My friend Dorrit texted me the photograph above with a question: "Porterville 1920s?" She'd sent another photo with the KKK marching down this street. The Klan was still active in Porterville in the 1980s, can you believe that shit? A writer for the Porterville Recorder noted that in 1985, a man contacted the paper to drum up some publicity about a demonstration the Klan was having on South Main Street. The reporter, Rick Elkins, told the man that he would not give them publi

Our landlord said he wanted to sell the house, so we had to move, at least that’s what Riley said. I didn’t fully understand why our lives were so chaotic, but I was beginning to see that a lot of what went wrong was Riley's fault. No one was in the driver's seat. This was our fourth move in four years, over a dozen since I was born. I’d been excited about leaving the horrible house we were in, until I laid eyes on the place we were moving into. The new address was near the r

They told their mother in Spanish "we brought home a stray dog." I didn't speak Spanish, but much later, the sisters told me...