Jose Vadi - Inter State: Essays from California

This is a must-read book, it must be read to yourself, aloud to your friends, and to strangers on the bus. Jos Vadis brilliant collection Inter State maps internal and external geographies of California through lush description and deft analysis. From the Bay Area down through the Central Valley into SoCal, this collection showcases a voice keenly aware of how history is alive both in the landscape as well as inside his own writing body.

SAM SAX , author of Madness and Bury It

In this lyrical collection, ethnographer-on-a-skateboard Jos Vadi uses personal and family history to explore the vicissitudes of California life. Inter State is a soulful chronicle of precariousness in the Golden Stateincluding farm work, tech work, homelessness, gentrification, and wildfiresthat also pays homage to the familiar drives, dive bars, and skate spots that will keep its author loyal until death. A rich and moving meditation on the forces that can make us feel displaced even when we know we are at home.

NINA RENATA ARON , author of Good Morning, Destroyer of Mens Souls

What a pleasure it is to trace the many histories of California as mapped by the reverent and incisive Jos Vadi. Whether driving through a central state valley, trudging up a San Francisco hill, dodging cops, or just making his way through a decadent museum, each of the routes he winds for us is peppered deliciously with historical, political, and familial stories all the while being driven by exquisite and generous prose. All these long and meandering sentences moving languidly like a coastline, like a famous highway, like a grape vine: rippling, bending, cascading like the landscape he is conjuring, making memorials where there are none but where there should be. The writing is candid, colorful, captivating, and just like the feeling you get when youre in California; you want to stay here, on this land and in this language forever. Vadi is the perfect Californian flneur: well paced, inconspicuously observant, just a little bit legally high, and reporting live from his skateboard.

LAUREN WHITEHEAD , writer, performer, Assistant Arts Professor of Drama at NYU Tisch School of the Arts

I wonder if our country had more writers like Jos Vadi whether wed be in quite so wretched a state as we are. With wit and rage and love in equal measures, Inter State is an antidote to the persistent mythology of power as character. Vadi claws elbow-deep into the soil to unearth that which has been buried, forced aside, and willfully forgotten. He speaks of family and injustice, of labor camps and tech booms, and after reading this book, it is clear that anyone who writes of California without anger is a liar. I look very forward to reading it again.

KYLE BEACHY , author of The Slide

Cerebral and rich with history and sharp observation, Inter State is a searing love letter to California, a physical and emotional map of the places and people we call home, cities that destroy as well as nourish. With smart prose and daring form, these are perfect essays for our complicated times.

MELISSA VALENTINE , author of The Names of All the Flowers

inter (transitive verb)

: to deposit (a dead body) in the earth or in a tomb; bury

inter- (prefix)

: between: among: in the midst

(from Merriam-Webster)

In the digitized Hi8 footage, my abuelos home remains: The massive fruit tree and retaining wall dividing the backyard from the shared neighborhood rear alley. An old California farm town with mini-ditches in the middle of the alley dead-ending at the wash carrying water down from the San Gabriel Valley foothills of San Dimas Canyon, Mt. Baldy, Mt. San Antonio, and beyond, down and through the suburbs and river of the same SGV namesake somewhere near El Montes collision with the Irwindale mineral mines and drag races, that infamous 10-605 interchange. Clipped to his white undershirt is the lavalier mic Id just purchased at the RadioShack in a shopping center up the street that used to house a remodeled Kmart and no longer houses kids skating its loading docks before stealing rolls of film. The lavalier is plugged into the wrong part of the Hi8 camera, which had been boxed and unused for years on my dads dresser. Thankfully the cameras built-in microphone catches Abuelos words clearly after a brief test shot of him curiously introducing himself to the cameraAntonio Gomezthe expression on his face like he was hearing his name aloud for the first time.

My abuelo exists between my first and last names: Joswhich I share with my fatherand Vadi, the last name of our Afro-Boricua ancestors, who took the name of their Corsican sugar-plantation landowner Vadi, erasing their indigenous name Ball, according to my dadJos Miguelwhose first name I bear before Antonio, my mothers father. Jos Antonio Gomez Vadi: two patriarchs resting like gargoyles on either side of my tongue, multiple namesakes for a worldview inherited to honor and evolve.

I begin my interview. My mom sits behind me, playing translator, my original Spanish lost by kindergarten. Still, Abuelo and I have communicated through the fragmented fluency Ive smoothed into proficiency. My questions are about him and his life, his origin story, those stories weve heard growing up about hopping trains as an Okie and heading west from Nebraska to California, of running away from immigration, of slowly getting the entire Gomez tribe into the states in piecemeal stages, working before settling in the towns a few miles west of where my sister and I were raised but in as seemingly distant an era as our fathers childhood in East Harlem by way of Santurce, Puerto Rico. That side of the lineage, however small, benefited from my historian fathers ability to remember, and research. The larger Gomez sides roots start here, with a man who wouldnt let me in the house without a clean shave and short hair, the same Abuelo who told a cousin not to come inside wearing an early-1990s hoop earring slightly dangling from his ear, because he looked like a girl. Just a handful of the residual conservative qualities reminding my generation that the generation before us did not experience such a benevolent man, while I, sitting behind the camera, exploit the benefit of the doubt incarnate that is being a grandchild, finding the answers few in our family have documented.

He sits poised in a sullied but functional white plastic chair, one of many that never went inside a neatly arranged garage, his tools along the wall framing an uncles Honda driven almost exclusively during his biannual visits from Aguascalientes. A long, fold-down pool chair adorned with pillows and old shirts rests on the other side of his lemon tree, his outside napping area for the last thirty years.

He was already in his late eighties at the time of filming, and I was sober enough in my somewhat reckless twenties to know that this access, like his memory, would end sooner than later. I didnt know he had already purchased his own burial plot, right next to the one where the grandmother I barely knew had been resting since just before I turned two years old, both plots just off the main road in Rose Hills, purchased for six hundred American dollars, unfathomable now when the states real estate economy still hits families pocketbooks from six feet under, the cost of California soil. I didnt know sitting there, kneeling next to the makeshift tripod, that nearly four years later, Id be sitting in that same front room of his house, watching him transition into an afterlife I dont hope to see anytime soon. His medical bracelets and wallet, his bandannas, those odd Mickey Mouse white gloves I used to hold the reins of his casket, and other ephemera are still in my possession, as Im trying to hold on to