Writing a memoir is both an act of selfishness and selflessness.

On the one hand: whoever that is

you

to think that your life is important enough that others want to read about it? You were born, you grew up, you will tell the world something new.

On the other side your story

is

important, especially if you’re a Californian.

As we approach our state’s 175th anniversary in 2025, now is the time to capture what you experienced on paper, video or audio. We have been at the forefront of both good and bad trends that have affected the course of American history, if not the world, and it is vital that we document what we have seen while we can.

That’s the theme that came to mind when a slew of memoirs by Californians, famous and otherwise, came across my desk this year. The insights, triumphs, and tragedies in my four favorites offer a way to tackle the uncertain future of the Golden States and serve as a challenge you can take down

yours

own thoughts for future generations.

Latinos have always had difficulty connecting their memories to the California experience. Take Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769-1849 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, which was written in Spanish in 1875 and finally published in English this year by the University of Oklahoma Press. The author, after whom the city of Vallejo is named, is a titan of California history, someone who fought the American invasion of the late 1840s and then participated in the state’s Constitutional Convention.

It is not a quick read in two parts, 1,345 pages and more than 100 maps, photos and illustrations, but it is necessary

read

.

In a florid style, Vallejo retells everything from the Portol Expedition, the first time Europeans explored California by land, to the Gold Rush through historical excavations, government documents, and his own memories and opinions. He says many harsh words against the Yankees who have so scandalously deprived the Californios of their possessions and held the Mexicans in low esteem almost from the moment the two groups met. Writing about how schools in San Francisco in his later years taught German but not Spanish, Vallejo writes: The Germans are praised to high heavens, while the Hispano-Americans are despised.

Vallejo had every reason to be upset, and not just because of the loss of power and land. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M.

Senkewicz

the editors and translators of Recuerdos, reveal in a great introduction how Vallejo’s magnum opus was one of dozens of Californio books

testimonials

(oral histories) collected by Hubert Howe Bancroft, the Dean of California History. Rather than publish them in English, Bancroft reduced them to sources for his seven-volume History of California. over a century.

Well, if Bancroft doesn’t believe what I and others say, Bancroft can just go to hell and write his history there, Vallejo wrote in the margin of his copy of Bancroft’s work. Bancroft has no reason to doubt those who know more about the events than he does.

I’m sure former LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky would have liked more than a thousand pages to unravel his own remarkable story. But Zev’s Los Angeles: From Boyle Heights to the Halls of Power is no less

by

a sprawling, rolling California story. The son of Ukrainian immigrants who became one of the most important politicians in post-World War II Los Angeles, he guides readers through his life and career with anecdotes and asides in a style that, like him, is clear, insightful, confident, and crusading.

He tells the backstories behind his greatest hits, the fight for Prop

position

13 and against Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates, the near bankruptcy of LA County in the early 1990s, his time at the LA

c

ity

c

municipality and province

b

advice from

S

supervisors. Although he hasn’t been in office since 2014, Yaroslavsky certainly voices his opinions on Mayor Karen Bass (good), Southern California’s homelessness crisis (bad), and the county government (he prefers an elected official who can run the county in instead of a system with five supervisors). where no one is in charge). But the most Yaroslavsky episode is one that few talk about today: the decade

–

long battle over the removal of a cross from the provincial seal.

He introduces the story by recalling how every Christmas the side of LA City Hall would light up with a cross visible all the way to his family’s apartment in Boyle Heights. Why didn’t LA’s leaders, Yaroslavsky asked his father, also hang a Star of David? Fast forward to 2004, when he and his fellow supervisors, Yvonne Burke and Gloria Molina, voted to remove a cross from LA County’s seal, arguing it would save taxpayers from an ACLU lawsuit.

Hundreds of people protested, and conservative commentators vilified Yaroslavsky. Not only did he not back down, he also entered into direct discussions with opponents. He says he took over his secretaries’ phones to answer dozens of angry calls, including from an Armenian Christian woman who took his mother’s Hebrew class at Los Angeles City College in the 1950s. They agreed to disagree, but on extremely friendly and respectful terms.

It is the classic Yaroslavsky approach that this country needs in these politically volatile times. We must find and choose leaders with character and integrity, he writes in an epilogue. They are the ones who will guide our democracy into the future. If we fail, we do so at our own risk.

Speaking of people, Oregon State professor Adam Schwartz is a nice Jewish guy from the Tarzana side of the San Fernando Valley who published his own LA memoir, Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a Foreign Language Education. It is technically a textbook designed for gringo teachers and Hispanic students that challenges their ideas about whiteness and Hispanic in this country.

I know: it sounds like an academic bore, and it seems so. Schwartz offers group and individual exercises, cites

wokoso

favorites

search right away

bell hooks and Mike Davis and begins chapters with quotes and key phrases that could easily make a layperson roll their eyes. Although I am familiar with the practice, I had to figure out what indexicality means. But Schwartz, who invited me to speak to his class years ago, anchors it all in one of the most unique, soulful LA memoirs I’ve read in years.

His battleground is an education system that privileges white and Jewish students like himself and denigrates the insights of Latinos. Schwartz follows his school life with hilarious and moving photos and stories, from elementary school to high school, where he chose to use Francisco in his Spanish class, a name he even put on his Jamba Juice employee badge by helping students cope with COVID and Trump. The

prof,

an applied linguist whose specialty is Spanish language education in the US, states that his journey to becoming an acolyte and advocate for the language of Cervantes is one that anyone can follow and one that will benefit us all.

Dialogue means listening carefully, even when you are tempted to say something or turn away, he writes early in the book. Dialogue is therefore likely to provoke discomfort, and that is to be expected.

One of the people Schwartz thanks in his acknowledgments is Lydia R. Otero, a polymath if ever there was one: a union electrician who worked on the 105 Freeway and the first sections of the subway line, a pioneering queer activist in Los Angeles, a historian of Mexican-Americans in Tucson and a beloved professor at the University of Arizona.

Otero, who identifies as non-binary, connects these disparate threads

their hair

taut, warmly told LA Interchanges: A Brown & Queer Archival Memoir.

They arrived in LA from Arizona in 1978 and joined an emerging Latino LGBTQ+ scene that was fighting for visibility among fellow Latinos and queer people alike. LA Interchanges intersperses personal memories with a much-needed roll call of bars, clubs, publications, organizations, and individuals whose names remain absent from mainstream Southern California LGBTQ+ history.

My goal, Otero writes in the intro, is to portray gays of color as makers of history.

The story is compelling enough, but just as important to Otero are the archives

she she

preserved all these decades later: flyers, articles, newsletters and, most importantly, photos that range from protests and conventions to one of Otero in a 1981 Dodgers World Series championship T-shirt, drinking a glass of milk and eating what appears to be a Ding Dong.

Activism is important, the author argues, but so is a life full of joy and the memory of it.

When I moved [to Los Angeles], Otero concludes, I saw it as a place of possibilities. It met my expectations and more.

If that isn’t the best summary of the California Dream, I don’t know what is.