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Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: The Civil Disobedient

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By Michael Billingsley

The morning of January 15, 1976 started out just like any other in the Skyline neighborhood of southeast San Diego, but there were two special things that set this day apart. For one, it was the day before my 14th birthday. Second, it was the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

There had been a movement to make MLK’s birthday a national holiday—in fact, African Americans all over the country started celebrating before it became a legal holiday. One of the things that appealed to me was that my birthday was on January 16, one day after Dr. King’s and the day before Muhammad Ali’s.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: At the Chargers Game

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By Mario Lewis

“In the mid- to early ’70s my sister and I went to a Chargers game with my father. We (are) actually Raiders fans. My father, is a nice—nice-size man with some nice-size arms and everything and we were enjoying ourselves at the game and at the end of the game these four white guys were following my father out of the game calling him the n-word. Calling US the n-word, I should say.

“I was a youngster. I was maybe about 10 or 11 years old, if that. And so my father had a van and so my father, I guess he knew that he was about to get into a confrontation with ’em because they followed us all the way to the car. My father told us—he said ‘Run and lock yourself in the van.’ Right. So me and my sister ran and we locked ourselves in the van.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: Coming Into San Diego

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By Jimmy Santiago Baca

How stunning the morning desert was to Vito. His heart burst with pleasure and a desire for his childhood days when the sun radiated one tiny ray of faith on his life, a ray that had weight, one he could toss from hand to hand and hold up and carry in his pocket and embrace before sleep and kiss at daybreak.

Fields steamed dew as the pickers arrived. Men, women, and children humped in the furrows, picking. Carmen slept the whole way. He was thinking bad thoughts as her chest rose and fell. He looked away, told himself to stop thinking of touching her. He told himself to shake it out of his head, he could control his mind, he was a trained boxer, he could discipline his body and mind, he could fuck any chick he wanted, but something else was pulling him.

In the miles that stretched out before them he wished Carmen wasn’t engaged to his brother, that she was like so many he’d had—a free-loving chick who just wanted to fuck all night. But no, he was on a mission, and he would never betray his brother.

Still, he reached out and his fingers grazed her cheek and the sweetness of her sleeping face and her breath made something in his chest tighten.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: Living and Working In Poverty

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Grim Reality in “America’s Finest City”

By Susan Duerksen

“Living in poverty” is one of those shorthand terms that rolls easily off the tongues of news anchors and politicians before they turn to the next topic. We all tend to glaze over the full meaning of the phrase, the grinding day-to-day misery of hunger, worry, discomfort, exhaustion, and despair.

In the city of San Diego, the proportion and number of people living in poverty edged up in 2013. It should have gone down. Instead, 7,000 more people in the city live in poverty now, in addition to the 202,000 who remain in that dire situation from the previous year.

Statistically, it was a small increase, nothing drastic. When the Center on Policy Initiatives reported it in an analysis (63) of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the main response from local media and others was a yawn.

But consider what that statistic means. It counts only the people whose household income is below the federal poverty threshold, an absurdly low measure in high-cost places like San Diego. The threshold is the same everywhere in the U.S. and varies only by family size; for example, it’s about $12,000 for a single person and about $24,000 for two adults with two children. That’s per year.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: The Future of Post-Bordernity

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The wall is the materialized representation of this idea of a border. In English people call it a “fence” and in the U.S. that fence means “defense”; something that in American minds brings protection. Interestingly enough you would have to ask them, “Protection from who or what?” And this same wall or barrier or fence means an “offense” to Mexicans.

—Norma Iglesias Prieto

By Perry Vasquez

The U.S./Mexico border is falling apart. Like Chipotle Swiss cheese, it is shot through with gaps, holes, lacunae, erasures, and stretches of emptiness. The border exists—but at times its existence seems to collapse beneath the weight of its own sovereignty.

How does the border both exist and not exist at the same time? How does it manage to appear in strategic locations and disappear in non-strategic ones? Why do we think of the border as having a fixed and permanent national identity instead of a contingent and temporary one?

Like every national myth, the U.S./Mexico border began life as a collective act of imagination.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: Refugees, Late Summer Night

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By Steve Kowit

Woke with a start, the dogs barking out by the fence,
yard flooded with light. Groped my way to the window.
Out on the road a dozen quick figures
hugging the shadows: bundles slung at their shoulders
& water jugs at their hips. You could hear,
under the rattle of wind, as they passed,
the crunch of sneakers on gravel. Pollos. Illegals
who’d managed to slip past the Border Patrol,
its Broncos & choppers endlessly circling
the canyons & hills between here & Tecate.
  [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: San Ysidro Blues — 30 Years After the Massacre

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By Francisco J. Bustos

I remember playing on the kitchen floor when the shots started firing.
I remember my cousin and I running outside the apartment, like many others did.
The sound of bullets instantly changed everybody’s eyes and nobody could
explain it.
We lived on Sunset Lane, just a couple blocks, de aquel Mac Donals, 30 years ago.
We jumped outside at the sound of more bullets,
if we could make it to the corner, we could catch a glimpse of our San Ysidro
Boulevard.

I don’t know why we tried running to that corner. Something pushed us. With every step that we took, more shots sliced the air,
and more shots and more shots, again and again and again.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: Livin’ La Vida Logan

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Barrio Logan is one of the oldest neighborhoods in San Diego. It used to be one whole community called Logan Heights, named after congressman John A. Logan, but the creation of the Interstate 5 freeway that bisected the neighborhood changed that. Then the building of the San Diego–Coronado Bridge changed it again. Thousands were displaced from building the freeway and the bridge. Now Barrio Logan encompasses a relatively small patch of land sandwiched between the San Diego Bay and the I-5 freeway and north of National City and south of San Diego’s East Village.

Fewer than 5,000 people inhabit my barrio. Thousands more come during the day to work here in the shipyards, the Port of San Diego and the other companies that line the bay side of Barrio Logan. Of those 5,000 barrio denizens about 85% of them are non-white, most of which are of Mexican descent. But things are changing.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: From the Border to the Fields

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By Juanita Lopez

It is the year of 2014 and both of my grandparents are very old but alive, though suffering from dementia. I decided to pay them a visit to interview them. Believe it or not, they still live in the same one-bedroom apartment in San Ysidro where they established their U.S. residency in the late 1970s. From their yard, I am able to look at the thousands of tiny houses in Tijuana, where they once lived, dreaming of crossing over for a better opportunity. I look at my dark-skinned grandmother and admire her toothless smile. Her eyes light up every time she sees me. She normally asks me how my brother is doing, and I tell her he’s okay, working like always since he has a baby to take care of now. She smiles and two minutes later asks me the same question. I go over to her kitchen and wash some strawberries that were in her refrigerator. I offer her some after I cut them and sprinkle some sugar on top—my grandmother smiles again and starts telling me about her life, a not-so-sweet story about the times she labored as a farm worker picking strawberries and cutting flowers.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: Excavating San Diego Noir — A Jumping-Off Place

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In Mike Davis’s seminal discussion of noir in City of Quartz he defines the genre as “a fantastic convergence of American ‘tough-guy’ realism, Weimar expressionism, and existentialized Marxism—all focused on unmasking a ‘bright, guilty place.’” Born in the minds of the “Depression-crazed middle classes” of southern California, the “nightmare anti-myth of noir” trafficked in alienation and a distrust of the morality of capitalism. More specifically, Davis notes how “noir everywhere insinuated contempt for a depraved business culture while it simultaneously searched for a critical mode of writing or filmmaking within it.” Thus in the “through-the-glass-darkly” novels of this new genre, early noir writers created “a regional fiction obsessively concerned with puncturing the bloated image of Southern California as the golden land of opportunity and the fresh start.” In so doing, they transformed “each charming ingredient of the booster’s arcadia into a sinister equivalent.”   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: A Revolution In Urban Planning, Part II

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The Story of How a Small Working-Class Coastal Community Within San Diego Spoiled the Establishment’s Plans and in the Process Created a Revolution in Urban Planning.

While it participated deeply in the negotiations during the remainder of 1974 and into the next year, the Community Planning Group had enough depth to juggle its activism and successfully respond to new construction projects—mainly large, bulky apartments—still coming down the development pipeline. Over this period CPG was able to block the construction of eight five-story high-rise apartments, most of them aimed for the fragile edges of Sunset Cliffs.

With the limited consensus reached on certain issues by the Committee of 12/16, in Spring of 1975 the city published a brand new Precise Plan—complete with a colorful cover. This was the formalization of the earlier Draft Revision and carried more weight, and again, it confirmed the city’s rejection of the worst of the original plan; no mini-Miami Beach, no marina, no high-rise along the coast. Yet, still it had major faults, and activists were disappointed that there hadn’t been more progress between the Draft Revision published in January 1974 and the latest version, put out over a year later.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: A Revolution In Urban Planning, Part I

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The Story of How a Small Working-Class Coastal Community Within San Diego Spoiled the Establishment’s Plans and in the Process Created a Revolution in Urban Planning.

By Frank Gormlie

It was early afternoon on a hot July day in 2014 when then San Diego City Council President Todd Gloria gaveled the Council meeting to order. First on the agenda was a vote on the newly updated community plan of Ocean Beach, a small coastal neighborhood of the city—called simply “OB.” The Council’s action that day should have been a routine procedure, approving the product of a process initiated by the city’s own planning department, ostensibly a process integrating the community plan of Ocean Beach into the larger General Plan of the City of San Diego.

Yet what was going on that day was anything but routine or ordinary.   [Read more…]

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