![]() Munoz’s Bakersfield is a place where the town’s three most prominent ethnic groups - Basque, Okie, and Mexican - have created a shared identity that the rest of the state mocks as, well, Bakersfield. Munoz, a longtime friend, was born just north of Bako - as locals call Bakersfield - in McFarland, a town of about 21,000 that “no one knew where the fuck it was until Kevin Costner,” he said, referring to the actor’s 2015 sleeper hit McFarland USA. I ordered a sumptuous chile verde he got the machaca, which came with a salsa so savory you could’ve mistaken it for spicy bone broth. It’s a beloved Cal-Mex diner with a full bar, open since 1953. He demanded I start my official Valley tour with breakfast at Arizona Cafe. But I was there to see Matt Munoz, a former staffer and current freelance columnist for the Bakersfield Californian. If non-Californians know Bakersfield at all, it’s for its music - Buck Owens and Merle Haggard’s Bakersfield Sound, or the nü-metal thrashings of Korn. And I’ll say it: Only Los Angeles and Houston - maybe - have better Mexican food scenes than the Central Valley. But after spending three days on Highway 99, eating from Bakersfield to Sacramento and back - from taco trucks to high-end restaurants, in rest stops and swap meets, from big cities to towns with barely 3,000 people - I am now a convert. Įven I’ve ignored the Central Valley throughout my career - and I literally wrote the book about Mexican food in the United States. Even New York’s Mexican food gets more foodie love. They instead obsess about the Mexican food in Los Angeles or San Antonio, which makes sense. You’d figure that an area with so many Mexicans, from third-generation dining dynasties to families fresh across the border, would get some love from food critics. At a gas station, I took satisfying, warm bites of each. ![]() I grabbed a jalapeno-and-cheese-stuffed bolillo from La Perla Bakery, then stopped by a branch of the Tacos La Villa chain for a Hot Cheetos breakfast burrito. But narratives about the Central Valley as the state’s much-maligned-yet-vital backbone and as a hub of Mexican culture are erased again and again.Īll of this was on my mind as I got off Highway 99 in Bakersfield. Waves of immigrants over the past century - Armenians, Okies, Portuguese, Sikhs, Filipinos, Japanese, Hmong, and especially Mexicans and Central Americans - have established themselves in this country in the Valley’s fertile soil, meandering roads, and affordable housing. But it’s also an essential, underappreciated locus of Californian identity. The one thing Central Valley gets credit for is being the anchor of the state’s $46 billion agricultural industry, where nearly all of the country’s table grapes, almonds, walnuts, pomegranates, and many other crops are grown. Devin Nunes of Fresno and Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, two of Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants - are loathed by half the country. Even the Central Valley’s most prominent figures - Republican U.S. Stockton, an industrial port town on the San Joaquin River, filed one of the largest municipal bankruptcies in American history in 2014. Drinking water up and down the region is contaminated. The state’s punishing drought hit here the hardest. ![]() Migrant workers live and work in conditions little changed since John Steinbeck shocked the United States with descriptions of how the Joads lived in The Grapes of Wrath. Stories from the Central Valley that get mainstream play tend to be about crime, or poverty, or some other societal ill. To most of California, the Central Valley, a long, narrow area, ringed to the west by coastal mountain ranges and to the east by the mighty Sierra Nevadas, where about 6.5 million people live, is shorthand for misery.
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