Beyond 766 Valencia Street

In 1965, on the eve of the Summer of Love, my family moved from Pueblo, Colorado to San Francisco, the romantic city of cable cars.  My younger sisters and parents and I made our home on the second floor at 766 Valencia Street, in those years a business address for an enterprise my parents named California Funeral Service, Inc.  Our family’s place of residence was about to become the clearinghouse for Vietnam War casualties returning to American families living west of the Mississippi.  This life altering experience for all of the family occupies Part I of the memoir.  Part II concerns the family move to Oxnard, in southern California, in the watershed year of 1968.  The family business continued to create for us, and for me personally, complex relations to the antiwar movement and battles over school desegregation, which in Oxnard—a town identified both by its beaches but also by its agricultural economy—meant battles over a color line that was brown and white.  My family lived next door to the local ranching elite, and as I came of age as an outspoken young feminist and counterculturalist, the tensions mounted.

The genre of memoir allows me to undertake intellectual work that is both more personal than would be typical in scholarship but that is also, importantly, reflective about “the personal” as a fiction, a speaking location.  Memoir is therefore an occasion to reflect upon language, history, the nature of stories, and the terms under which stories are told, tell-able, or withheld. These last concerns link the memoir to my scholarship and its recurrent interests in gender and race, the politics of region, the visions of the social waged through counter or critical geographies, and in historiography of the contemporary period.