The Lessons of Fresno’s Ingenious Underground Gardens

For 40 years, Italian Immigrant Baldassare Forestiere Wielded a Pickax to Dig His California Dream Home

In our search for inspiring new ideas for solving California’s housing crisis, we must dig deeper. We must take our cues from Archimedes, “Give me a place on which to stand, and I will move the earth.”

How deep must we dig? At least to the depths plumbed by Baldassare Forestiere.

If you’ve never heard of Forestiere, you’re not alone. He’s never become the household name he should be in California. He deserves far more recognition for being the creator of Fresno’s greatest structure, which is also one of our state’s most …

by Joe Mathews | September 24, 2019

How an Oahu Doctor Struggles to Care for His Micronesian Patients

Fleeing Rising Sea Levels and Burdened With Health Problems, Hawai‘i’s Newest Migrants Now Face ‘Bigotry and Backlash’

by Seiji Yamada | September 14, 2018

With its multitude of ethnicities, cultures, and languages, Hawaiʻi might appear at first glance to be a post-racial society. The predicament of Micronesians in Hawai‘i, however, gives the lie to …

The German-American Family Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

In Creating an Icon, Washington Roebling and His Kin Realized Dreams That Europe Never Could Fulfill

By Erica Wagner | April 5, 2018

The Brooklyn Bridge was truly an American project embodying a certain American ideal. And people celebrated that fact from the start.

On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge—after 14 years of …

Let’s Make a Deal to Keep Immigrant Families Together

California Should Have the Right to Grant Legal Residency to the Undocumented

By Joe Mathews | September 11, 2017

MEMO
To: Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke and Attorney General Jeff Sessions
From: The Golden (and Still Sovereign!) State
Re: An alternative to your mass deportation of …

As Trump’s Policies Harm Immigrants, How Can Local Efforts Best Help?

In a Perilous Era, L.A. Needs to Draw on Its Strengths to Preserve Them

By Reed Johnson | August 10, 2017

Even by the tumultuous measure of Donald Trump’s first months in the White House, none of the new president’s policies or rhetorical outbursts has been more bitterly divisive than his …

I Survived the Gangs and the Border Crossing—but Trump Has Put New Obstacles in My Path

A Young Undocumented Salvadoran Immigrant Won't Quit His Dream of Becoming an American

By Roberto Flores | August 9, 2017

If you quit today, everything you did yesterday will be wasted.

That is the phrase I grew up living in my native El Salvador.

I emigrated to Los Angeles in 2014, a …

immigrants