The poseur king killed himself with the cyanide tablet he always carried on a golden watchchain. George Sterling, the Poet Laureate of Bohemian San Francisco was dead in 1926 after a disappointing career with no works of lasting value. His crowd had championed the dissipated louche "bohemian" lifestyle in San Francisco and Carmel (the small town of stone cottages above a perfect cove on the Monterey peninsula). Through an endless series of affairs, wine, parties, workless days and endless nights, great art would somehow appear. But the last ten years were cold. None of the novelists in the big bohemian circle produced anything lasting despite many stories romanticizing and deromanticizing California’s short history. (The only one who is remembered today is Jack London.) None of his painter friends were any good, really, and the ones who were left for New York. Modernist verse erupted from New York and Paris and instantly rendered stale the golden-hued archaic neo-classical stuff he did produce (when he produced).
Frank Norris was long dead. Gertrude Atherton was in exile and writing about New York. London’s own demons had killed him ten years before. Sterling’s patron Ambrose Bierce had disappeared in Mexico, presumed shot. A series of suicides crippled the Bohemian Artists circle, among them his ex-lover Nora and his wife Carrie. (Was everyone poly in ‘20s San Francisco?) In the end it was his turn. They found him on the floor of the Bohemian Club and buried him in Oakland. 1926 looked like the sad end of an era.
But what era was beginning? By 1930 a son of Carmel’s interior neighbor Salinas had returned to Monterey and embarked on his writing life. The California literature the previous generation had tried so hard to build would truly reach a global audience with this man, the only Californian who has ever won a Nobel prize in literature. He was soon working on the novel that made him famous. The frame? Weaving California’s pre-American past in with a society of true dissipated hedonists living moment to moment on another hillside on the Monterey peninsula.
John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat (published 1935, set in the mid-20s) is a curious book that doesn't get much attention these days, possibly because of the extremely cancellable “stereotypes” it perpetuates and its cheerful lack of overt messaging. Yet it was a bestseller, made Steinbeck famous, was adapted by Hollywood and was specifically mentioned by the Nobel committee when they gave him the award. It has lots to say about California history, and thus American history, and is a darkly comic look at the actual mindset of high-time-preference people. It also has a darker more universally resonant importance I will reveal. Ándale…
–
If you are ignorant of California history you are blessed and know no lies.
In the beginning they said California was an island. That lie was true. The Island of California was a cartographic error that was kept alive for a century or two. But in fact California was only accessible by sea prior to the arduous wagon journeys of the 1840s. Though Spain laid claim to it, the great deserts of the Southwest covered all the possible land routes to California.The Sonoran Desert and the Mojave Desert were more impassable than seas. Should you cross them there are vast mountain ranges blocking the fertile central valley and habitable coastal plains. Spain’s control was exercised on the map only for most of its existence.
For as long as post-1492 people have lived here they have been trying to rewrite the past to amplify a different romantic or ethnically non-American aspect of California. The boring truth that gets shoved down: most of what we know of California today is a result of Yankee traders and their hard-headed approaches to extractive and productive industry.
If you soak in the early 20th century Hearst-era Mission Revivalist thought you might be forgiven for thinking that Spanish California was a centuries-long project on par with Spanish dominion in its core new world holdings in Mexico and South America. In reality, de facto Spanish occupation and control of California lasted about 50 years, from the time the Portola expedition set foot in San Diego in 1769 to the Mexican Revolution of 1820. The Metropolitan Cathedral and University of Mexico City had been standing for 200 years before a single mission brick was laid in Alta California. Whatever you may think of Mexico as a Spanish colonial project and subsequent nation of mixed Indian and European citizenry, it has endured for a very long time. The Spanish colonial project in California was tenuous at best with at peak only 3500 Spanish residents controlling around 20,000 "missionized" Natives. (source, Starr and Sherburne Cooke)
If you soak in the post-1960s La Raza and ensuing 2000s Leftist thought you might be forgiven for thinking Mexican California was a centuries-long project cruelly intruded upon and severed by White American aggression. In fact, the independent state of Mexico controlled California for about 20 years. Because it continued to be unreachable except by sea it experienced little in-migration from the rest of Mexico. (It also experienced relatively low Mexican immigration after the annexation until the 20th century.) Compare this to the New Mexican community of Santa Fe which was connected to Mexico proper by a passable well known road, the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro.
Thus the popular slogan "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us!" is factually false when applied to recent arrivals from Sinaloa and Michoacan and their children but it does apply to a few special subgroups within the whole history of the American Project.
(Who did the border actually cross, besides these original Californios? Two big ones: Enslaved African-Americans dragged here against their will and Native Americans. There are some other small interesting ones: New Mexicans, 1803 New Orleans, Native Hawaiians.)
This Californio group that is the focus of Tortilla Flat is several orders of magnitude smaller than those big ones, a "toy model" of population absorption within the USA and the resulting effects. The group was small and built within a few generations. Within a few generations it was functionally extinct.
Because of its small size and remoteness the group has less to offer in terms of mythical stereotypical vices and virtues. The larger groups have outsize stereotypical virtues:
American Blacks: musicality, culinary skill, athleticism. Native Americans: martial excellence, outdoorsmanship, stoic courage. Californios: nice architecture and um, chilling out.
Seriously, in Volume One of his famous California history Kevin Starr devotes a chapter to multiple sources saying the relaxed (lazy) Californio approach to life was a salutary influence on the manically driven Yankee mindset. “... the ranks of those Americans in whom California had awakened a taste for an alternative way of living, a lifestyle in which Yankee stiffness softened under a warm sun and personality expanded into hitherto repressed ranges of value and emotion.”
The modal wealthy Californian in its first hundred years was a hard-working outsider from a joyless Protestant background who made a fortune in endless work at something dreary, married a nominally Catholic local woman, converted and relaxed (somewhat) into a golden lifestyle twilight. (To this day California is home to the world's richest white Catholics. No, I do not have a source on that.) Wealthy Bay Area residents now are either a similar American migrant or an immigrant steeped in his home country's version of the Protestant work ethic. The source of the money is tech and the subject keeps from going insane thanks to a new interest in arcadian pursuits. Balancing a workweek devoted to productively serving the machine god with a weekend spent in performative appreciation of wine, local beef, mission architecture, mountains and hiking oak-strewn landscapes may make us seem faintly ridiculous. But dammit it's a stable pattern.
The Californios: a Spanish-Mexican-Native population of California, not too many of them, not here for very long, not very successful in any particular civilizational achievement. But they were there and their influence is still felt. They were an actual people until they weren’t. Steinbeck wrote a book about them at the moment they were winking out.
–
The first thing to note is that Steinbeck explicitly states that his group in question is most definitely the remnant population descended from the original Californios. It’s worth quoting the preface at length:
Monterey sits on the slope of a hill, with a blue bay below it and with
a forest of tall dark pine trees at its back. The lower parts of the
town are inhabited by Americans, Italians, catchers and canners of fish.
But on the hill where the forest and the town intermingle, where the
streets are innocent of asphalt and the corners free of street lights,
the old inhabitants of Monterey are embattled as the Ancient Britons are
embattled in Wales. These are the paisanos.
[...]
What is a paisano? He is a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and
assorted Caucasian bloods. His ancestors have lived in California for a
hundred or two years. He speaks English with a paisano accent and
Spanish with a paisano accent. When questioned concerning his race, he
indignantly claims pure Spanish blood and rolls up his sleeve to show
that the soft inside of his arm is nearly white. His color, like that of
a well-browned meerschaum pipe, he ascribes to sunburn. He is a paisano,
and he lives in the up-hill district above the town of Monterey called
Tortilla Flat, although it isn’t a flat at all.
That’s an explicit avowal of a distinct ethnic inheritance, an embattled racial group in a land that has been swallowed up by conquerors like the Britons. Monterey was the capital of pre-American California and really its only important town. Steinbeck would have been aware of books like Gertrude Atherton’s The Splendid Idle Forties, (1902) which contains stories of Californio life in the era just before takeover by the USA. Most are set in Monterey and focus on high society grandmothers, debutantes, military governors, American officers, Californio horsemen, etc. Steinbeck himself first wrote a collection of short stories called The Pastures of Heaven (1932) about a valley just inland from Monterey. The book opens with a long-ago prelude set in mission times complete with enslaved natives and a romantic yet violent Spanish corporal. These previous gauzy looks at Californio life made for a counterpoint to Steinbeck’s decidedly unaristocratic bunch.
What happens in TF? It consists of a series of vignettes of the adventures of a group of paisanos whose adventures will be very familiar to anyone who has dealt with good-natured substance-abusing lowlifes who exhibit extremely high time preference: Few long term plans are made and a dollar in hand is always worth much much more than any future multiple of dollars. If you wrote a book today where all the characters of a given ethnic group acted in this fashion and no one else did you would be accused of minstrelsy.
One friend rents a house from another but of course never pays any rent. The solution is to sublet the house to yet another friend who never pays either, but at least Pilon can blame Pablo for his own lack of rent.
One character has been lounging drunk under a boat all day. He's returning home when rain pours down forcing him to take refuge on the porch of an amorous widow. After he drinks her wine and doesn't return her overtures she drums him out of her house with a stick, whereafter a cop finds them having sex in the street.
Through their drunken carelessness a house burns down.
One friend steals the pants off his drunken sleeping friend, pawns them for a quart of wine and then steals the pants back after the quart has been drunk and he has fought with the pawnbroker's wife.
The book ends with a party to end all parties and a death. His friends don't have fine enough clothes to attend a funeral, nor money to buy them. They can't steal a suit because everyone in town has their suits on for the funeral.
Another book that Steinbeck no doubt read and is referring to: Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. This is the autobiography of a Boston student turned seaman who drops out of Harvard to crew on a Yankee sailing ship in 1835. He arrives in California just a few years before the American annexation and spends a year there up and down its shore. His account was one of the only detailed true accounts of California and Californio culture before the gold rush. For anyone heading west who would care to read a book this was the first on the list and it became a canonical American text.
Dana devotes great detail to the fantastical (to him) Californio custom of treating funerals as days-spanning community wide parties. (In another aside, he reminds readers that as of the 1830s, Puritan-aligned New England wasn’t even celebrating Christmas yet.)
This is Dana in Chapter XVIII describing Easter Sunday ashore in San Diego
In a few minutes the man made his appearance, and apologized for having nothing to entertain us with, saying that he had had a fandango at his house the night before, and the people had eaten and drunk up everything.
"Oh yes!" said I, "Easter holydays?"
"No!" said he, with a singular expression to his face; "I had a little daughter die the other day, and that's the custom of the country."
Here I felt a little strangely, not knowing what to say, or whether to offer consolation or no, and was beginning to retire, when he opened a side door and told us to walk in. Here I was no less astonished; for I found a large room, filled with young girls, from three or four years of age up to fifteen and sixteen, dressed all in white, with wreaths of flowers on their heads, and bouquets in their hands. Following our conductor through all these girls, who were playing about in high spirits, we came to a table, at the end of the room, covered with a white cloth, on which lay a coffin, about three feet long, with the body of his child. The coffin was lined on the outside with white cloth, and on the inside with white satin, and was strewed with flowers. Through an open door we saw, in another room, a few elderly people in common dresses; while the benches and tables thrown up in a corner, and the stained walls, gave evident signs of the last night's "high go." Feeling, like Garrick, between tragedy and comedy, an uncertainty of purpose and a little awkwardness, I asked the man when the funeral would take place, and being told that it would move toward the mission in about an hour, took my leave.
[...] From the beach we returned to the town, and finding that the funeral procession had moved, rode on and overtook it, about half-way to the mission. Here was as peculiar a sight as we had seen before in the house; the one looking as much like a funeral procession as the other did like a house of mourning. The little coffin was borne by eight girls, who were continually relieved by others, running forward from the procession and taking their places. Behind it came a straggling company of girls, dressed as before, in white and flowers, and including, I should suppose by their numbers, nearly all the girls between five and fifteen in the place. They played along on the way, frequently stopping and running all together to talk to some one, or to pick up a flower, and then running on again to overtake the coffin. There were a few elderly women in common colors; and a herd of young men and boys, some on foot and others mounted, followed them, or walked or rode by their side, frequently interrupting them by jokes and questions. But the most singular thing of all was, that two men walked, one on each side of the coffin, carrying muskets in their hands, which they continually loaded, and fired into the air. Whether this was to keep off the evil spirits or not, I do not know. It was the only interpretation that I could put upon it.
This detail of firing guns over the body of the deceased is also echoed by Steinbeck, once in foreshadowing when Danny speaks of his eventual death and then once with an actual fandango-esque funeral procession which recalls Dana’s description:
Chapter X: “We too have been soldiers,” said Danny. “When we die, we will go to the grave on a gun carriage, and a firing squad will shoot over us.”
Chapter XVII: “The friends could hear the music and the shrill drone of the service. From their vantage point they saw the cavalry arrive, and the band with muffled drums, and the firing squad, and the caisson with its three pairs of horses, and a cavalry-man on the near horse of each pair. The mournful clop-clop of shod horses on asphalt put despair in the hearts of the friends. Helplessly they watched the casket carried out and laid on the caisson, and the flag draped over it. The officer blew his whistle, raised his hand and threw it forward. The squadron moved, the firing squad dropped its rifles. The drums thundered their
heartbreaking, slow rhythm. The band played its sodden march. The caisson moved. The people walked majestically behind, men straight and stern, women daintily holding their skirts up out of the indelible trail of the cavalry. Everyone was there, … The service was short and military. The casket was lowered; the rifles cracked; the bugle sang taps…
Another explicit Californio callout is the characters’ cultic version of Catholicism, which was a motif of the nonfiction account of Dana and various other fictional treatments that Steinbeck would have been aware of, like Ramona and especially Atherton’s collection. The one time the main troupe rise above petty thievery is in the case of “The Pirate,” a mentally challenged semi-homeless paisano who lives with a bunch of dogs. Every day “The Pirate” cuts firewood which he sells for a quarter but begs all his food and sleeps rough in an abandoned shed. The gang reason that he must be banking those quarters and resolve to steal his horde. But in their efforts to winkle the secret out of The Pirate he reveals that he had a vision of St Francis who healed one of his dogs. After the vision The Pirate has devoted himself to saving up 1000 quarters in order to buy a golden candlestick for the church in St Francis’s honor.
Hearing this they devoutly refuse to rob him and even beat and torture a would-be robber who does take the money for a day. The candlestick is eventually purchased and installed in the local church. St. Francis is not only the patron saint of animals but the patron of the order of monks who ran the missions in California so would have had special significance to the Spanish-flavored Catholicism of the Californio-remnants.
What is present in the narrative: comic bummery, explicit avowal of it being a Californio population, thematic ties to previous Californio narratives.
What is not present in this narrative? It’s missing some motifs that weary modern readers might assume “should” populate a tale of low-socioeconomic-status dwellers.
There are no salt-of-the-earth minority families just trying to get by with honest hard work. There are no evil bosses exploiting innocent working class folk. There's little "systemic prejudice" that matters to their lives. When The Pirate confides in a priest and entrusts him with his hard-saved money to buy the devotional ornament, the priest gamely honors him and his request. Though the characters spend time in jail for various charges, the punishments seem well-deserved. The police, if anything, are under-involved considering the petty crime waves unleashed by the crew. There is no depression or large-scale governmental economic hardship that they must struggle against. In fact, work seems plentiful. Sometimes the characters go down to "cut squid" if they really are so hard-pressed in their lives that they will consider working for money. (The unseen squid boss's name is, uh, "Chin Kee"... Steinbeck is not beating the rap when it comes to Asian characters.)
They are simply good-hearted lowlifes who seem incapable of thinking of more than the next hour or day ahead. Wine is their daily obsession and undoing. Nothing of value stays valuable or is put to any use. Furniture is burnt for warmth, clothing is pawned, inherited houses turned to ruin. Relationships last days if not hours. No one is married.
And with one exception, no one has any kids.
Yes I’m going to cram TFR into this Tortilla Flat Review.
Steinbeck documents the phenomenon that the extreme low end of the wealth and income spectrum actually have far lower reproductive success than those above them. This is especially true for men. There is a popular misconception that the poor always have more children than the rich. Famous demographer Lyman Stone has a recent three-part series trying to debunk this idea, the links are here, here and here. The essence of his research is that fertility rates that seem correlated to wealth are bound up in culture, birth timing and the effects of child-rearing itself. He has study after study showing positive correlation between wealth and child totals.
One of the starkest studies he includes is this one from Sweden. In the graph entitled “Probability of Childlessness” we can see that for men in the lowest income decile the P(childless) never goes below 30% for all IQ levels. The correlation holds until income decile 6, at which point it starts leveling off.
Once again, this data is for men. For the lowest-IQ, lowest-income levels, shown at top left in the graph, P(childless) is above 50%. (A note in the study: “Interestingly, we find that after adjusting for income, men with higher cognitive ability have a higher probability of childlessness than men with the median cognitive ability score. Assuming that they have a similar income, men with high cognitive ability scores are therefore more likely to be childless than men with average cognitive ability scores.” The Idiocracy model that less intelligent people have more children is correct… but only if you consider the population above median IQ levels, i.e. the right half of the IQ bell curve)
If you think about your experience you will find this to ring true. The real dropouts, the junkies, the never-employed and the habitually jailed are not fathering that many children. But in the realm of normies, higher education and high-IQ-type achievement does not automatically equal more children. In fact it seems to be a slight negative factor.
Back to Tortilla Flat: The six main characters have no children of their own. The various unattached women they go in and out of affairs with do not have any children. At the big party at the end of the novel there is a throwaway line about the children waxing the dance floor but otherwise no children appear.
The big exception is Chapter XIII, which details the world of Teresina Cortez, unwed mother to 8 children with a 9th on the way. (At the end of the chapter it is implied that her new pregnancy is a result of Danny and his friends, so at least one of the paisanos has at least one potential child.)
Does this one hyper-fertile female-headed household outweigh all the other childless residents of the Flat? I don’t think so. It’s literally one, in a sea of childless households. It also exemplifies the fact that the men are shut out while women at lower levels have options. Teresina’s first marriage gives us another datapoint about the inheritance of the next generation of Tortilla Flat: “When she was sixteen, Mr. Alfred Cortez married her and gave her his name and the two foundations of her family Alfredo and Ernie. Mr. Cortez gave her that name gladly. He was only using it temporarily anyway. His name, before he came to Monterey and after he left, was Guggliemo. He went away after Ernie was born.”
Exogamy and infertility are the two main options. There is one other poignant quote about the difference between male and female outcomes. Jesus Maria is telling a story about a family they grew up with:
“‘All that family is gone now. One brother is in San Quentin, the other was killed by a Japanese gardener for stealing a wagonload of watermelons. And the girls, well, you know how girls are; they went away. Susy is in Old Jenny’s house in Salinas right now.’”
–
The paisanos were down and out cheerful ne'er-do-wells. The paisanos were the last core remnant population with plurality descendance from pre-American Californios. The paisanos didn’t have many children. The paisano population didn’t last much longer and had melted away within a few years of the publication of Tortilla Flat. All these facts are causally intertwined in an iron logic.
It can be hard to internalize the mechanism of systems that operate via death and reproduction over long periods of time and that's part of why I love TF so much. It captures the moment on the edge of the abyss. Even if Steinbeck did not really meet these particular people and the stories are not factually true, he did capture a core truth: the last, most pure remnants of a once-endogamic population now exposed to larger enclosing population must be by definition kind of a low-TFR wreck, even as those who claim inheritance from that original population might be more numerous than ever in the world at large.
Were there Californios in Monterey other than the paisanos? There was and still is a whole high society fancy Old California thing going on. They have official registries, social clubs and Rodeo Days and ceremonies. You can research the first families now on websites. There's a genealogical society.
At that moment in 1925 the more successful, fecund descendants of the Californios had already married other non-paisanos and moved into other orbits. They still might call themselves Californios but they call themselves something else too, like Californians or Rotary Club Members. They had long intertwined with other ancestries and each generation of children will be only half as related to the Californios and have a whole new family tree's worth of identities to try on from the other parent. Time will give them a whole new slate of choices .
All the “society Californios” were descended from people that had married out and married well, merging into the pool of wealthy other Californians. The ones who have not married out, who are in not any other social orbits, those are the paisanos and they are not having kids. Steinbeck isolated the moment that the true endogamic population, the ones with more Californio blood than not, were still around but quickly going extinct.
Before the American annexation “the island of California” functioned as a physical enforcer of population endogamy. Californios became a people by virtue of proximity and stayed a people because there was no one else to mix with. (Of course they themselves were a mix of founding populations from Native and Spanish.) But after the massive influx of Americans, that population is under siege. The large enclosing population group willing to marry those inside the in-group function as a sort of one-way osmotic barrier, as long as the socio-economic status of the remnant in-group is declining. If you're in the small group and you’re attractive and capable you have many more mating options outside the barrier, so you "escape". The median pool that remains inside the barrier is thus decreased in attractiveness, further lowering the probability that any outside will cross the barrier to join. Endogamic pairs inside the group are worse than they were a generation before. With every member of the group that matures the process iterates and the ratchet turns a little harder. Those who leave the pool and mate successfully don't lose their own heritage, they just have children for whom it is (more) diluted.
The key is the vast size of the exogamic pool. If there is little social barrier to exogamy then for any one participant in the game there will always be more options outside the group. That is, for all above the lowest quintile. Participants whose options are truly limited (like our dwindling paisonos) mate inside the group, reducing endogamic outcomes even more.
There still are Californios, they're just all fractionally related to those who came before. They are descendants of more successful ancestors. The pool that was majority related to the original
Californio pool got smaller and smaller until it disappeared completely.
There are no more Californios. There are more Californios than ever.
–
I mentioned earlier that the Californio experience is so small compared to other groups that it can serve as a toy. There is one more feature of that experience we haven’t touched on yet but it’s important: the subsequent migration of co-ethnics a few generations after the “island” has been absorbed. Other Mexican migration to California starts in earnest after 1900 and swamps the Californio populations. This new pool not only creates a new Mexican-American identity larger than the foundational Californio version but provides more out-marriage opportunities for those Californios who might be racially identified as non-white and kept from out-marrying before for color line reasons. Exogamy intensifies.
Here is an estimate of Mexican born residents of California by year, from United States Census Bureau reports by way of Albert Camarillo’s Chicanos in a Changing Society and gemini research:
1900: 8,086
1910: 33,694
1920: 88,881
1930: 368,013
Here you can see that the very period Steinbeck was writing about and in (post-WWI and then the late 1920s, respectively) were the years that witnessed a 50X jump in Mexican migrant population. This is another way TF is fortunately situated right on the edge of the abyss when Californio identity is about to wink out forever.
Steinbeck deals with this in a disturbing chapter where the paisano gang encounter a recent Mexican migrant. One of the gang, Jesus Maria, has been sitting in his customary spot outside the post office where he has found it is convenient to ogle passing girls’ legs.
I like this passage because Steinbeck elegantly shows the language bridges between Anglophone cop, bilingual Californio-accented Jesus Maria and the migrant boy who only speaks Mexican Spanish:
One day when he had leaned against the post office for two hours with
very little success, he was witness to a pitiful scene. A policeman came
along the sidewalk leading a young boy of about sixteen, and the boy
carried a little baby wrapped in a piece of gray blanket.The policeman was saying, “I don’t care if I can’t understand you. You
can’t sit in the gutter all day. We’ll find out about you.”And the boy, in Spanish with a peculiar inflection, said, “But, señor, I
do nothing wrong. Why do you take me away?”The policeman saw Jesus Maria. “Hey, paisano,” he called. “What’s this
_cholo_ talking about?”Jesus Maria stepped out and addressed the boy. “Can I be of service to
you?”The boy broke into a relieved flood. “I came here to work. Some Mexican
men said there would be work here, and there was none. I was sitting
down resting when this man came to me and dragged me away.”Jesus Maria nodded and turned back to the policeman. “Has he done some
crime, this little one?”“No, but he’s been sitting in the gutter on Alvarado Street for about
three hours.”“He is a friend of mine,” Jesus Maria said. “I will take care of him.”
Though the gang have the best intentions they are deeply unprepared to be parents and the baby eventually dies in their care. (This is a concrete example of the childless dead-end that is low-status male existence.)
So we have a toy model with these characteristics: Isolated on an island for 70 years, absorbed by the larger culture with which it eventually diffuses over the next 70 years, spurred especially at the end by a new wave of co-ethnic migrants. At the end of that time the segment of the population with the most inheritance from the origin group is the least successful in society. (Endogamic fertility spiral.) The traditions of the group are kept alive by a growing number of successful descendants with lower and lower actual genetic inheritance from the founding group.
This toy model of a small population in a remote place is a template for what’s happening all around you with larger and more complex populations. Originally I had a long section here about the group(s) we see undergoing this transformation today: isolation, absorption, co-ethnic in-migration, fertility crash, the K-shaped pattern of exogamic success and endogamic decline. It got too unwieldy, too speculative and too ugly. I don’t have what it takes to honestly document a spiral and make it a fun read. I’m not a Nobel prize winner.
–
I’d like to retract my opening snide commentary on George Sterling and his sad end. Reading about a tortured and pretentious transplant Californian obsessed with legacy and myth hit too close to home. Tortilla Flat ends with another act of self destruction. The main character Danny “began to feel the beating of time.” He “began to mope on the front porch, so that his friends thought him ill.” He goes on a manic spree of crime and madness, stealing from his friends and trying to sell his house to a respectable town resident. When he returns, “the rough fingers of violent experience had harped upon his soul. He began to live listlessly… The talk flowed about him and he listened, but he did not care.” His friends resolve to throw a giant party in his honor at which he “defied emulation as a celebrant.” He drinks gallons of wine, sexually harasses every woman and tries to fight everyone else with a broken table leg. Eventually he throws himself into the gulch and dies.
The book ends with his (other) house burning as his friends walk away separately, the group forever scattered like the ashes.
Like many aging people in an aging society I am fascinated with decline and millenarian narratives. Someday the last of “us” will draw his or her last breath. But what is “us?” There are small extinctions happening all the time. Whatever you think your group is, there’s a 100% chance it will pass away. This will happen with little fanfare before anyone really knows it’s gone. There’s a decent chance your group is fading away right now. But before it truly dies it will diffuse, shrink, mutate and decay. Your most numerous and successful descendants will be those least related to you, thriving in a world they were born for full of other new and exciting groups. Your most related descendants will be mired in toxic patterns in a cursed world that seems to have abandoned them. What, really, is your legacy? Who will be watching? Will anyone build the final myth and bless those last throes with a work of art or literature that can endure?
I like Tortilla Flat. It is romantic but unsentimental. I wish we had a Tortilla Flat for all these doomed groups, races, subpopulations and cultures of the world. Yours, mine and George Sterling’s too. For they are all doomed in their way. Whoever eschews the cyanide tablet or the cliff will be left staring alone at the dying embers, wondering what happened.