The California Report Magazine

This week, we say goodbye to 2022 with two of our favorite stories from this year.   The Sizzler: The California Origin Story Behind One of India’s Flashiest Dishes Take any popular dish – pizza, ice cream, hot dogs – and try to trace its origin story. Chances are, you’re going to go on a winding road with conflicting accounts of who actually invented the dish, or whether it was invented by one, s...

This week, we're devoting our show to KQED climate reporter Ezra David Romero’s series “Sacrifice Zones.” He explores how sea level rise could push contaminants into certain neighborhoods, especially places that are near former military or industrial sites, and that have a history of racism, redlining, and disinvestment. Ezra profiles activists in San Francisco, Oakland and Marin City who are push...

A tiny local election in the Central Valley caught our attention last month. A group of candidates promising change took over control of a big, farmer-run organization that delivers their irrigation water: Westlands Water District. It’s an empire built on imported water and political power. But these newly elected Westlands board members – all farmers themselves – are now saying: We need a new str...

Deborah Miranda is an award-winning poet, writer, professor, and an enrolled member of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. Miranda researched wax cylinder recordings made almost a century ago of some of the last speakers of indigenous languages in California, along with other primary source materials about the history of Californi...

This Thanksgiving weekend, we’re reprising one of our favorite episodes about family and belonging. It’s about what happens when you don’t learn your “heritage language," the language your parents or grandparents speak. Like many of us who are multiracial, or children of immigrants, KQED reporter Izzy Bloom gets asked all the time why she doesn’t speak her heritage language, Japanese. She usually...

California has always been a place people come to seek refuge. This week, two stories of people seeking the promise of the Golden State, with very different experiences. First, immigrants held in ICE detention centers often hold jobs in those facilities: cleaning, folding laundry, even working as barbers. Those positions often only pay a dollar a day. For the last several months, some of those imm...

On this week's show, we're sharing an episode of the KALW podcast Uncuffed, which is made by inmate journalists at Solano State Prison and San Quentin State Prison. A prison might not be the first place you'd think of to celebrate a wedding. But it's where Uncuffed producer Edmond Richardson is marrying the love of his life, Avelina. He talks about his joys and his fears as the day approaches and...

We head to Nevada County, where students are mobilizing around an election for school board next week. Some of them are even too young to vote, but they’re working to defeat conservative school board trustees who they say have failed to stop racist and homophobic bullying on school campuses. As KQED’s Julia McEvoy tells us, these students in Grass Valley are trying to help elect candidates they ho...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reporter Jessica Kariisa is Ugandan American, and she’s spent years listening to and writing about African pop music. When she moved to the Bay Area, she wasn’t sure what she’d find in terms of an African music scene. Gentrification and the rising cost of living have pushed many Black communities out of cities in the Bay Area and beyond. But, after doing some digging, Jessica discovered an African...

This week, we bring you the first episode of the new season of a podcast from LAist Studios called Imperfect Paradise: The Sheriff. KPCC correspondent Frank Stoltze explores how a former Sheriff’s lieutenant with almost no leadership experience rose to become the head of the largest law enforcement agency west of the Mississippi, and how he turned out to be a leader with authoritarian tendencies....

In East San José, a scrappy strip mall anchored by a bánh mì shop doesn’t look like much. But it's a bustling transportation hub. Every morning by 8 a.m., there’s a steady stream of riders lining up for the daily run of the Xe Đò Hoàng, or “Royal Coach” in Vietnamese. Those in the know call it the “Bánh Mì Bus,” which takes passengers all the way to Orange County and back. Christine Nguyen takes u...

What is it like to be a dad and your first-born son goes off to college? That just happened for Adolfo Guzman-Lopez. He’s covered higher education for years at KPCC in Los Angeles, but when his own son moved into his freshman dorm this month, Adolfo was not prepared for the reaction he’d have. And we meet a mom from East Palo Alto who's spent years trying to help her kids cope with anxiety and tra...

As the Monterey Jazz Festival kicks off again this weekend, we go back in time to a chilly evening in 1962. Sixty years ago, a groundbreaking musical premiered at the festival called “The Real Ambassadors.” It featured a glittering array of jazz titans, including Louis Armstrong. This was during the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, and the musical cast artists of different races, challenging rac...

The pioneering Asian American actress Anna May Wong will be one of five American women the U.S. Mint is recognizing this year with an image on the American quarter. Wong was born in Los Angeles in 1905, and she grew up helping out at her father's laundromat. As a kid, she skipped school to visit movie sets and mimicked the actors at home. She would eventually become Hollywood’s first Chinese Ameri...

About 30 minutes off Interstate 5, in the Central Valley, there’s a town that’s a vital part of California's history, and Black history in the U.S. It’s called Allensworth, and it was founded as a kind of Black utopia back in 1908. It was self-governed by Black residents, and had its own school, church, bank, debate society and glee club. And for a while, it was thriving. These days, though, Allen...

We’re reprising an investigation from The California Report’s Central Valley reporter, Alex Hall, that recently earned a National Murrow award for News Documentary. In 2020, California’s Foster Farms became the site of one of the nation’s deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks at a meat or poultry plant. Hall spent a year and a half talking to spouses and family members of workers who spent decades at the c...

What does it means to be a journalist when the story you’re reporting on also affects you? That’s a question Ericka Cruz Guevarra, host of the KQED podcast The Bay, explored on a recent episode. She shares her story about a camping trip she went on with her best friend during the pandemic. But it’s also a story about the mental health impact of reporting the news when you’re a journalist of color....

Our lives are full of routines. From the time we get up, to what we eat for breakfast, to the modes of transportation we take from place to place. But do we really know the stories behind the buildings we pass by and the people who live or work in them? One reporter gives us an inside look into four different businesses on one Berkeley block. Then we go to East Oakland to meet 10-year-old Hemer as...

This week, we’re heading to the high desert town of Susanville, to sample some of the most gourmet food you can find in Lassen County… in a community college cafeteria. We meet the Palauan chef who’s finding a way to bring a taste of home to a community that in some ways, isn’t so different from his Pacific island homeland. Then we’ll visit the foggy coastal city of Pacifica, to learn about a litt...

Today, it’s an unassuming beige building on a busy Berkeley street. But in the 1970s, the Rainbow Sign was a groundbreaking center for Black culture, politics, and art. It hosted dozens of high-profile Black thought leaders and performers, including James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Maya Angelou, and Shirley Chisholm. The Rainbow Sign was open to all – as a performance venue, political organizing space,...

In 2021, we brought you a story from reporter Kori Suzuki about Dahbia Benakli. She was a preschool teacher who lived in Walnut Creek, a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area. She and her two kids were facing eviction from their apartment. That story ended in an uncertain place, with Dahbia waiting to find out whether or not she’d get to keep her apartment. In December, her landlord took them to co...

How to Save the World: Audio Diaries from a High School Climate Activist Survey after survey shows people who are Gen-Z – born between 1996 and 2012 – consider climate change to be the biggest challenge we’re facing. KCRW’s Caleigh Wells followed one teen climate leader in Los Angeles, Paola Hoffman, for months. She collected audio diaries and captured her speeches at climate strikes, her testimon...

This week, we're teaming up with our friends at LAist Studios to share an episode from the new season of their podcast “Imperfect Paradise: The Forgotten Revolutionary.” It's the story of Oscar Gomez, a radio DJ and Chicano student leader during a time of explosive anti-immigrant political rhetoric in the early 90s. Some people thought Gomez was going to be the next Cesar Chavez. But then, he died...

The Ojai Valley’s climate has been ideal for growing certain tree crops. But climate change is making it windier, drier, and hotter there. As Lisa Morehouse tells us, none of that is good for farming. And neither is Ojai’s rising cost of real estate. And this summer, incarcerated youth will help fight California's wildfires. These young men are hacking containment lines with hand tools. It's part...