The California Report Magazine

Even if he’s not always recognized as part of the Asian-American community, Oakland-born rapper Guap is fiercely proud of his Filipino roots. On the last track of his 2021 album, 1176, he tells an origin story spanning decades and continents. His grandfather, a Black merchant marine, stationed in Subic Bay in the Philippines, found himself with a rip in the pocket of his uniform. He found a young...

Identity is always complicated, and for multiracial folks who straddle many identities, it can be isolating. It can also be invigorating and rich to belong to multiple communities and celebrate that complexity. The latest census shows it's demographic to pay attention to: 2020 data reflect a 276% increase in people who identify as multiracial compared to 2010. Sasha Khokha is joined by special gue...

Have you ever heard someone calling your name, but then you look around and no one’s there? Or you feel your phone vibrate, but actually, it didn’t. Then you’ve technically experienced psychosis. For most of us, it will never go further. But for people who later develop schizophrenia, it often starts like this. On this week's show, KQED Health Correspondent April Dembosky takes you inside the mind...

As California looks for ways to alleviate drought, the federal government is considering raising Shasta Dam by 18-and-a-half feet in order to store more water in wet years. Behind it, three rivers backup creating Shasta Lake, the largest reservoir in the state. If the dam enlargement proceeds, areas up river from the dam that aren’t currently underwater will flood. The Winnemem Wintu people have o...

This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the worst plane crashes in California history. In 1948, 32 people died when a plane heading from Oakland to the Mexican border landed nose-first into a canyon near the Central Valley town of Coalinga. The passengers were 28 Mexican Braceros who were being deported from California to the border. While the bodies of the white pilot, flight attendants, a...

Chumash Tribes 'Reunite' Sacred Rock in Morro Bay Ceremony The nearly 600-ft. volcanic rock poking out of Morro Bay is a Central Coast landmark, known to most as Morro Rock. But two Native American tribes indigenous to this area call it something else: Le’samo by the Salinan, and Lisamu’ by the Chumash. For 80 years, starting in 1889, the Army Corps of Engineers quarried the rock and used it to bu...

Yoga isn't just an ancient practice. It can also be a lucrative business, especially in fitness-conscious California. What’s more, yoga teachers can often have a lot of influence over their followers, making suggestions about their diet, sleep and sometimes, even politics. But as the Coronavirus pandemic dragged on, many people started noticing a surprising overlap between some of the alternative...

Sandra Castaneda was 20 when she was given a life sentence for a murder she didn’t commit. After she’d spent 19 years in prison, a judge overturned her conviction and ordered her release. But instead of walking free, she found herself behind bars again, in a holding cell in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. That’s because California prisons notify ICE whenever they release a per...

We're featuring work from our colleagues at the Bay Curious podcast this week. Reporter Ariana Proehl digs into the history of Parchester Village, a neighborhood in the Bay Area town of Richmond. After World War II, Black ministers there made a deal with local politicians to build some of the state’s first housing intended to be racially integrated. Parchester Village soon became a hub for Black p...

This week, Sasha Khokha sits down with Sam Anderson, host and reporter of the new podcast, Crooked City: The Emerald Triangle. In 2016, after finding out that a high school friend was wanted for a murder on an illegal pot farm, Anderson began a five-year journey to investigate the crime. He had to earn the trust of people close to the victim and the accused, all while living and working out of a t...

Poet Lee Herrick has taught at Fresno City College since the late 1990s, and is now our state’s first Asian American poet laureate. His work has touched on some of the unique experiences Californians share, including our diverse culture and questions of identity. Host Sasha Khokha chats with Herrick as he shares some of his poems as well as his plans to spread the of poetry across the state. And w...

This week, as we say goodbye to 2022, we share some of our favorite conversations with California authors this year. ‘All My Rage’: A Story of Love, Loss and Forgiveness in the Mojave Desert Author Sabaa Tahir based her new young adult novel “All My Rage” on her experiences growing up in her family's 18-room motel in the Mojave Desert. As the child of Pakistani immigrants, and one of the few South...

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...

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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...