmy Mejia-Sensente, aka “Crazy,” or “Loco,” Carlos Mejia-Quintanilla, aka “Sleepy,” or “Dormido,” and Luis Amilar-Zanas, aka “Trucha,” or “Yomo,” were on a 14-Muni bus, traveling on Mission Street from San Francisco to Daly City. The three young men were members of the transnational gang known as La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

A 26-year-old man named Alexander Temaj-Castanon boarded the bus after leaving his job as a cook at a San Francisco barbeque restaurant. Mejia-Sensente, Mejia-Quintanilla, and Amilar-Zanas watched Temaj-Castanon and decided that he was a member of La Nuestra Familia, or the Norteños. They based this decision on their observations of Temaj-Castanon’s tattooed body and his general bearing.

When Temaj-Castanon stepped off the bus on a quiet stretch of Mission Street in Daly City, Meijia-Sensente and Mejia-Quintanilla collected a backpack from Amilar-Zanas and followed him. Amilar-Zanas had placed a gun in the backpack.

The night was dark, the hour was late, and the street was deserted. They crept up behind him. Mejia-Quintanilla pulled the gun from the backpack and shot Temaj-Castanon once. Mejia-Sensente took the gun and shot the dying man again. They watched the body fall. Then they ran.

Temaj-Castanon was not a member of the Norteños or any other gang.

None of these facts were in dispute, not even by the defendants. This was a senseless murder, executed for no other reason than that the defendants believed it was their duty and obligation to eliminate a rival in a blood feud that has persisted for decades. But that duty and obligation, though so compelling as to bring these three young men to assassinate an innocent man, is nowhere to be found in the public documents. The U.S. Attorney’s office dismisses it in the same way that enraged the steward of the blood: “MS-13,” reads the sentencing memorandum for the case, “constitutes an ongoing organization whose members function as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.” In this rendering, murder has been reduced to a business enterprise that must be done on a schedule according to the time demands of a corporate entity.

I can understand this sense of time. I live in it, I fought for it, and I will do all that’s in my power to remain within it.

But in looking through the public docket for this case I located one time factor that the U.S. Attorney’s office may have overlooked.

In 2002, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Quintanilla was a 12-year-old named Wilfredo Oliva-Castro who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1996, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Sensente was a 12-year-old, name unknown, who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1991, when he was jumped into MS-13, Amilar-Zanas was a 12-year-old named Luis Sana who lived with his family in El Salvador.

We will never live in their time but they will always live in ours.

There is one more important notation in the paperwork for this case. Though they’re not publicly available, the docket shows that each defendant requested a translator during the course of the legal proceedings. Presumably the three defendants, all native Spanish speakers, wanted to be certain that they could follow the language of the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, and the judge as these people presided over the direction of the rest of their lives. The case files note that the translators all came to assist the defendants.

I am so glad that they came. But how I wish, oh how I wish, that these translators had spoken sooner.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the Winer 2016 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. It was also named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017. Our thanks to Caille Millner and the MQR staff for allowing us to reprint this essay.

 

The Life of One of the South’s Greatest Folklorists

AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez

I don’t know how many times a spiral-bound cookbook has made The New York Times Best Seller list, but in 1986, Ernest Matthew Mickler’s independently published White Trash Cooking did. The book gathered more than recipes. It contained Mickler’s stark, artful photographs, collected folklore and functioned as a document of a vanishing backcountry Florida. To some it seemed a novelty. To people who grew up in the Southern backcountry, it was a respectful record of life, and it validated their existence. Ernie distinguished uppercase “White Trash” from lowercase “white trash,” saying that, “Manners and pride separate the two,” yet his book title unnerved commercial publishers.

For The Bitter Southerner, Michael Adno travels Mickler’s Florida, talking with Mickler’s friends and family, to celebrate the man who embraced his roots and earned his MFA from Mill’s College in California, a man whose photos drew comparisons to Eggleston or Christenberry, whose tireless documentary work impressed Harper Lee, and who died from AIDS the day after his second book came out. His books are not novelties. They are rich cultural documents that still know how to have fun.

“Kit asked as a favor for us to look at a cookbook a young ‘caterer’ he knew in Key West had written,” Meyer said. “Kit sent the typescript, which sat on the desk for a couple months. Jonathan asked me to look it over before he returned it, assuming it wasn’t anything our press would be interested in. I sat down, read it, and told Jonathan, ‘This is fantastic — all the way through, the recipes, the presentation, the voice.’” And he added, “‘WTC’ was the only manuscript I recommended Jonathan publish I’m proud to say. The rest is history.”

Jargon’s Williams called the Oasis guesthouse where Ernie worked. Ernie was staying down the block, and when word reached him, he ran over like a bat out of hell to take the call. Phone to his ear, Ernie listened: “My name is Jonathan Williams with Jargon. Joe gave me your book, and we want to print it.” As Ernie recalled, “I almost fell off the end of the telephone.”

After Jargon took the book on, they began raising the money to print the thing. But more than a year later, Woolcott grew frustrated with Jargon’s glacial process, so he bought two tickets to Winston-Salem to crash the publisher’s next board meeting. Mickler and Woolcott arrived as Jargon was hosting an art opening. Ernie felt out of place among the art snobs. But soon enough, someone screamed at Ernie, “I’ve seen you in drag!” And in a moment, the purported pretension fell away.

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Miles and Coltrane’s Milwaukee Gigs That Never Happened

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

On March 23, 1959, an ad ran in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newspaper, announcing: “Opening Tonight, The Country’s Hottest Jazz Trumpet Player Miles Davis and His All-Star Quintet.” At the time, Miles and his incendiary band of John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, and Cannonball Adderley were recording what became the jazz masterpiece Kind of Blue. This group, like this record, became legendary. Yet for some reason, the band never made their Milwaukee engagements. Was it money? Was it the mob? At On Milwaukee, writer Bobby Tanzillo tries to find out why.

Speaking of messy, less than a year after the Davis’ group’s cancellation at the Brass Rail – for whatever reason – Izzy Pogrob turned up dead in a ditch next to a country road in Mequon, with nine gunshot wounds to the head.

Jazz fizzled at the Brass Rail, which Pogrob’s brother Irvin ran as a strip club until 1968, when it was taken over by Rudoph Porchetta. In the 1970s it morphed into a pizza place – though it served food much earlier – and tavern and finally closed in 1982.

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