The golden dream brought them here. Some fled drought-stricken ranches in West Texas, Colorado or Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. Others came from Mexico to work in the citrus groves that drove the region’s agricultural economy. Many of these new arrivals to California’s Inland Empire never had the chance to graduate from high school.
When they arrived, they were met with dusty roads and stultifying Santa Ana winds. But there were stable jobs in banks, farms, aerospace companies and medical offices. There were modest homes with backyards where neighbors barbequed and stacked their plates with fresh black-eyed peas. Inside these homes were cozy living rooms where families gathered after dinner to listen to evening radio.
This is the golden dream of Susan Straight’s childhood. It’s a distinctly different dream than the one chronicled by the late Joan Didion in her seminal essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” Writing about the 1960s-era Inland Empire, Didion described a mirage masquerading as a dream, a counterfeit lifestyle on offer “for all those who come from somewhere else.”
A lack of religious diversity and an embrace of the get-rich-quick scheme were central to Didion’s grim portrayal of the area. “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity,” so her famous line goes.
Following the literary icon’s death in late December, prominent local writers said their admiration for Didion’s runs deep despite her harsh portrayal of the area in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” Interviews with some, in addition to their published writings, offer personal accounts of Didion’s influence on several of the Inland Empire’s most celebrated writers today. While Didion’s description of the Inland Empire belied its religious diversity and came across as elitist, reactions to her work among locals reveal some of the forces that shaped life in the Inland Empire over the past half-century.
Straight, a Riverside-based writer, described the disjunction between the Inland Empire Didion portrayed and the experience of growing up in the place: “…my people are not Didion’s people,” Straight wrote.
Straight was raised by the Inland Empire’s dreamers — people who came from somewhere else. As a writer, her ability to “make a lyrical, rhythmic sentence” comes in part from studying Didion’s prose. She has written novels, essays and a memoir in which the Inland Empire features prominently.
The convergence of these inspirations - Didion’s prose and the place she grew up - causes Straight to wonder how one of the sharpest observers of American culture couldn’t see what was obvious. The region’s job prospects offered a way into the middle-class, and new arrivals established religious institutions that forged community bonds.
Didion’s Inland Empire was a more sinister place. “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” centered around Lucile Miller, a housewife and mother convicted of burning her husband Arthur alive on a quiet street in Alta Loma. Didion used the Miller case as a symbol to describe a California Dream turned into a California Nightmare. She skewered the “San Bernardino Valley” — a term seldom used by locals — as a place filled with outsiders who brought their “incurious ways” with them. This was a place where it was possible to live “without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew,” Didion wrote.
By Didion’s telling, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church seemed to have a monopoly on the area’s believers. The Millers were dedicated Seventh-Day Adventists who observed the Sabbath, believed in an apocalyptic Second Coming and avoided smoking, drinking and eating meat. Didion used these details to underscore the moral hypocrisy of Lucile Miller and perhaps, by extension, the church, whose insularity affected other communities.
“The rest of us were more or less contained by real estate redlining practices that affected where we lived and went to school. So in that respect, people might have lived most of their lives without interacting with people from other backgrounds,” said Kathleen Alcalá, an author who hails from San Bernardino. “People were so silo’ed in the Sixties that one could tell if a woman, especially, was from one of the more unusual sects – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, or Seventh Day Adventists, by the way they wore their hair, their dresses, their make-up or jewelry.”
But the notion that this was a place devoid of religious diversity perplexes many locals. “It doesn’t sound like she ever stopped to talk to anybody, does it?” Straight asked in a recent interview. “I guess if you were going straight to the courthouse [to cover the Miller case], you wouldn’t meet any Catholics.”
While Catholics and Jews were in the minority, traces of their influence in the area are unmistakable. Catholicism in San Bernardino and Riverside counties traces back to 1842 when settlers arrived from New Mexico to form the San Salvador parish. According to a list kept by the Diocese of San Bernardino, three other parishes formed in the late nineteenth century continue to operate today.
As for the presence of Judaism, Mike Murphy, a Highland resident, recently told The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, “Rabbi Norman Feldheim was such a public luminary from Temple Emanu-El that the city named its new Sixth Street Public Library after him.”
Banyan Street is the thoroughfare where Arthur Miller met his untimely demise. As it happens, it’s also home to Saint Peter and Saint Paul Roman Catholic Church. The parish was formed from St. Joseph’s Church in neighboring Upland. Approximately 400 families comprised its original congregation in 1970, according to church archives. While the parish was established a few years after Didion came to town, one would be hard-pressed to engage with locals and never meet a Catholic, some residents contend.
“On the one hand, Didion’s essay is purposefully dark to match the subject, but is it accurate? Far from it,” said Cati Porter, executive director of Inlandia Institute. “Didion’s admirers for whom this essay is their only contact with the region would surely be disappointed to find that orange blossoms and lemon groves smell heavenly, the Mojave is breathtaking, and that we’re not all churches and cheesy motels.”
From a historian’s perspective, it’s the presence of cheesy motels, more than the absence of churches, that Didion brought into her crosshairs.
“California writers have often provided a counterpoint to the myth of California as the land of boundless opportunity, success and romance,” said John J. Rawls, a historian at Diablo Valley College. In the 1960s — against the backdrop of Haight-Ashbury, the Manson cult murders and the Peoples Temple mass murder-suicide — California came to be seen as a “dark precinct of social pathology.”
Famously weary of the 1960s and its excesses, Didion’s version of the Inland Empire may have reflected a broader malaise with the social upheaval of the decade.
There is a broad consensus among locals that Didion’s portrayal of religious life bore little resemblance to the reality on the ground. But her portrayal of the desire to escape economic instability resonated with some.
“Now I know that although from California, Didion was from an entirely different background than mine, the descendant of white settlers who declined to take the Donner Pass cutoff,” wrote Alcalá in a recent essay. “Yet she was able to see the place much as I saw it, one where people, even white people, were striving to make good without much to start with, people seeking a way out, a shortcut to prosperity.”
Didion had her finger on the pulse of an anxious undercurrent among the area’s new middle class. It was an anxiety that drove some residents to make unsavory tradeoffs, Lucille Miller being the most extreme example, in pursuit of the Golden Dream. Astute an observation as this might have been, Didion’s tone tended toward class condescension, some say.
“It’s hard. My work celebrates Ontario and the Inland Empire you see, and even the fast-food haunts I loved as a kid,” said Juanita Mantz, an Inland Empire-based lawyer and writer. “Didion might cringe at these markers but I find them beautiful. [But] for me, I love her writing. I love that she highlighted and saw the Inland Empire, even if it was from a narrow lens at times. And I owe her a huge debt. She taught me how to write an essay just by reading hers.”
Local writers emphasize that the Golden Dream was never a monolith — it was as diverse as the region itself. The Inland Empire was, and is, too varied a place for one perspective to reign.
“As writers, it’s our job to use all the tools to tell the story,” Porter said. “And for all the writers writing about Inlandia today, each take is different. And that’s the way it should be.”