Earlier this summer, our theater company—Baktun 12—presented eight shows to audiences of 130 to 160 people. We even had to turn guests away. This is a not a small thing on the east side of Salinas, the Alisal. The community is known for an undocumented …
The Salinas Valley is world famous for producing healthful foods, but people here struggle with severe health challenges. …
I recently sat in an amphitheater in Salinas and watched students receive their high school diplomas and training certificates from the Drummond Culinary Academy. …
Acosta Plaza is a 305-unit condominium development, constructed in the 1970s, which had over the years become mostly rental apartments for farmworkers. It also had developed a reputation as one the toughest neighborhoods in Salinas. …
Around 7 p.m. on June 10, the Alisal Union School Board was finishing up its meeting at the Jesse G. Sanchez Elementary School in East Salinas when the drummers took the stage. They were elementary school kids, their hair neatly slicked back by their moms, …
Most teenagers from Salinas, given the opportunity, are desperate to leave here. We’re a small city that feels like a farm town, surrounded by fields, with too little to do. …
Back in 2012, when word got around the Department of Education offices in Washington, D.C., that I would be leaving my role as assistant secretary for postsecondary education to …
There’s something about agriculture that grows the soul.
Fortunately, I could see the strawberry and lettuce fields of the Salinas Valley from the window of my eighth …
In the new hit musical Hamilton, a frustrated Aaron Burr sings an anthem for all those who are shut out, denied a chance to shape their own destiny: “I want to be in the room where it happens.” …
In the heart of the city of Salinas sits a nearly 500-acre property known as Carr Lake. While the city’s general plan refers to it as “parkland,” Carr Lake is neither a lake nor a park. It’s farmland, under cultivation in a heavily urbanized setting. …
Forbes says my hometown of Salinas is the second least educated city in the U.S. According to a number of measures, it’s also one of the poorest places in California. But as a college student who grew up there, and still comes home every summer, I feel rich. I owe that feeling to being from Salinas, …
How do you make Salinas a more peaceful, safer community?
Trying to help people in this community figure that out is my job. Or jobs. I double as the community safety administrator for the city of Salinas and director of the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace, or CASP. …
California Highway 68 is a very short road, running just 24 miles across Monterey County from the cities of Pacific Grove and Monterey on the ocean to the inland city of Salinas.
In today’s California, the path between great wealth and poverty is rarely very long. …
On May 20, 2014, two Salinas police officers shot and killed 44-year-old Carlos Mejia on Del Monte Avenue in the city’s east side. Within hours, a cell phone video was posted to YouTube that shows Mejia walking down the sidewalk and turning toward the police. …
We hear a lot these days about rifts between police and the communities they serve. This is especially true in communities of color. I thought it might be helpful to offer my story as someone who comes from both worlds: I’ve devoted a career to …
These are the three things I knew about Salinas, California, growing up an hour north in the Silicon Valley: gangs, John Steinbeck, and agriculture.
Steinbeck was often required reading in California schools. …
Every few years, Salinas grabs national media headlines for the wrong reasons: Police killings of criminal suspects caught on camera. Or maybe a sensational courtroom drama like that of our local convicted murderer Jodi Arias. …
Mr. Twenty-Something is obviously in pain. His face is contorted and his right shoulder doesn’t look like his left. He’s wearing a tank top, and the complex and colorful tattoos across his upper torso don’t conceal the deformity of the top of his right arm. Where the left shoulder had the expected dome of muscle extending from the edge of his collarbone, his right one is flat. …