Reflecting on the stories behind a belt buckle that he inherited from his father, the author traces his father’s history and his family’s several migrations across the U.S.-Mexico border. The belt buckle depicts a bull and rider, and the article discusses the history of charrería and rodeo, the mingling of Mexican, American, European and indigenous traditions

A handsome blond, Leon Patterson looked like a picture of the California dream; more than a few of us yearned to be him. He was, however, the product of the California reality: poverty, toil, and grit. His family had struggled west from Arkansas searching for opportunities in the shadow of the Great Depression. The Pattersons were part of the larger, second wave of “Okies, Arkies, and Texies” who migrated during the 1940s. The Great Central Valley, at 15,000,000 acres about the size of Egypt, held the promise of at least seasonal work, even for unskilled laborers—especially at its larger southern end, called the San Joaquin Valley by locals. By World War II, the Valley had become one of the state’s economic engines, sustained by agribusiness, oil, and abundant cheap labor.

The social history of the Central Valley has been poked, prodded, dissected by generations of journalists, photographers, historians, storytellers of all stripes looking to puzzle out once and for all the poverty-choked enigma that is California's farm belt. From The Grapes of Wrath to Cesar Chavez, the bleak warm tales of William Saroyan to the harsh reality of Japanese internment, the Central Valley grows stories so tragic, deep, and humanly rich that in just 100 years or so it's claimed far more than seems its fair share in the broader American tale. Every year brings another crop of stories, but sitting in the pew that Sunday morning, the one I was hearing and seeing had somehow slipped from the net. Even I, who had grown up close by, had missed this one. Glimpsed it, but not seen it for what it really was.

A family heirloom testifies to generations of California history, most especially its history of people struggling to hold on to what they have, to get back what they lost, or to climb towards economic prosperity.

This narrative essay explores the role of interpersonal connections among people from diverse backgrounds and how they fill in for much of the social services being eliminated from the state government.

In “Ambassadors in Overalls: Mexican Guest Workers and the Future of Labor,” Matt Garcia explores this the legacy of the Bracero Program, a bilateral agreement initiated in 1942 between the United States and Mexico that invited male Mexican nationals to do mostly farm labor in California and throughout the rest of the nation. Presumed to have ended in 1964, Garcia explores how guest worker programs of this type have continued to the present in multiple forms and in numerous countries. In the United States, they are often proposed as a solution to the problem of our broken immigration system in spite of a record of failure to ensure safe and fair working conditions for participants. Increasingly, Garcia argues, these programs are shaping the way we all live, work, and belong in this world.

Immigrants, whether characterized as "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers," have been a constant feature of California history from its beginning. This essay looks at immigration controversies during the Mexican era. Hurtado finds striking parallels with todays immigration debates. This history, he argues, should help us to think more creatively and humanely about the problem of the border.

Convicts and undocumented immigrants are similarly excluded from full social and political membership in the United States. Disfranchised, denied core protections of the social welfare state and subject to forced removal from their homes, families, and communities, convicts and undocumented immigrants, together, occupy the caste of outsiders living within the United States. This essay explores the rise of the criminal justice and immigration control systems that frame the caste of outsiders. Reaching back to the forgotten origins of immigration control during the era of black emancipation, this essay highlights the deep and allied inequities rooted in the rise of immigration control and mass incarceration.

This article uses California’s long history of migration to question efforts by local Tea Party activists to push for an anti-immigration law modeled after Arizona’s notorious S.B. 1070. Focusing on Mary Hunter Austin’s description of a multilingual, transborder celebration of el Grito de la Independencia (Mexican Independence Day) in the Owens Valley in 1903, the article argues that the Tea Party’s anti-immigrant ideology relies on a flattening of history to cast migrant workers as outsiders and naturalize Anglo dominance of the region.

Eating at Los Angeles’s iconic restaurant, The Proud Bird, and considering the city as a nexus of migration and a crucible of belonging.

“Interview with Yolanda Cruz” is a conversation with filmmaker Yolanda Cruz, a graduate of UCLA’s film school and 2011 Sundance Screenwriters Lab Fellow. The interview focuses on her filmmaking, indigenous origins as a Chatino (one of sixteen indigenous groups in Oaxaca, Mexico), and views of indigenous peoples in California and across the globe. The interview spends time on Cruz’s latest film, 2501 Migrants , which depicts the unique work of Alejandro Santiago, an indigenous artist from Oaxaca, who uses his artwork to bring attention to the migrants who have left the region and created what has been called “cultural and domestic abandonment.”