About four years ago, my parents moved to Salinas, California, a struggling farming town near Monterey, California. They are economic migrants of a sort, poor in old age after having been middle class in middle age, driven from the Bay Area by the high cost of living there, and the cold facts of a small fixed income. Salinas––a place to make a home that they do not call home––has probably the best weather in California, and a murder rate more than twice as high per capita as that in Los Angeles, not to mention severe problems with child poverty, homelessness, bad schools, and gang violence. I come from wherever else I am to see them every couple of months. I sit with them in the tidy rented house they can barely afford and listen to their complaints, sympathetically and sometimes not sympathetically. I do errands with them. I walk their town. I photograph. I am part watcher and part dreamer, as they themselves likewise watch what comes to pass, and dream of what does not come to be.
Jason Francisco
Salinas, 2018
Salinas, 2018