The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Rendon was the twelfth Assembly leader since 1995, when a term limits initiative had ended the long, powerful reign of Democrat Willie Brown. The strict limits—six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate—meant lawmakers started eyeing their next office almost as soon as they arrived. Legislative leaders often had almost no experience in Sacramento. Lobbyists gained enormous power. In a move billed as a way to encourage stronger, more stable leadership, voters approved relaxed limits in 2012, the year Rendon was elected. He could potentially serve as Speaker for as long as eight years.

  With Rendon’s election as Assembly leader, Latinos for the first time led both houses. Senate president pro tem Kevin de León, two years older than Rendon, had been raised in San Diego by his Guatemalan immigrant mother. First in his family to graduate high school, he traced his political activism to the marches against Prop 187.

  The governor joked about the generational and ethnic passing of the guard. “My little ilk7 of old German Americans is kind of fading into the sunset, and Kevin and his ilk are kind of taking over, and that’s all right,” Jerry said at the dedication of an urban park in downtown Los Angeles in the midst of immigrant neighborhoods—on the edge of Chinatown, and a little south of Chavez Ravine, the site of Dodger Stadium, where more than a thousand Mexican American families had been displaced in the 1950s for a public housing project that was never built. Jerry traced the waves of immigrants who had settled on what was once Native American land—Spaniards, then Mexicans, then Anglos. “And now, the Mexicans are coming back. And the Mayans are coming back. And the Guatemaltecos are coming back.”

  Although immigration had slowed and even showed a net decrease in recent years, California, by virtue of its size, still led the nation in almost every demographic category related to the foreign born. (To get a sense of scale: Los Angeles County alone, with more than ten million people, was larger than forty-one states.) Mexico remained the leading country of origin, followed by China and the Philippines. Asian immigrants were the fastest-growing group. In recent years, more than half of new arrivals had come from Asia. Of the more than ten million immigrants in California, the best estimates suggested roughly half were citizens and another quarter were legal residents.

  The rest, as many as three million, were living in the United States without permission. About two thirds had lived in California for more than a decade. Many had crossed the border illegally as children; some discovered their status only as teenagers. Others had paid thousands of dollars to coyotes who helped them evade patrols and cross the Mexican border. Among more recent arrivals, most had simply overstayed their visas. Undocumented Californians had married and raised families, worked for years under fake credentials, paid taxes and Social Security. Most farmworkers were undocumented. Labor unions actively organized undocumented janitors, day laborers, and restaurant workers. Many families had blended status. Census data estimated that 1.9 million children lived in a house with an undocumented family member. By the time Jerry returned to Sacramento, in much of California it would have been hard to find many people who did not know someone who lacked legal residency papers.

  Change happened fast in California, ever since the frenetic pace of the Gold Rush era. The state that had only a generation earlier led the way in demonizing illegal immigrants now pioneered efforts to help them lead normal lives. As it had on environmental regulation, California struck out on its own, ahead of and sometimes in conflict with the federal government. Home to as many as one fourth of the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, California grew impatient as Congress failed for more than a decade to enact reform. With little controversy and some bipartisan support, the state adopted a series of laws to extend and protect the rights of all immigrants.

  “While Washington waffles8 on immigration, California is forging ahead,” Jerry said in the fall of 2013, as he signed a measure limiting cooperation between local police and immigration officials. It seemed to him a matter of common sense, that ancient organ often found wanting in politics. “I’m not waiting.”

  Latino legislators who had been stymied for years in trying to authorize driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants encountered a governor who insisted they revive the shelved measure at the end of the 2013 legislative session. It passed easily, with Republican votes as well as Democrats. “No longer are undocumented people in the shadows,” Jerry said as he signed the bill on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall. “They are alive and well9 and respected in the state of California.”

  The lines formed before dawn outside state Department of Motor Vehicles offices on January 2, 2015, the day the law went into effect. Over the next six months, half the licenses the state issued went to undocumented immigrants. California opened four new offices and hired a thousand workers to cope with the demand. The ability to drive legally, without fear of having a car impounded, or worse, was life-changing for many people. There were fewer uninsured drivers in the state and fewer hit-and-run accidents. Within three years, California had issued more than a million of the special licenses.

  Each year brought more steps to narrow the distinction between those with papers and those without. Children from low-income families were eligible for subsidized healthcare, regardless of their residency status. Undocumented immigrants could obtain licenses in most professions, including electricians, architects, and contractors. In 2014, California became the first state to allow undocumented immigrants to practice law—although federal law prohibited any firm from hiring them. Californians paid in-state tuition at the public colleges and universities, regardless of immigration status. The 2011 California Dream Act made all undocumented immigrants eligible for state financial aid that covered full tuition at public universities. Subsequent laws waived fees at community colleges and allowed undocumented students to serve in student governments.

  “Professor [Sheldon] Wolin coined the term ‘fugitive democracy’10 to indicate that the power of people—democracy—is episodic, not continuously present,” Jerry told students at Cal, quoting his former professor. “But at key moments, bureaucratic and corporate power gives way to an aroused citizenry. Look how the hostility to immigrants expressed in the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, gave way to what is now a majority in California who support immigration reform.”

  Jerry’s most pressing crusade, to which he devoted his most passionate attempts to arouse the citizenry, was a battle where the past, present, and future converged, for California and its fourth-term governor. Throughout his political life, Jerry had been drawn to environmental issues, which he saw as comparable to the sort of moral absolutes that had attracted him to the Jesuits. While Pat and Jerry Brown shared a sense of responsibility to plan for the future, Jerry’s future was more cerebral. Pat wanted his name on the California aqueduct. Jerry wanted a place in history for helping save the planet. “You have to be able to imagine what isn’t, that’s what real leadership11 is,” he told a group of county officials. “It’s not just managing what is, but it’s imagining what might be and taking the steps to get there.”

  His cause became climate change, which threatened to remain unacknowledged until it was too late to reverse catastrophic damage. His interest went back decades. In 1992, he had attended the world climate summit in Rio as a guest of environmentalist David Brower. A decade later, as mayor of Oakland, he joined three congressmen at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, to demonstrate an American presence at a meeting skipped by President George W. Bush. With Americans focused on terrorism in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Jerry warned of a different threat: man-made destruction of the environment. “This is the moment for prophets,12 for vision. Otherwise, the people will truly perish,” Jerry wrote after the Johannesburg summit. “This is unpleasant stuff. It is so unpleasant that conventional leaders would rather comfort us with reassuring words about the power of markets and the inevitability of medical and technical breakthroughs.”

  Over the years, the e
nvironmental movement in California had been bipartisan, largely white, and middle- to upper-class. As the state’s demographics shifted, so did environmental concerns. Climate change became “not about polar bears, but people,” in the words of Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from an inland area who began to play a leading role. Garcia was a generation younger than the Latino leaders of the legislature. Born in 1977, during Jerry Brown’s first term as governor, Garcia grew up in the Coachella Valley east of Los Angeles, an area of rich agricultural land. His parents were farmworkers who made it out of the fields; his father became a gardener, then worked for the city of Indio, date capital of the world. His mother started a housecleaning business. A mediocre student, Garcia went to community college for four years, eventually transferring to graduate from the University of California, Riverside. He taught English to farmworkers, to help them get jobs in a hotel, or a better shift. An internship shooting video at Coachella City Hall had piqued his interest in politics, and he ran for City Council in 2004 and was elected mayor two years later. His issue was creating parks. He didn’t have any when he was growing up. Parks became his rallying cry when he was elected to the Assembly in 2014, too. He represented a district that stretched from Coachella south to the Mexican border, where Garcia had spent every Saturday as a child visiting his grandparents.

  The landmark cap-and-trade bill signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which had become a centerpiece of California’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, expired in 2016. Although the Democrats held a two-thirds majority in both houses, conservative legislators from oil-rich districts opposed renewal. The sponsors needed votes from the Latino caucus. Eduardo Garcia saw an opportunity to draw attention to environmental issues in parts of the state too often overlooked. Like his district, where seven out of ten children had asthma. Or the Central Valley, where thousands had no access to clean drinking water. In exchange for support of cap and trade, he wanted greater input into policies enacted by the powerful, independent Air Resources Board. He wanted to ensure that an institution that had been viewed as the domain of Westside Los Angeles liberals became responsive to the needs of the state’s poorest residents and its growing Latino majority.

  One of the provisions of the Garcia bill, packaged with an extension of cap and trade through 2020, increased the legislative oversight of the Air Resources Board by adding two ex officio members. To the surprise of her staff, ARB chair Mary Nichols not only accepted but embraced the change. She saw it as a way to “move California’s air pollution and climate program ahead by another decade and bring into the discussion a whole new set of players13 that have not felt like they had a seat at the table up until now.”

  She spoke at Vista Hermosa, the first park built in a hundred years in a densely populated, heavily Latino Los Angeles neighborhood, as she watched Jerry Brown sign the bills into law. She saw the event as public recognition of a coalition that would be important to California’s future, a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation, who would carry on the commitment in their own way. Jerry’s rhetoric reflected the shift, too. “I want to say something about low income people, people of modest means, who live in the Central Valley, who live in Riverside, San Bernardino, Imperial County,” he said. “They’re the ones who eat the dirtiest air.14 And we’re not going to clean up that air until we reduce pollutants in the way this bill is purporting to do, and will do … The great problem with these big issues is that you wait too long, because you can’t see it, [and then] it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  Worried about legal challenges to the cap-and-trade program, which could be construed as a tax, Jerry next pushed for a further ten-year extension, which needed to pass by a two-thirds vote. His all-out lobbying included the unusual step of appearing in person before legislative committees debating the measure. “I’m not here about some cockamamie legacy15 that people talk about,” he told a room packed with lobbyists and lawmakers at the state Senate hearing. “This isn’t for me—I’m going to be dead! It’s for you, and it’s damn real!” Then he sat in the audience and took notes on concerns expressed by environmentalists, who faulted the bill for concessions to the oil industry, which they saw as part of an ongoing pattern. Some objected to cap and trade because it allowed large polluters to continue unabated, if they purchased sufficient permits.

  Jerry turned a problem—the defection of some Democrats who felt provisions were too favorable to large polluters—into an advantage: Eight Republicans supported the measure. “That is a breakthrough.16 The iceberg of denial is cracking. These are real Republicans,” Jerry said. Republican support nationally would also be key to further action on climate change. He urged the business community to pressure Republicans for more bipartisan support.

  He also viewed Republican support as significant in a time of deep partisan divides, a reaffirmation of the Party of California, and he gave full credit to his Republican predecessor for setting cap and trade in motion. Schwarzenegger shared the podium for the bill signing on Treasure Island, the San Francisco skyline in the background. It was the same place the first cap-and-trade bill had been signed. “To ratchet into another eleven years, this is pretty great,”17 Jerry said as he signed the law.

  The fact that California can welcome an immigrant from Austria and make him governor, that’s another miracle. We’re on the move, because we’re California. This is not one of those ordinary legislative things. We’re dealing with climate change, and next to the nuclear threat, which is the other existential danger, nothing is more serious than extinction. There are tipping points … the gravity of this topic is so great that it’s hard to talk about, people think you’re a little wacky. People think you’re Cassandra.

  Eleven years from now, when this thing expires, I’ll be in my nineties. If I’m around. So this is not about me, it’s not about Arnold, it’s not about these younger legislators here. It’s about the world. And California is leading that world in dealing with the principal existential threat that the world faces. What could be more glorious?

  He spoke in July 2017, a time when many who shared his beliefs found it difficult to rejoice. In his first months in office, President Donald Trump had championed policies and values that ran counter to much of what California had come to represent. Trump appointed climate change deniers; he sought to build a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border, to ban certain immigrants from entering the country, and to deport others. The Golden State became the counterforce, a hopeful beacon in an era of uncertainty. Jerry Brown assumed the role for which he had prepared since childhood, that of the most powerful Democrat in the United States.

  Those Jerry had derided a few years earlier as East Coast “dystopian declinists” when they called California a failed state now hailed it as the promised land. In reality, the state where everything was outsized still faced huge challenges, even before Trump’s ascendancy. The aging infrastructure of Pat Brown’s era was crumbling. A compromise plan to raise the gas tax to fund highway repairs would fix only a fraction, and the plan was threatened by a move to rescind the tax by a ballot initiative. The housing market had become so tight that to buy a median-priced house in San Jose required a household income of more than $200,000. To replenish the state’s stock of affordable housing would take decades. Homeless people formed tent colonies in every city, in record numbers, with no solutions in sight. Half the children in the state qualified for subsidized medical care. Climate change was playing havoc with water supplies and fire danger.

  Jerry delivered his State of the State message a few days after President Trump’s inauguration. He broke with the tradition of laying out an agenda for the coming year to deliver instead an impassioned rebuttal to the divisive, xenophobic politics of Washington, D.C. It was one of his most powerful speeches.

  This is California,18 the sixth most powerful economy in the world. One out of every eight Americans lives right here and 27 percent—almost eleven million—were born in a foreign land. When California does well, America do
es well. And when California hurts, America hurts. We don’t have a Statue of Liberty with its inscription: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” But we do have the Golden Gate and a spirit of adventure and openness that has welcomed, since the Gold Rush of 1848, one wave of immigration after another.

  For myself, I feel privileged to stand before you as your governor, as did my father almost sixty years ago. His mother, Ida, the youngest of eight children, was born in very modest circumstances, not very far from where we are gathered today. Her father arrived in California in 1852, having left from the Port of Hamburg, aboard a ship named Perseverance. It is that spirit of perseverance and courage which built our state from the beginning. And it is that spirit which will get us through the great uncertainty and the difficulties ahead. So as we reflect on the state of our state, we should do so in the broader context of our country and its challenges. We must prepare for uncertain times and reaffirm the basic principles that have made California the Great Exception that it is.

  He quoted John Donne (“No man is an island”), the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (“Even God cannot cause two times two not to make four”), and Woody Guthrie (“This land is made for you and me”). His most eloquent passages sought to reassure undocumented immigrants, including more than seventy-two thousand enrolled in California’s public colleges and universities: “First, in California, immigrants are an integral part of who we are and what we’ve become. They have helped create the wealth and dynamism of this state from the very beginning.” He recited some of the laws protecting the undocumented. “We may be called upon to defend those laws and defend them we will. And let me be clear: We will defend everybody—every man, woman and child—who has come here for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.”