First Latino governor of the Golden State? | Vida en el Valle

Former Los Ángeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa plans on running for governor of California in 2018--and has been touring the state, which despite its enormous wealth also has the highest poverty rate in the nation.  

CENSUS DATA  

"Of the largest 300 cities in the nation that are impacted by high poverty rates, 77 are in California and 3 of the top 5 most poverty-stricken towns are in the Central Valley."

According to VIDA en el Valle--a HIspanic Weekly, serving California  San Joaquin Valleuy, Villaraigosa has been on an intensive tour of the area.

Below is a condensed version of VIDA's article, from which M/e is quoting directly.

“I learned that the whole water issue is more complex than people in the big cities would have you believe. I also learned that there are a lot of hard working people who are not working anymore,” said Villaraigosa.

He compared the Central Valley and its people to the Midwest.

“They believe in family, God, have a strong work ethic and believe in this great country. But for some reason, they, and people from the Inland Empire all share this sense that their issues and their problems are not really important to some of our policymakers and that nobody listens to them.”

Part of his Central Valley tour included a stop in East Porterville, an unincorporated community in Tulare County that has been plagued by drinking water issues for years and claims about 12 percent of the state’s failed water wells. Dozens of government agencies and nonprofit organizations have stepped in to help the community, eventually drawing international media attention for its woes as California’s drought worsens. 

“I learned that if you are lucky enough to be a homeowner in East Porterville, you get a 50 gallon tank of water; and if you are poor you have to shower in a truck,” said Villaraigosa.

California/Mississippi Poverty Rates

This chart is 2013, but the economic divide, between rich and poor, has increased in California, and the housing adjusted poverty rate has climbed to 27%, worse for seniors and children's and minorities.  States like California, New York, Florida, Texas--which do not rank as badly using traditional measures-- turn out to have much higher poverty rates, among the worst in the nation, when adjusted for cost of living.  There are similar problems, in California, in regards to public schooling.   The US government has recently begun to adjust poverty rankings based on cost of living, this you will see conflicting figures from the government itself, between 16 and 27%, with the United way putting the figure in the low 30 percentiles.   DS 

IN A LONELY PLACE: Dorothy Hughes

CRIME SEGEMENTS takes a backwards glance at both the book and movie, both noir classics, though with very different conceptions of the main character.

"It was good standing there on the promontory overlooking the evening sea, the fog lifting itself like gauze veils to touch his face.  There was something in it akin to flying, the sense of being lifted high above crawling earth, of bingprt of th wildnss of sir.  Something too of being closed within an unknown and strange world of mist and cloud and wind.   He’d liked flying at night; he missed after the way had crashed to and finsih and dribbled to an en.  It wasn’t the same fluing a little private create.  He’d tried it; it was like returning to the stone ax after precision tools.  He had found nothing yet to take the place of flying wild."  OPENING PARAGRAPH IN A LONELY PLACE, Dorothy Hughes, 1942.  Reissued by The Feminist Press, 2002   

DADA BORDELLO

Dada Bordello, penultimate night of Dada World's Fair, Oddfellows Home, San Francisco. 

HITLER ONLY KIDDING ABOUT ANTI-SEMIITISM, NY TIMES, 1922

"Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes."

"You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them."

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

-Maya Angelou

SIN SORROCO: PRISON NOIR

.... " a unique voice among crime novelists. She doesn’t write about private eyes and her stories are not plot-driven, but she does pull the reader into the off-kilter lives of women and men living outside mainstream society. Having spent time in California jails and prisons, Soracco is intimately acquainted with milieus like the ones her convict and ex-convict characters inhabit...far from the mostly lily-white preserves of too much U.S. literary fiction." from January Magaine

from GREEN ARCADE BOOKS

STAGED AT LITQUAKE: DEATH OF TEDDY BALLGAME