A Pacific Coast Highway Road Trip

Highway 1 has long occupied a central place in my personal geography. From early childhood vacations to formative adolescent milestones, it has served as an axis around which memory has accumulated. I recall standing as a child on the beach at Morro Bay, awestruck by the looming presence of Morro Rock. I remember romantic evenings in Pacifica, a marriage proposal in Carmel-by-the-Sea. These memories form a psychic landscape that is layered, contradictory, and unresolved.

Yet the first memory I have of Highway 1 is not defined by pleasure or exploration. At the age of eight, my mother took me on an impromptu coastal trip following a breast cancer scare. I lacked the intellectual and emotional faculties to comprehend the situation, but its emotional impact was acute: anxiety, confusion, and a nascent awareness of mortality. Though we returned many times to the California coast throughout my childhood, the memory of that initial trip remains the most prominent.

As a young adult, I embarked on my first solo road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. There was a kind of adolescent euphoria in the convergence of perceived freedom and natural beauty. I stopped frequently to photograph the coastline, unknowingly initiating a visual practice that would later evolve into a more politically engaged artistic inquiry. At the time, it was simply an attempt to 'capture' beauty and 'preserve' wonder.

But nostalgia alone cannot account for the wide gamut of memory tied to this route. Adulthood brought darker associations: one trip marked by the haze of opioid use, nodding off behind the wheel, with the uncomfortable realization that I was both a participant and an observer in my own undoing. As George Eliot wrote, such recollections come with "shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, after a degree in political science and a career in intelligence, that the act of revisiting these sites now occurs through a more politicized lens. The landscape has not changed, but my framework for interpreting it has. What once appeared as an open expanse of memory and emotion now reveals itself as a stratified space shaped by labor, capital, erasure, and contradiction. Rather than resist this shift, I have come to see it as a necessary evolution. It is a perspective that I will embrace and integrate into my work going forward. If my early photographs sought to preserve wonder and extract beauty, my future work will seek to interrogate the systems that produce, exploit, and obscure it.

Having spent formative years in Santa Barbara and subsequently in other California locales, my education was dominated by colonial aesthetics rather than historical critique. Field trips to the Santa Barbara Mission, the crafting of dioramas depicting missions and Chumash settlements, all served as educational experiences predicated upon surface engagement, systematically obscuring underlying genocidal histories. Acorns collected for the preparation of wiiwish—a traditional Chumash dietary staple—were presented as educational novelties, their cultural significance sanitized through pedagogical distance.

Yet, the missions captivated me. The architectural aesthetics, imbued with a seemingly anachronistic presence within contemporary American urbanism, held a paradoxical appeal. Their incongruity appeared to transcend temporal boundaries. Only later would I grasp the degree to which these structures were equally discordant even in their original context: symbols of colonial hubris abruptly imposed upon pristine, indigenous landscapes.

Growing up amidst this aestheticized colonial framework, my fascination with the Chumash endured into adulthood, transforming into dedicated studies of their ethnobotanical and ethnomedicinal traditions. Their philosophical dualism resonated with me deeply as an adult. Yet, as a child, my youthful understanding failed to recognize the violent histories of dispossession and genocide to which they had been subjected.

Returning recently to the Santa Barbara Mission, I anticipated an emotional experience, at the very least, with the narcotic comfort of nostalgia. Instead, I was confronted with an affective vacancy, interrupted only by irritation at discovering the Franciscan Friars were beneficiaries of the twenty-dollar admission fee, a realization that nearly prematurely terminated my visit.

The site itself, once personally resonant, felt inexplicably foreign, devoid of historical continuity or emotional connection. Rarely have historical sites elicited so profound a disengagement for me, surpassing even my apathy towards Civil War battlefields—locations I typically find profoundly tedious. At this mission, however, contemplation pivoted instead towards the invisible toll exacted upon Chumash lives. The mission’s museum exhibitions compounded this dissonance, with their oversimplified, caricatured representations of indigenous peoples producing a distinct internal metaphysical discomfort.

Ultimately, my return offered none of the anticipated rewards—neither solace nor familiarity. The experience yielded instead a deeper, unsettling confrontation with historical complicity, prompting a reflection on my position within ongoing historical narratives. What historical scripts are still being written and what is my role in those unfinished narratives?

Agriculture often remains imperceptible to those raised amidst it, especially when such labor is predominantly performed by an ostensibly invisible, minimally recognized underclass. This dynamic manifests strikingly in California, where Latin American migrant workers profoundly shape cultural landscapes yet remain paradoxically unacknowledged. Growing up in Coastal California, bilingual school assemblies, and pamphlets and advertisements in both Spanish and English—or occasionally exclusively Spanish—formed part of my daily experience. Yet, despite this pervasive cultural saturation, a tacit social refusal persisted, preventing acknowledgment of migrant workers, their exploitative wages, physically demanding labor, and their systematic marginalization.

This persistent refusal to confront the lived realities of migrant workers endures today, albeit camouflaged within superficial calls for compassionate immigration policies. The prevalent narrative frames migrant workers as essential precisely because they perform labor that "regular Americans" purportedly reject, a claim conveniently neglecting that such jobs are undesirable precisely because they entail exploitative compensation for physically debilitating work. Such cognitive dissonance is symptomatic of late-stage capitalist society, wherein consumer compassion is conditioned upon distancing oneself from the suffering necessitated by their consumption, a phenomenon I term "Compassion Prime."

The Pacific Coast Highway serves as a focal point for California's agricultural production, particularly within the coastal central region encompassing San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties. The climate of this area renders it exceptionally suited to cultivating an extensive variety of crops; its agricultural potential is unrivaled within the contiguous United States.

Unexpectedly, this recent journey and my renewed exposure to the agricultural landscapes and laborers of Coastal California opened the floodgates of memory. As a child, my encounters with these fields and their workers were marked by curiosity regarding crop identification and laborer identities, coupled with the intense olfactory impression of fertilizer mixed with the salty marine air. Such sensory experiences undoubtedly anchored these childhood memories particularly firmly.

I maintain profound gratitude for my formative exposure to this agricultural environment, an experience which fundamentally informed my later comprehension of migrant labor's socioeconomic and political intricacies, and gave me a life-long intuitive perspective on labor exploitation within this framework.

Beauty. This is the structural entrapment inherent to the Pacific Coast Highway. It's arguably the principal allure for the majority who visit. Bixby Bridge (pictured below) draws hundreds of visitors daily, each one producing nearly indistinguishable images, replicated endlessly across social media platforms. Prior to the digital saturation of contemporary visual culture, the act of admiring—and even photographing—these locations constituted a form of connection: to a time, to a place, to a sense of presence. In the current late-stage capitalist sociocultural paradigm, however, such spaces operate within a transactional logic, whereby aesthetic value is extracted and commodified in exchange for digital affirmation. The result is an increasingly vacuous cycle of consumption, devoid of relational or spatial integrity.

This dynamic is difficult to critique without implicating oneself. I, too, produce these images, surrounded by others making identical compositional decisions. I rationalize the gesture as observational or critical—an act of bearing witness to the phenomenon—but such justifications feel increasingly hollow. Recognition of the structure does not exempt one from participating in it, which is, perhaps, the mechanism through which the trap is most effectively sprung; there feels a futility in trying to resist it.

The Pacific Coast Highway offers many opportunities for meaningful engagement, but its beauty may itself obstruct a deeper connection. One might liken it to a celebrity or an individual of overwhelming physical beauty, so aesthetically commanding that few endeavor to look beyond the surface, let alone interrogate the structures that sustain their myth.