by Gautam Dutta
Who should prevail in a popularity contest featuring several choices? Should one measure depth or breadth of support?
Consider the classic “What movie should we...
Val Zavala has been the anchor of SoCal Connected since its debut in 2008. She has been at KCET since 1987, serving as anchor, reporter or executive producer for the long-running "Life & Tim...
Guillermo del Toro knows his monsters, whether they’re vampires, ghosts, mythical beings, hell beasts or humans. His richly written creations are also visual marvels — from the grey-skinne...
Before Monica Ganas began teaching California, she lived it. A native of the state and a 30 year veteran of the entertainment industry and now a professor at Azusa Pacific University, Ganas explained how her personal background inspired her book, Under the Influence: California’s Intoxicating Spiritual and Cultural Impact on America. “I think I’ve been trying to make sense of my personal experience for a lot of my life,” she joked. It wasn’t until she left the state that she began to see its strangeness, and the way it impacts the country. Ganas stopped by Zocalo’s offices to explore California culture — from the glamor of movies to the ordinariness of traffic, from car obsession to spiritual diversity.
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
by Mae Ngai
Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.
