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MEKKA
by Susan Straight
Mecca, a city in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, first emerged like a vision in the desert and was invoked by the ambitions of businessmen who saw an opportunity for a new crop of agricultural cash in the arid landscape. They planted date palm trees to attract tourists and produced an identity that was essentially a caricature of the Middle East, complete with genie costumes and Bedouin tents. Years later, the marketing gimmick wore off, but the palm trees and farm workers remained, and Mecca continued to be home to thousands of people.
Susan Straight’s new novel “Mecca” is about this desert town and the many constellations of Southern California inland communities.
The novel begins with Johnny Frias, a California Highway Patrol officer who spends his days monitoring highways. Before long, Johnny’s life is interrupted by his usual commute tides when a forest fire threatens his father’s home and a secret he buried long ago in the canyons resurfaces. He’s in a race against time, but he’s not the only one. Straight also introduces Matelasse Rodrigue, a single mother who drives through much of Southern California and helps friends and family through hardships while raising two young boys; and Ximena, a young, undocumented Mixtec woman from Oaxaca who runs between Mecca and Los Angeles to escape detention and deportation.
The scope of the novel is very wide. The story takes Southern California by storm, visiting well-known destinations from Venice to Huntington Beach, San Bernardino, the Colorado Desert lands of the Coachella Valley, and Joshua Tree. But Straight also explores the intimate, often invisible recesses of a hidden California, a courtyard community of old canyon homes, Oaxacan families that grew behind a curtain of morning glory in one of the busiest areas of Los Angeles, the last traces of citrus labor camps. . neighborhoods.
Through the intertwining narratives of Johnny, Matelasse and Ximena, Straight showcases the complex intersections of personal and familial histories to create a broad and deep view of a dynamic, multiracial Southern California. Johnny is the son of a Mexican and Californian Indian family. A fair-skinned Black woman often confused with Mexican, Matelasse traces her ancestry to the ancient citrus groves of California, the fields of the Coachella Valley, and a slave plantation in Louisiana. And Ximena is an immigrant whose story highlights the Latin American Indigenous peoples who came to California after surviving the horrors of crossing the US-Mexico border (which for Ximena included the rape and the drowning of her younger brother).
Native and resident of Riverside, California, Straight has dedicated her writing career to representing the Southern California interior. Central to much of his work is the idea that one’s relationship to a place plays perhaps the most vital role in shaping how we understand the world. “Mecca”, like most of Straight’s writings, is a love song for a place and its people. He writes lyrically about workers pollinating palm trees in the groves as if it were a cosmic dance: “Even in the heat, it was magic. Huge piles of feathery golden threads with tiny flowers four feet long. It’s like fantastic broomsticks and the gods can sweep the sky.”
In “Mecca”, the characters are constantly teeming with events – raging fires, migrant raids, and other disasters, both personal and social – but they survive thanks to their community by sticking to their families and friends.
One of the most notable aspects of “Mecca” is Straight’s attention to how the characters negotiate their racial identity through language. For characters like Johnny Frias or new immigrants like Ximena, who lived in California long before his family was made part of the United States, learning the language of whiteness is imperative. Their survival depends on it. They have to contend with a fluid, generational, sometimes arbitrary American English that is meant to signal cultural affiliation or otherwise. Although Johnny learned to speak both Spanish and English fluently at a young age, his assimilation of white culture was never complete despite his profession and proficiency: “I remember being 20 years old trying to understand all the variations. holy cow. Never a horse, dog or chicken. holy fumes. Never catch fire or flame. Holy mackerel. Never eat trout, salmon or sardines. Holy moly. Whatever it is.”
Flat provides a number of similar examples with various other characters as well, as they follow the peculiarities of the American vernacular and reveal the formidable power inherent in it. For example, Ximena’s process of learning about the world around her requires multiple steps: “Three languages. Every word had to be repeated in Ximena’s head. agua. Guilty. nducha pelo Hair. ix. Only one word was always the same; Luz never said this in Spanish, only in English. ice“Some facts are so specific to a language and culture that they need a single word. In the desert, where keeping the heat out is essential for survival, Ximena learns that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is an even more dangerous threat and must be avoided at all costs.
Susan Straight is a prominent voice in American and Western writing, and “Mecca” is a meaningful contribution to this canon. It heralds important ways of storytelling that are changing the land and how we see each other. Countless disasters over the past few years, including climate crises and racial conflicts, have required Americans to reassess our relationships with nature, the environment, and history. Straight, with indomitable courage and grace, he digs deep into these challenging regions and transforms us in the process.
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