Journal of Alta California Spring 2019

Alta has now reached its first anniversary, a milestone we celebrate with pride, but also with considerable gratitude and humility. In any event, we will need more than another two centuries before we reach the exalted reputation of Hatchards, the famed London bookstore, still going strong since 1797, as praised by Sir Alan. Nevertheless, we can aspire to those same goals — to create a place of solace and hospitality for lovers of the written word — a locale for readers and writers to gather and to share experience — to reflect, debate and illuminate the issues that recur from decade to decade and that shape the memory of this place where we live, love and endure. Of course, any publishing venture depends on the people who define the project.…

The immigrant experience is as old as America itself. The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West recently held a symposium called “Migrant Letters,” devoted to correspondence from 20th-century Chinese and Mexican immigrants to California. Changing immigration laws, job opportunities, acclimation to a new culture — their experiences echo today’s issues. These letters have been edited for clarity and condensed. FROM DR. GEORGE CHAN, PORTLAND, ORE., TO ATTORNEY Y.C. HONG, LOS ANGELES, 1930 Dear Mr. Hong: I am writing for Mr. Chow Yick again. I didn’t quite understand him in the first place. That he is not a American Citizen himself, but his father is. So he is a native born son. Before he even enter in U.S.A. his wife is in the family way & a child was borned…

Tom Zito spent 15 years writing for many publications. He came to California to report a piece on startups for The New Yorker, but started one instead. He’s now done seven. Page 5. Ishmael Reed’s latest honors include the Alberto Dubito Award for International Poetry and the AUDELCO award for theatre. He teaches at the University of California and the California College of the Arts. Page 13. Beth Spotswood is Alta’s digital editor and podcast host, and pens a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in San Francisco’s Mission District with her husband and newborn son. Page 68. Scott T. Baxter is a photographer based in Carefree, Arizona. His photography is in the permanent collections of the Phoenix Art Museum, the Desert Caballeros Western Museum, and the…

No single person has done more to propagate the lone-gunslinger, out-of-the-garage, into-our-hearts Everyman myth of Silicon Valley than Steve Jobs. Forget Bill Hewlett and David Packard, finessing their first audio oscillator in a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. Bill Gates? A complete stiff compared to Steve. Larry Ellison? A thug, calling ahead to his office to have a cop chasing him for speeding stopped in the company parking lot by a corporate lawyer. And there’s the shotgun, which we’ll see later. Gordon Moore? Moore’s Law? Twice the chip density every 18 months? Boring! Plain and simple, it was Steve, the granola-crunching swami of technology who made it all seem so possible: You, too, could drop out of college, take drugs, spend time soul-searching in India, start a company,…

She describes herself as a “first-generation everything.” The oldest of three sisters, Garcia was the first in her Mexican immigrant family to graduate from college, the first to work for a multimillion-dollar corporation, the first to publish a book. And now she’s the first in her family to own a bookstore based in a 300-square-foot storage unit in an alley in Santa Ana. Garcia’s LibroMobile has been in operation for more than a year. It’s a compact but well-designed shop, 2,000 books strong, with more in another storage unit and five free mini-libraries sprinkled around town. She stocks more than 100 zines, local art and a good selection of used, cheap books that lean toward Spanish-language and Latin American literature and history. She also offers recent releases, such as Miriam…

When The Sea Ranch — a radical experiment that merges architecture and ecology — opened in 1965 on a wild stretch of Sonoma coast 100 miles north of San Francisco, it was most remarkable for what it was not. Covenant restrictions for the planned community explicitly forbade stereotypical signs of suburbia: no lawns, no mailboxes or street lamps, no flower beds or garages — certainly no garden gnomes or pink plastic flamingos. The Sea Ranch’s planting guide for owners specifies only native or naturalized vegetation with the caveat to “avoid prettiness — maximize rugged character” and, for flora, no “conspicuous blooming performance.” The only standout element should be the landscape: steep cliffs bordering the ocean, wind-swept meadows formerly grazed by sheep, rows of slanted Monterey cypresses, and dense forest across…