Last week in hayward
Friends, hello.
As I work this winter on turning many years of research and writing into something cohesive and tangible, I’ll use this Substack as a place to break the fourth wall — to talk directly about what I’m doing and how — but it will not include pieces of what ends up in the finished book (that will be a tasty surprise to come). I want the end result of this work to be something greater than me, i.e. relevant to more than one person’s story of migration and identity. That being said, I do like sharing that I spent hours reading a phone book in California last week and I do like weaving in the pieces of my life that contend with my work (namely, the song my son sang for me on my return: “This is my love song for keeping you from going away/Lock/Ratchet strap the door/So you won’t get out”).
I hope you’ll keep reading through these winter months <3
Secondly, for people who have come this way through River Arts or are otherwise interested in *what else* I do, I was a guest on A New Angle, a podcast on Montana Public Radio. Give it a listen if you want to know more about me, River Arts & Books, or working with/in community in this cultural landscape (which is what the 28-minute conversation ended up being about).
That’s it for fourth-walling it today. Thank you so much for being here.
—
I spent two days in Hayward last week. It was meant to be three but the flight out of Bozeman was delayed 15 hours to change a tire. I got a free room out of it and some sushi, which I appreciated, but really, I wanted to be in California.
When we boarded at 6am the following morning, only 20 others in addition to myself had stuck it out. Everyone had jumped to other flights — taking the long way through Denver, taking the next day’s flight, or skipping the trip entirely. It was unlike me to be patient.
But at 9am I cruised out of SFO, music blasting as I sailed down the 101 to the East Bay. “Is it too early for In-n-Out?” I text my dad, though arriving there at 10:05 feels anything but wrong and entirely delicious. I sit in the car and eat the cheeseburger and contemplate. Only a mile from my Airbnb, I pull out to the intersection of Harder and Mission. In front of me sits a sprawling cemetery. I realize that’s where my grandparents are buried and it feels auspicious at the start of my trip to inadvertently come face to face with their earthly ends. I enter the left lane to head to my Airbnb but at the last minute decide not to ignore the hit and motion to the person to my right — may I get over?
He allows it and I take a right onto Mission and a left into the cemetery. Once in through the main gate, I wonder how I will ever find their graves. The internet won’t give me an exact number but says there are “tens of thousands” of people buried in one of the Bay Area’s largest Catholic cemeteries. Ok, I think. I let my hands drive the car. Once it has woven its way through the serpentine routes, I park. Ok, I think. I let my feet walk. We (my feet and I) pass through open air halls of entombed people. I don’t look at any names, I don’t look at anything, really, I just walk, until my feet stop. “Is this right?” I wonder, looking to the right, to an area that looks slightly familiar and slightly off. “I think I am in the wrong place,” I think, turning to my left to go. On that quarter turn, though, their names catch my eye, low to the ground, about a meter from where my body stopped itself. I sit.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” I say to my grandparents.
—
The Hayward Area Historical Society is housed in a massive building, which one can circumambulate several times before finding the entrance (as I did). There is a large arcade on the bottom floor and some sort of locked-in game that I think people are into, so the hallway is decorated with what looks like Raiders of the Lost Ark sets. Stacks of skulls and faux-Mayan wall hangings. It’s bizarre.
Up the elevator to the second floor I exit, and read a sign that says “Research, Archives”. I enter a small office covered in shelves of books where a woman stands with a paper cutter.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hi!” She responds warmly.
“I’m wondering if you could help me, I’m looking for land maps, old, maybe like turn of the century? I’m trying to find a farm.”
The woman is happy to help and immediately puts aside what she’s doing. I imagine she doesn’t get too many visitors, but that’s conjecture. For an hour, it’s just the two of us. In her eagerness to help me find what I’m looking for she brings out everything she can in that moment — here is a book from 1870 with Hayward’s original town map, here is a shitty assayer’s plan from 1896, here is a realtor’s flyer from the 30s. Nothing is quite right. We struggle to articulate which street we’re actually looking for based on research I’ve already done. The Peixoto family is listed at Washington Street, Niles Road, Mountain Road, my dad’s memories are on Mission, and all of these things are now changed in moniker and in actuality — cemented, plowed over, urbanized, littered in strip malls and subdivisions and parking lots.
“Are you sure your family owned the land?”
Of course I am not sure, I think. I am only going off of what I have, which is a document from 1900 that says yes, yes, Frank B. Peixoto owned his land. I am going off of photos in which the family looks pretty well off. Or are they dressing in their best for a staged memorialization?
“You never know with these maps. They’re inconsistent and don’t show everything, or everything correctly even. And where it seems like we agree around where your family is, the road just kind of goes out to the nether regions. It was beyond town limits, and undocumented.”
When another employee comes in I learn the woman’s name is Diane and she’s the director of the Historical Society. A man enters and asks me, “Will it bother your work if we’re talking?” Of course not, I tell him with a smile. I feel like I am the intruder, taking over the tables with documents and notepads and a computer and my selfie habit.
He’s a freelance journalist, as it turns out, and he interviews Diane and her co-worker about “what goes on at a historical society and why people should care.” It’s very hard for me not to speak up, but I appreciate Diane’s honesty when he asks her what their biggest challenge is. “Funding. It’s always funding. So much has been cut this year and organizations are suffering across the board.”
The dude, in addition to talking extensively about himself and his achievements in life, is a bit of a smart-aleck, throwing comment after throwaway comment about how you can find all this stuff online and what’s the need and have we heard of AI and didn’t we see his point of view?
I cannot keep my mouth shut. From the next table I interject “This is going to be one of the best days of my work. I can look up stuff all day online and I do. But when do I get to touch it? When do I get to pull out another book because its cover is calling to me? When do I get to flip through a 100-year old register with notes in the sidebar no one has ever read?”
They all nod their heads in agreement and move on, as do I.
—
The next day I go to the public library and search the archives. In between town histories I find a tiny paperbound book: Telephone Directory, March 1932. It’s falling apart and held together by tape, but wedged between two much larger hardbound books, no one could actually see it on the shelf.
But there I sit, at a desk on the second floor from where I can see the church where my 20-year-old great-grandmother married the older widow as soon as her boat landed. I check all the names: Peixoto, Garcia, Leal, Ferreira, Teixeira. I accumulate addresses and phone numbers and relatives and then I have a breakthrough.
“Does 752 Niles Road ring a bell?” I had asked my father on the phone weeks before. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t match anything I have seen anywhere else, except the 1920 census which says that’s where they lived. That address can’t be found on Google maps or any map or even in the book Diane had handed me with all the reallocated street numbers.
But here, in this single 93-year-old forgotten directory I didn’t know I was looking for, I read a listing Peixoto F B bx 752 Niles rd and I realize that, of course, 752 is his box number in town and Niles road — the road once called Mountain then Niles then Castro and now Mission but has all along been the one that takes you southeast out of town and into the hills — is the family’s location.
It’s not that his P.O. Box number is essential to the story, I tell my dad later that night when we meet for dinner in Berkeley, it’s that every bit of information I glean is world building. Now I know that there were no mailboxes along the country road, that the farmers instead walked or drove into town for mail. Maybe easy to assume, maybe insignificant, maybe actually irrelevant. But it helps. I picture their days more clearly.
—
I drive to the hills that sit just above the metropolis. Of course, Hayward is anything but, an unremarkable town in the mass that is the Bay Area. But it’s also 160,000 people from all nations, a sanctuary city, a place people have been living for over 10,000 years, one rich with a recent history of immigration and labor.
I drive to the regional park that starts where the town life ends at the base of the foothills. It seems, based on all maps, that this is close to where four generations of Peixotos farmed and, I think, if I can’t get it exactly as I want, I can at least say hello to some mutual acquaintances.
There are three paths that lead from the parking lot and I choose the one to the left that heads straight up the hill. In my $10 flat-as-fuck tennis shoes I regret every bit, but I want to get up high fast. It’s then I see the first one — not the first one on this whole trip, but the first one that truly calls to me. I turn left. The eucalyptus is towering. Its scent is intoxicating as the sun rises, its bark is peeling off in strips. I know this tree is well over a hundred years old and I run my hands up and down its smooth body. At least I know my grandmother could have sat here. My great-grandmother, in the shade of this tree, on a break. My great-great grandmother, watching the children, muttering in her native tongue. A good picnic spot is still a good picnic spot.
In time, I move to continue, though up is no longer appealing. I look at the brush-covered ground and see the path the parks department has carved. I hear the lows of the cattle grazing and see their own trails cutting routes through the hills. “I wonder how long cows follow their own feet,” I muse. Is it a season? A year? A decade? A few? My feet follow the well-trod way that I can see spiraling out across, over, and through the Hayward hills.
Thirty minutes later, I am down low again, about to enter the crevice where two hills meet. An ancient coast live oak meets me, its lengthy limbs sprawled over a wide expanse, its mass of self foreboding and yet inviting. The tree blocks the sun though light glimmers through leaves, through branches, it dances on the ground at my feet. There are endless boughs on which to sit, endless nooks in which to whisper to one another.
After I do everything right, after I follow my instinct, after I follow the animals, after I stop at the tree, the reward comes: water. I hear its sound. It’s quiet, a small spring with a narrow creek shrouded by brush and shrub. I go to it, I dip my hands in its flow, I hum in response to its steady song. At least, I think, water is still life.