Episode 33: José Vadi on California

José Vadi grew up in California’s Inland Empire, but his roots go back to Puerto Rico and Mexico. His abuelo, or grandfather, was an Okie who hopped freight trains west to Nebraska and then on to California, the promised land. Like many immigrants, he worked for a time as a migrant worker in the salad bowl of California’s agriculturally rich central valley, before settling down in the San Bernardino Valley to raise a family. Vadi’s second book, Inter State: Essays from California (Soft Skull Press), is an innovative collection of interconnected essays. Each piece appeared elsewhere previously, in slightly different form, but together, they create a prismatic picture of California’s sprawling nooks and crannies—from the agricultural lands to the gentrifying urban culture of the bay area. Vadi’s routines, including commuting to his old job in San Francisco, are a common thread that weave these essays together. Although they were all written between 2015 and early 2020, as Vadi notes in the afterword, “connecting California, then the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, and 2020’s record-breaking fire season grabbed and pulled at the seams as hard, quickly and destructively as possible.” Inter State is a valuable book in understanding the California of today, a state rife with stubborn issues: neo-liberal fantasy-land economics, a housing crisis, an ill-prepared bureaucracy for managing climate change and natural disasters, and largely tone-deaf leaders who may say the right things but who are just as compromised as some of the swamp creatures in Washington, DC. And yet… Vadi’s book is hopeful. He left the Bay Area for Sacramento and now has more time to write poems, essays, plays, take photos, and skateboard (another undercurrent in the book). He seems to have successfully removed late capitalism as a hinderance to his life, at least for now. His new surroundings in Sacramento have renewed his creativity and purpose. We caught up recently to discuss Inter State and what he’s up to next.