The human need for shelter is real and lasting no matter how it manifests itself in us. In California, squatters, gold miners, and émigrés settled and adapted the law of the land, creating an expansive and often confusing definition of home. This process applies today, as new residents continue to migrate and settle in the West.

People live on the edge here in California, and it’s dangerous to look down from a place built of dreams. But risk creates possibility. That’s why these dreams have built our homes and paved our roads. That’s also why, from time to time, they turn sour and dim.

Born in Tijuana, Salomón Huerta was raised in the projects of Boyle Heights and grew accustomed to the shaved heads of the gang members in the area. To make some spare change, he spent his afternoons painting small, passport-sized portraits of his homies. His talent was unequivocal.

Huerta is now known for his detailed portraits of the backs of people’s heads. In fact, the Whitney Museum used this iconic image to advertise their 2000 biennial and posted Huerta’s heads all over New York City on billboards and bus stops. For a ghetto kid like him, it was a dream come true. But Huerta had something else in mind besides fame. He was thinking of a house, the home he never had. Huerta spent his next few years painting tract homes; the kind, he says, that anyone with an honest job could buy.

These tract homes, now part of the vernacular of the Southern California landscape, were part of the post-World War II building boom that aimed to provide affordable single-family housing to veterans of the war and to the new American middle class.

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