Thousands of women who survived the Vietnam War, whose husbands were sent to reeducation camps after working with American military, now live in the US, where nail salons anchor almost every strip mall and flourish inside luxury malls as well. The history of how Vietnamese women came to work in the nail industry and how Americans became accustomed to manicures and pedicures is entwined with the loss of home and landscape.

The late 20 th and 21 st century tech boom-related gentrification of San Francisco has rapidly and violently displaced longtime city residents, particularly in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of the Mission District. While some may characterize this gentrification as more economically than racially consequential, the negligible overlap between Latino and techie demographics means that the possible disappearance of Latino San Francisco is very real. This essay uses the famed murals of the Mission District as the lens through which we can see Latinos’ complex and historical presence in this California city, and then interrogate how they can continue to play a part in its future.

Albany Bulb, a former landfill, is a thirty-one-acre battleground for the Bay Area’s competing progressive movements for social justice, environmental conservation, and politically engaged art. Street protest, lawsuits, regulatory jockeying, anarchist camp-ins, and art have all been deployed in the name of saving this oddball spit of land from and for its users of many species. Drawing from information collected over sixteen years of visits to the Bulb, including scores of hours of interviews beginning in 2013, this essay brings together work from an interdisciplinary team of UC Berkeley students and Bulb residents to apply techniques of ethnography, contemporary archaeology, oral history, participatory mapping, mobile apps, botany, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to the study of the Bulb.

A personal essay about visiting and living in the California desert, the architecture and art created there, and what does and doesn’t “belong” there. There are considerations of homesteader cabins, motels, “villains’ houses” and the author’s own ambivalent urges to own a piece of the desert, with references to Ed Ruscha, Rayner Banham and Noah Purifoy.

The author, who is chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, considers the diversity of beliefs and cultural practices of Native Californians. What all tribes share is a tie to a specific landscape and a brutal European colonization that worked to break that tie. Sarris discusses ways that native Californians have found ways to once again strengthen those ties, such as the Bole Maru, or Dream Dance. The religion contains elements of older beliefs and ceremonies, but increasingly puts more stress on the afterlife.

California is experiencing a proliferation of public religious celebrations like never before. The authors focus on four public celebrations: the throwing of colors during Holi, an annual pilgrimage to Manzanar, the Peruvian celebration of El Señor de Los Milagros, and Noche de Altares. Even as these and many other similar festivals simultaneously represent the irruption and interruption of the sacred in the public sphere, these festivals reflect the multi-religious character of immigration. These public rituals say something about the pursuit of belonging in California and in the United States within an increasingly diverse and multicultural landscape. Those who participate together as intimate strangers are often seeking only a temporary affiliation, perhaps a place for a moment to engage one another beyond the context of the marketplace. In sharing in these religious and cross-cultural experiences, participants become enmeshed in the complicated and vibrant diversity of California, up close and personal, as physical as the bodies encountered there.

Non-Californians rarely refer to the Golden State as a sacred place or religious landscape. Yet, California fascinates, in part, due to its religious extravagance–think Jim Jones, Heavens Gate, the Crystal Cathedral, Harold Camping’s predicted end of the world, the Grateful Dead. Everything is here, and then some. This essay looks at California as an epicenter of religious expression and a global microcosm for hybrid religions, new religions, and experimental religious practices. The essay analyzes migration, the California/Mexico border, genders/sexualities, race/ethnicity, commercialization, embodiment/disembodiment, and the natural world as lenses on California’s religious landscape.

Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron in Berkeley more than eighty years ago did more than introduce a uniquely efficient and effective atom-smasher to the world of high-energy physics; it launched the paradigm of capital-intensive, large-team research known as “Big Science.” The paradigm’s offspring include the Manhattan Project, the moon landings, the Human Genome Project, and research into climate change. But it raises questions about the influence of money on basic research and how society should weigh competing demands for resources among practical social needs and the quest for fundamental knowledge of our natural world.

The Santa Ana River, running through three of the largest counties in America, has a long, often overlooked history from Native American settlement to the contemporary industrial corridor, but always riparian and beautiful. This essay and accompanying photographs explore the middle section of the river, which runs through San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, the Native American settlement of Agua Mansa, the exploration of de Anza, and the current landscape of homeless residents in an emerging post-industrial landscape.

San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal, symbolized California’s desire for preeminence in Pacific trade and naval power. The expected reopening of an enlarged Panama Canal in 2015 is causing shippers, ports, and military strategists to reassess how the Golden State should adapt to the ever-growing importance of the Pacific world in global affairs. Such ongoing and future adaptations to the enlarged Panama Canal will continue to underscore and augment California’s perennially close ties to the Pacific world.

San Diego vied with San Francisco to host the 1915 World’s Fair. San Francisco won, but San Diego went ahead and staged the International Panama-California Exposition. Planners of both fairs traded on ideas of empire to raise their cities’ profiles and capitalize on increased commercial opportunities promised by the newly opened Panama Canal, but they took very different approaches. In San Diego, city leaders saw themselves as inheritors of Spain’s colonial empire and as the critical link to a new American empire at the intersection of Latin America and the Pacific. They also saw themselves as the pinnacle of human progress and conquest, distinct from a supposedly primitive nonwhite past and a romantic Spanish interlude. The impact of this view of California history can still be seen and still troubles the state today.

This article recounts the history of the author's house and surrounding area in the Golden Gate neighborhood of Oakland, California, from the pre-colonial era to the present. The article emphasizes the repeated instances of displacement of one class of residents by another: colonization by the Spanish, the post-Gold Rush Anglo takeover, agriculture giving way to suburban development, the African American migration to Oakland, and contemporary gentrification. The author positions the current wave of gentrification and displacement in his neighborhood and city in the context of that history.

This essay reflects on the life and service of late U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, also known as J. Christopher Stephens, and focuses on his roots as a Californian. Stevens is best known as the ambassador who died in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. The essay examines geographical perspective and orientation, the emotional effects of differing topography, the meanings of “here” vs. “there,” and “home” vs. “away.” In particular, the essay reflects on the orientation of Ambassador Stevens in terms of his place in the world. To those at home he was going away from the center of his world. To those he worked with in the Middle East he came to the center, which was where he knew he needed to be.

The author returns to Bakersfield, California to clear out her childhood home and confronts the unsustainable reality of life in today’s San Joaquin Valley. Presented as a series of narratives related by friends and neighbors during trips to Bakersfield’s immense landfill site, Maretich paints a picture of a community struggling under the effects of high crime, increasing poverty, and diminishing expectations in the wake of the Great Recession, which for Bakersfield is far from over. Exploring themes of sustainability, environmental policy, and personal responsibility, Maretich shines a light on one of California’s most important and least understood regions.

Carolyn Finney and Rue Mapp talk with Boom editor Jon Christensen about their work with people, diversity, and nature in California. They discuss the mistaken perception that African Americans are disconnected from nature, and the opportunities and challenges in putting agencies such as the National Park Service in dialogue with diverse communities.

This essay looks at the history of Santa Cruz Island and preservation and conservation efforts there through the work of the National Park Service, the Nature Conservancy, and the University of California Natural Reserve System. Alagona argues that these efforts are sometimes counterproductive because they rely on incomplete or outmoded understanding of the island’s human and ecological history. A better understanding of how history, culture, and nature shaped each other would lead to more complete conversation and better land management decisions.

An interview with writer Rebecca Solnit, about San Francisco’s ongoing upheaval during the tech boom. Topics covered include tech commuter shuttles (aka Google Buses), Silicon Valley, San Francisco’s history as a place where culture flourishes, and how the city is becoming an expensive bedroom community for tech workers who commute to jobs in Silicon Valley.

Michael Dear examines the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, from the first commission formed to map and delineate the physical border to the border fences constructed in recent decades as a response to illegal immigration and fears of terror threats. He considers this place in between two nations to be its own third country, which he calls Bajalta, where the border isn’t a division but the connective membrane of the borderlands.

Using his family’s experience of coming to the United States as refugees from Vietnam, Andrew Lam meditates on the history and future of children who come to the United States as refugees from violent places. In addition to examining the writer’s own life, the essay discusses Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers responsible for the bombs at the 2013 Boston marathon, and considers how success and failure in the United States shapes the refugee children who come to this country.