When I was in high school, the anthropologist Leo Chavez was working in my hometown of Carlsbad, California, on an ethnographic study of a community of migrants who were living in a small valley just off of El Camino Real.
I knew nothing about the community, or what happened to them. I only found out about the forced eviction of the 200 or so people when I was in college at UC Santa Cruz about 10 years later. Until then, it was as if the whole event had never happened.
My professor assigned the book Shadowed Lives (by Chavez) for my Latin American Studies class. I turned to the chapter about "Green Valley," the community of migrant workers who were forced to leave after local residents protested their presence.
All of this happened under my nose, while I was busy surfing, playing baseball, and learning the kinds of things that school boards and administrators find appropriate. I learned very little about the history of the country that borders my own, Mexico, or the people who come from there. I learned very little about the long relationship between my own country and the one that was just 45 minutes away on the 5 freeway.
Benedict Anderson wrote about imagined communities. Looking back, it seems to me that my own community was highly imagined. There was reality, and then there was what my community preferred to construct itself as. The identity of Carlsbad was very much focused upon its historical ties to certain Euroamerican settlers who arrived in the late 19th century.
Many people–those who did not really fit into the prescribed narrative–were written out of the imagined and constructed identity of my home town. Despite more than 8,000 years of occupation in the region (and plenty of archaeological evidence to back that claim), Native American people remained next to invisible in the histories of the city.
But that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore, right? Wrong.
While such processes of erasure and exclusion seem like they should belong in the distant past...they do not. The residents of Green Valley were not so graciously reminded of the fact that they did not belong in the community of Carlsbad, let along the imagined community of the United States of America.
And it did not happen in some remote, unknown place. It all happened in my back yard. In the dream of adolescence, I was completely oblivious of it all. Now, some 15 years later, I look around at where I came from and see all of the cracks and scars in my community’s history–and I wonder why there wasn’t more room for others’ lives in our limited imaginations.