Indigenous: Growing Up Californian
By Cris Mazza
City Lights, 293 pages, $16.95 paper
A recent TV commercial, here in my golden home state, parades before us a carefully diverse slew of folks of every shape, color, age, occupation and economic status, in a variety of choreographed activities; each stops to gaze at the camera and proudly proclaim: I’m a Californian!
Get it? We love the label–but careful how you try to define us. We’re unified in our pride–but we’re all individuals. Don’t presume to think you know who we are–but we’re really just like you. I don’t remember what product or service the commercial is selling; it’s really just hard-selling us. We’re Californians, and we’re driven to assert an identity about which we’re both arrogant and apologetic.
“[T]he world reflects on California from the perspective of those who yearned to be there,” Cris Mazza announces in her luminous and textured collection of autobiographical essays, “Indigenous: Growing Up Californian.” But for those of us on the inside looking out, us born-and-bred-Californians, how do we make sense of the stereotypes, the conflicting homogenizing and mythologizing? How do we deal with a prevalent general attitude both envious and disdainful of our geographic identity? What to do with all the contradictions? “[I]f we didn’t choose this enchanted place to live out or chase our visions,” she asks in her introduction, “if we are a generation or two removed from those that dared to hunt a dream, does it mean we don’t dream?”
Mazza’s beautifully rendered love affair with her native state has nothing to do with gilded dreams or pretty postcard depictions of sun and surf. Her experience is rooted not in image but in a primal connection to the land itself. She is one of five children born to parents struggling to provide on a small academic salary in rural Southern California. A day at the beach for the Mazza clan is not mere Coppertone-scented revelry, it’s a 13-hour expedition of fishing and clamming in order to feed a family of seven.
But, she writes, this “isn’t a story about victimization and deliverance. It’s about a middle-class California family that didn’t realize it was middle-class, in any sense of the word.” They scavenge for abandoned glass bottles, grow and can a staggering array of fruits and vegetables, breed their own poultry. Mazza helps her father hunt and slaughter wild game in their (presuburban) back yard. Movies and TV are a treat, not a way of life. For Mazza, the value of this clear-eyed, unsentimental upbringing is clear:
“[M]y childhood angst over not having a new bicycle or fashionable clothing has long dissipated, and what I obtained instead has lasted longer than a Stingray bike or desert boots. An affinity, a sense of coming from and belonging to this landscape–outwardly tough yet in its own way so fragile.”
Mazza describes growing up in a 1960s and ’70s family essentially feminist in its blithe, gender-neutral expectations of education and achievement, and her resulting adolescent struggle out in a world whose attitudes haven’t caught up: “A major rite of passage was when our growth had slowed enough to get real leather hiking boots–but there was never a rite of passage involving being old enough to use makeup.” She wants to play trombone in her high school band, never mind it isn’t girly, never mind she’ll be the first girl:
“Yet when they accepted me as a trombone player, suddenly they could not think of me in the same way they viewed the girls who played clarinet and flute. . . . What does ‘one of the boys’ really mean? And who was more confused, me or them?”
In this case, “one of the boys” means a fellow musician is happy to use her for practice on how to feel up his (real) girlfriend. Mazza is flattered and dismayed, and the emotional ambivalence she grapples with is painfully, exquisitely real.
Sexual confusion recurs in the essay “Exemplary Lives,” where Mazza parallels a depiction of her attempts to breed an uncooperative female dog with her own conflicted feelings about sex, marriage and motherhood. And in “Symphony Ex, Ex-Symphony,” she weaves an account of her failing marriage through the trials and tribulations of the San Diego Symphony. These two essays, along with “Land of Make-Believe” (a somewhat hodgepodge account of a crazy aunt, Mazza’s work with severely handicapped children at a state facility, more on her troubled marriage and some adolescent play with gender roles), are compelling in their execution but oddly impersonal.
Mazza’s device of parallel motifs tips in favor of the non-intimate; there’s more here on the history of the professional musician class and the logistics of dog breeding than on the actual specifics of this problem marriage she keeps dropping into the conversation. Thus we never get quite as personal an engagement in her own adult emotional life as we might feel we’ve been promised.
But this could be exactly what saves this book from the self-absorbed gut-spilling to which too many memoirs are prone. Mazza spends her time on the fascinating details we don’t expect; even when present in a moment she tends to disappear, leaving a lucid reportage with such precise and vivid detail I feel myself ready to skin a rabbit, artificially inseminate a dog, hold my trombone correctly, or feed a severely disabled child. And if these three essays don’t necessarily exemplify the unique experience of “growing up Californian,” the explicit promise of the book, well, perhaps that’s the point: The infinite variety of the landscape is matched by the infinite variety of experience.
Time after time, Mazza must leave her beloved California to patch together a living wage out of short-term academic jobs and encounters the negative attitude so at odds with her own experience:
“[P]eople in these new places presupposed I would be intellectually happier, creatively more stimulated, perhaps suffer from mood-altering light-deprivation syndrome but make up for it by experiencing the exhilaration and inspiration of ‘a true change of seasons.’ Thus painting California, by assumption, as an invariable place of blinding sunlight, which, along with the inescapable banality, is artistically suffocating, paralyzing, and anesthetic.”
Thanks to these essays, we know better.
Now living in Chicago and trying to assimilate as an Illinoisan, Mazza returns to her emotional, geographic and thematic home in the essay “Tell Me,” where she recounts her mother’s heart-bypass surgery and the subsequent stroke that stole her use of language. The paradox now: She is the grown child who must deal with an infantilized parent, the writer for whom words suddenly carry the weight of the world and no weight at all:
“Ten years later . . . with an almost lifelong history of not confiding in my mother, there were new reasons for the things I couldn’t (or thought I shouldn’t) tell her: For fear she wouldn’t understand, that her impairment in processing language would force me to tell it slowly, to deliberately hold each horrible word in both hands too long before precisely passing them, one at a time, to her.”
If Mazza felt restrained from sharing her words with her mother, we can be grateful she has chosen to share them with us. “[N]o matter where else I am, I’ll not ever not be a Californian,” she says, and her insightful exploration of the messy, inherent contradictions of human identity celebrates the dreamy Californian in all of us.
