My curse is memory. I remember the car accident that changed my life when I was barely eighteen months old. I remember my childhood with exacting clarity—the day, for instance, when I was six and spoke my first words of English, and I can tell you exactly how those words made me feel: filled with pride but also with insecurity. You can see how I’ve learned to use this bastard tongue to my advantage. I have come a long way with my hoard of memories, and the road has not been straight, but rather a zigzag that at times...

If you were raised in Fresno, Bakersfield, or Sacramento, you don’t have a connection to the California missions. Yes, you recognize the oxidized iron bells along the highway marking their relative location, but you don’t give them much attention. When you visit a mission, as everyone in California does sooner or later, it is merely an ethnic curiosity left over from two centuries ago that has nothing to do with you or your growing up in Sacramento or wherever. To you the missions are relics of a romantic past lit by the sunset’s rosy glow and, like all relics, they...

These words spoken by a Mexican woman on trial for murder at the height of the California Gold Rush jumped out at me when I first read them in a newspaper dated 1851. Who was this woman who spoke in public so calmly yet forcefully, and for whom the only name we have is Josefa? The tragic circumstances of her death obsessed me for weeks, till finally, one summer day I drove out from San Francisco to visit the Mother Lode country, La Veta Madre, as themexicanoscalled it, the site of this story. I crossed over the San...

When I first return to the San Fernando Valley, I am that strange breed of native son who has no inkling of his landscape, no insight into his history. I lack the basic knowledge most six-year-olds would have of this culture, as if I’ve been dropped from another planet, and my tongue has never spoken a single word of English.

Eventually, years later, I will learn this history. One day in 1915, my grandfather Agustín Lugo brought my grandmother Ramona and my Uncle Carlos, then three years old, to the border town of Juárez, Mexico. They had come by train...

On October 21, 1955, I crossed the border from Tijuana to San Ysidro, completing a full-circle journey that had taken me from North Hollywood to Mexico City and back. California is mytierra natal, but my first memories of life are of Mexico City: El Mercado La Merced, Chapultepec Park, the songs of El Cri-Cri on the radio, andfotonovelasof El Santo, the legendary masked wrestler. I was five years old when I left “La Capital” and came to the border town with my older brother, Raymond, and my grandmother. We rented a yellow house on Calle Segunda, next...

During the 1970s, the Mission District in San Francisco teemed with painters, muralists, poets, and musicians, even the occasional politico or community organizer who acted beyond the rhetoric and actually accomplished something. We called it La Misión, or La Mission, and we spokeespañol, caló, Spanglish, or just plain unadorned English. We had no problem being understood because La Mission was a microcosm of Latin America, and the whole barrio seemed in perfect sync. A cutting-edge music scene, fueled by musicians like Carlos Santana; the Escovedo Brothers (Pete and Coke); and groups like Malo, with Jorge Santana, brother of Carlos,...

No one knows for certain what the indigenous population of California numbered when the first missionaries, soldiers, andpobladoresarrived in 1769. Estimates range from 300,000 people to perhaps a million, grouped into thousands of communities.¹ If these figures are even remotely accurate, California supported the highest concentration of indigenous population in North America outside of central Mexico. The Native Americans lived quite well here; they were healthy, robust, and they depended on little or no agriculture. Theirs was a hunter-gatherer society, more gatherer than hunter, a society so in tune with nature’s cycles that its members survived off the...

It is a Sunday in the middle of July, and the hills above the Golden Gate strait are an explosion of wildflowers—blue lupines, red Indian paintbrushes, yellow monkey flowers—but the fog has rolled in from the Pacific, clamping its cold hand on my face. I am hiking through Fort Barry, the former U.S. Army base at the Marin Headlands, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from the city, and the trail gives me a spectacular view of San Francisco. It is a beautiful contradiction: the summer landscape, the frigid weather, and the abandoned army base now occupied by...

It’s one of those freezing San Francisco summer days, typical July weather in the city. No doubt someone will get a flash of inspiration and think themselves quite original by quoting Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Twain never said that, but it’s true, nonetheless. It seems that only La Mission is sunny and warm in the city.

As I write this, in the year 2001, there’s a fierce struggle going on in La Mission between the families, artists, and working people who already live here and the affluent and arrogant who...