Middle Son of California

Immigration, identity, and spectacle in the Golden State — a personal reflection

this is no bueno

As I watch events in LA, I feel a pull in my bones reminding me that I’m a son of California. But these days I feel like the middle son, caught between Gavin Newsom and Stephen Miller. Conflicted as hell. I’m literally between their ages and views, and metaphorically focused on keeping the family from tearing itself apart. One minute I’m raging at the farce of U.S. immigration policy and brick-throwing protesters waving Mexican flags. The next, I’m cringing at Trump’s police-state theatrics and the cruel targeting of innocents.

We’re walking into a trap, and the media spectacle is part of it. In a hyperreal world, we have to remember that this isn’t reality TV. It’s actual reality. People will get hurt if we treat it like a show. And yet the fuse is already lit. California dreamin’ has become California screaming, and my mediating, middle-son sensibilities are on high alert. Though I haven’t lived there in decades, California still lives in me — this drive to solve problems and dig for gold in the dirt. And maybe those instincts offer a way out. But to get there, I need to share some personal history….

A hundred years ago, a little Mexican girl named Concepción — my grandmother — crossed the dusty desert border into California. This was before 1929, when crossing wasn’t a crime. Her family settled in East L.A., where she did domestic work for a Hollywood Hills family with Mayflower roots. Their son flirted with her. She flirted back. Scandal ensued. They married and had four kids, including my mom, who now lives in Mexico as a dual citizen — full circle. Concepción became Connie, but to me she was always “Grammy.”

Around the same time, in San Francisco, my great-grandfather — a Scottish-trained surgeon — presided over the Bohemian Club as president.¹ I have old photos of him with well-dressed tycoons and gay-looking artists leaning on redwoods at the Bohemian Grove.² My family still has a cabin nearby, and I swim in the same river he did.

my relative is the guy in white pants

Meanwhile, another great-grandfather ran a theater in San Francisco. He was born in Stockton, the son of a Berlin-born doctor. They all shared the initials F.A.G., a long-running joke in my family. My grandfather, F.A.G. III, grew up skateboarding the hills of Cow Hollow.

The original F.A.G.

To my ancestors, California was a land of golden opportunity. In 1925, it was still a semi-frontier with only 3.9 million people. It was conservative then, even nativist. Now it’s ten times more populous and deep blue.

In the postwar boom, California became a middle-class Xanadu. Ancestries like mine merged into its own culture, mythologized by shows like The Brady Bunch. In photos from the ‘60s, my dad looks like he’d wandered off the set of Gidget.

I was born in Marin County in the mid-1970s, when you could still buy a home there for several huckleberries. Now they’re over $2 million, and affordability issues have pushed many people out.

We left the state when I was eight, but I returned for college and visited the Russian River every summer. I remember the fight over Prop 187, a voter initiative to restrict public services to undocumented immigrants.³ It passed, then got struck down by a liberal judge who said enforcement was a federal responsibility. Ironically, this is the same argument Trump is now making.

In the decades since, I’ve watched California charge into the future in ways both inspiring and maddening. There’s traffic, crime, homelessness, inequality. Yet it’s also home to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, elite universities, and one of the most dynamic populations on earth. The Anglo-Castizo middle-class culture of my childhood has become a stratified multicultural society — and it still mostly works.

But the California Jerry Brown helped shape is showing cracks. The uneasy alliance of countercultural, neoliberal, and pro-government sensibilities that defined “Californian ideology” is buckling. You see it in San Francisco’s squalor⁴, LA’s wildfires, and the state’s sketchy finances. Don’t even mention high-speed rail.

Now a new generation is grappling with those contradictions. And out of this swirl of forces step two sons of California, squaring off over immigration.

Stephen Miller, the testy younger son with villain vibes, stands for sovereignty and rule of law. And he’s willing to round up laborers at Home Depot to make the point.

Gavin Newsom, the slick elder son who flouted his pandemic policies in the most gauche caviar way imaginable at the French Laundry, is now defying Trump’s ICE-and-Marines escalation in LA, calling it unconstitutional and reckless.

To Miller, Newsom enables lawlessness.

To Newsom, Miller enables authoritarianism.

Then there’s me: the middle son, arms outstretched, trying to stop the fight, yelling: This is not reality TV! I share Miller’s fury at decades of unenforced law. And I share Newsom’s urge to protect the innocent.

If I were to offer a mediated path, my motto would be sovereignty without cruelty.

We need a smarter plan to achieve immigration sovereignty — one that deports criminals and takes national security risks seriously, but that stops short of mass expulsions of law-abiding laborers. Blunt-force deportations will backfire, and I question their morality. Instead, we should shift incentives, better enforce employment laws, and, yes, create guest worker programs and earned paths to citizenship for those who genuinely contribute, as many do.⁵

To the libs and libertarians: You can’t be pro-democracy and ignore borders.⁶ And to the Trump crowd: You can’t enforce democracy through brutality and mass surveillance, or it will begin to smell like fascism.

We have to thread the needle. The path of the middle son is to call for deescalation, sanity, and smart solutions. If you’re a protester, that means staying peaceful, waving the AMERICAN flag, and offering actual solutions. If you’re a Trump supporter, it means targeting bad actors instead of innocents, and not buying into Stephen Miller’s broad-brush rhetoric of scapegoating and demonization.

I’m more of an immigration hawk by nature, and polls suggest that the public sides with Trump on these issues. But it’s clear to me that Trump is overplaying his hand and losing moral authority, and that will backfire.

My background — part privilege, part immigrant — pulls me in opposing directions. I want to offer a middle path. But I also realize I may have to pick a side at some point. That’s life in an era of dumbed-down culture war politics.

California, like me, is full of contradiction. The state has always teetered between collapse and Eureka, June Gloom and blue sky, tectonic shifts and stable earth. It’s always been a place of dreams and disillusions, where second sons chart the future.

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Related Note

I wrote this essay as a response to an essay prompt I suggested.

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Theme Song

1. A great-great-grandfather, technically.

2. Not to defend Richard Nixon’s description of the Grove or anything, but…

3. I sometimes wonder how things might look if Prop 187 had survived.

4. Well, except when Xi is in town.

5. Immigration hawks will point out, correctly, that this creates moral hazard. However, I don’t see a path to immigration sovereignty without some compromise. To me, the tradeoff is worth it and net good for the country.

6. Unless the populace votes for that.