In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings.
Delia Ephron
I grew up in North Hollywood, in neighborhoods that used to be Mexico, which once belonged to Spain. My family’s quarter-acre has been in three countries over the past 200 years, and that’s not even considering that it has never stopped being Chumash, Tongva, and Fernandeño Tataviam land. Portugal was born in 1143, but not baptized (papal approval) until 1146 and it has not changed its borders significantly since.
My state’s history and my family’s both began in the late 1840s. My mother’s great-grandparents were the children of Irish famine immigrants. They found their way to Los Angeles in 1912. That is as far back as my history goes. My father and his parents came to Los Angeles in the 1960s, after the whole family had spent most of a decade traveling between the Central Valley and Northern Mexico as part of the Bracero program. Neither side of the family talks much about what was left behind. My family history, as I know it, begins in California, or at least on the journey to California.
This is my heritage. I am a self-proclaimed Irish-American Chicana. When I am abroad and asked where I am from, I answer California. My sense of Americanness is that of the immigrant. I feel simultaneously an outsider to WASP culture and most of U.S. History, and yet a fervent attachment to California, the only home I know. My heritage is in hand-me-down stories of Ireland and Mexico as they existed when my families left them, not how they are today.
My heritage is in Los Angeles, where my families converged. According to DNA testing, my ancestry spans three continents and a multitude of ethnicities, including 2% Portuguese. I have no family connection to Portuguese culture, though. It may be a small part of my ancestry, but not my heritage. I was warmly welcomed there as a stranger and that says a lot about the Portuguese in general, and Azoreans in particular..
Compared to the rest of Portugal, the Azores are still relatively new, yet compared to California, they are ancient. The Igreja Matriz de São Sebastião has been a functional church since the 16th century, so many generations, nearly 500 years of people coming and going as if this sort of thing happens all the time. Los Angeles is an industry town; buildings go up and down like set dressing. In Ponta Delgada, the farmer’s market kept the same layout when it moved underground during renovations, changing only as necessary..
The mountains across the street from my grandmother’s apartment grew twelve inches the morning of the Northridge quake, and I’ve long thought that was one of the most Los Angeles things ever to happen. Even the mountains here can change overnight. There is something incomprehensibly stable about the Azores. They have earthquakes, even volcanoes, and still manage a sort of continuity that is entirely foreign to me.
Michael Connelly says of my home town, “Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically — any way you want to look at it — everybody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.” He’s not unique in this observation. If, as Billy Joel says, “Los Angelenos all come from somewhere,” the Azores are the bookend, a place where everybody has gone or is going or is missing someone who has left. Those islands are shaped by emigration as much as California is by immigration. The people are friendlier than in Los Angeles, but their stories are the same, just told at different ends.
There is a pizza place near my apartment in Ponta Delgada. Nothing there is fast. I’d often order a bite to eat and a Kima to take away. When I went alone, I was invited by someone ten to twenty years my senior to join them at the table next to the cigarette machine. I accepted the invitation and made conversation while waiting for my inexplicably slow food.
Pedro had returned to Ponta Delgada now that he is retired. He had been a truck driver in Canada for nearly his entire adult life. He had been born in Ponta Delgada, but he left as soon as he could get out. His mother owned a big house in town, and Pedro told her not to sell it. I found it particularly revealing that he said he told her, not asked or advised her. Decades later, Pedro still seems annoyed that she sold the house, even while admitting that it was a lot for her to take care of alone.
On another occasion I sat for a long time with Nelly. She did not speak English as well as Pedro, but her English was still better than my Portuguese. She used her phone to show me pictures of a statue and swans in a park not far from here and ducks named (by her) Fernando and Chuka. Nelly owned a big house in Ponta Delgada and would rent rooms to people and give them rides anywhere they wanted.
Then Nelly asked me, “we are friends?” There is only one correct answer when a sweet older woman takes your hands in hers and asks this. I affirmed that we were. She showed me pictures of her face bruised and swollen and explained that her husband had died and her son had moved away a long time ago. She had a partner, but he… She made a punching gesture and showed me lumps where her jaw bone should be smooth. She told me, “this is not my face.”
Nelly was planning to move to Lisbon. Her friends thought her crazy to move away, but she wants to be far away from her ex-partner and is hopeful doctors there can fix her jaw. I was married to a man who brags that he never hit me, and friends and family thought I should stay too. He was only mean when he’d had too much to drink, or not enough to drink, or a rough time at work, or was stressed about something. Sometimes, he was great though. It can seem like madness to leave a good house behind, but most of us are willing to jump from high windows when we know the house is on fire. And we’ll jump out of entire countries when they are on fire, too.
I have met people like this in Los Angeles: people who left home in search of adventure, or safety, or a fresh start, some who were saving up to go back someday, and some who knew they would never return. Despite Billy Joel’s claims, Los Angeles is where I am from. I grew up in a city that people run away to, and now I know what it is like to sit with them in a place where people are from.
Drivin’ down your freeways
The Doors
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman
So alone, so alone
L.A. Woman
Crystal, Clearly 
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