Hollywood has defined the Golden State long enough. Time for a great, new California story

It’s clear to me as a native Californian and professional writer that what the Golden State really needs is a good story that captures the imagination but is rooted in the complexity and ethnic diversity of California today.

In the 20th Century, California — home to Walt Disney and Hollywood studios — was a veritable story factory, albeit one that too often reduced people of my ethnic group and others to bit parts.

Notable California authors, including John Steinbeck, Amy Tan, William Saroyan and Richard Rodriguez, have produced better stories.

Today what we need is for more people to step forward and tell the California story — and for those stories to inform the next generation of Hollywood myth-makers, poets, authors, artists and journalists.

It should start with Gov. Gavin Newsom, but he is too arrogant and detached to be a storyteller-in-chief. The Prince of Privilege acts as if doing public relations for California is beneath him. He seems most comfortable with people of his rarefied class or in carefully scripted photo ops.

So I searched elsewhere.

A former reporter, columnist and professor at Baylor University, Macarena Hernandez is what I call a “good journo.” A native of La Joya, Texas — a small town in the Rio Grande Valley — who produces podcasts and works as a freelance writer, Hernandez got a masters in journalism at UC Berkeley in the 1990s.

Her introduction to California came a decade earlier, when she worked in the fields of the Central Valley until age 14, moving around farm towns like Shafter, Mendota and Parlier. Alongside her parents and siblings, she cut grapes and laid them out to dry into raisins as — in her words — “the world’s worst migrant worker ever.”

Hernandez considers California her “second home,” a place that shaped her early understanding of the world.

“I loved California,” she said. “I have good memories, even though it was really hard work. And I also learned what the world was going to look like, because, in California, you had all kinds of people, something I didn’t see in Texas at the time. I realized the world was so much bigger, and the possibilities were also so much greater.”

But not without their share of injustice.

“I learned about inequality in California because I saw how invisible we were as farmworkers,” she noted. “The unfairness of life really struck me.”

“So,” I asked my friend, “what’s the California story?”

“People want to see humanity,” Hernandez said. “A state like California had to reckon with changing demographics and making sure it builds a state where everyone has equal footing.”

According to the 2020 U.S. census, California has the highest poverty rate in America when adjusted for the high cost of housing in the Golden State. A 2019 study by the Oakland-based Insight Center for Community Development found that more than half of Latino households in California were having trouble making ends meet.

With whites accounting for just 36% of the population, California is a “majority-minority” state — and the future of America. It’s a future of emerging and ascending communities whose time has come.

“If you want to create a society where people are treated with dignity, then it’s going to be hard,” she said. “California leads the way in these hard conversations.”

That sounds to me like one heck of a good story.