A Land of Shadows

This essay is the foreword to an artistic inquiry into immigrant Chinese life in rural nineteenth-century California – a communal life that was itinerant, vulnerable, preyed upon, resilient, and centrally important in the state's and the nation's history. The project integrates new photographs of the remnants of Chinese settlements in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Sacramento delta areas into a forgotten governmental account of Chinese immigrants, made by D. D. Beatty in Downieville, c.1894. The result is a remade book, part document, part poetic archaeology.

Excavating Asian America in the Sacramento Delta

The Sacramento Delta is an agricultural region in northern California with deep historic significance for Asian Americans. Asian American laborers were instrumental to the development of Sacramento Delta, transforming the swampy peat bog into one of the richest agricultural areas in California. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Chinese laborers constructed levees, dikes, and ditches along the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers before breaking the fertile soil to grow fruit and vegetables including pears and asparagus. Asian Americans continued a permanent and transient presence in the Sacramento Delta on farms as migrant farm laborers, permanent farmworkers, and overseers, and in the small delta towns such as Isleton that emerged as merchants, restaurant operators, boardinghouse operators, and other business owners catering to the local community.

California: The Planet of the Future

Boom interviews prolific science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson about writing, California, and the future. Topics of discussion include utopian and dystopian visions of the state, the Sierra Nevada and Sacramento Delta, the Orange County of Robinson’s youth, how California’s landscape and environment have informed science fiction, terraforming, utopia, dystopia, and finding a balance between technology and environmentalism.

Learning from the LA Aqueduct

This article considers major infrastructure spending projects on the table in California (a high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, a peripheral canal in the Sacramento Delta, higher education) and compares their funding models to that of the Los Angeles Aqueducts. Whereas William Mulholland convinced Angelenos in 1905 to pay for the aqueduct for the benefit of future residents, modern California voters are more likely to insist infrastructure is paid for with a mix of public and private investment, or solely by its end users. Hiltzik argues California’s leaders could learn from Mulholland, whose foresight, adept campaigning, and willingness to shade the truth benefited millions of people.