Snow
Last week, I joined the herd of thousands of Southern Californians looking for fresh powder on Mammoth Mountain. I found it.I've been riding Gold Rush, Canyon Express and other ski lifts at Mammoth for about 12 years. This year, more than any other, I also found that the supermarket clerks, resort maintenance workers and even the guy who made me a Nutella-filled crepe in town looked like my cousins, aunts and uncles.
Noe Gardea, the Peru-born publisher of the weekly Sierra Reader in nearby Bishop, told me Hispanic immigration to the Mammoth area has boomed in the last three years. Tourism-related service sector jobs and construction work has brought most new residents to the area. Noe said he recently talked to an immigrant family of modest means who'd moved to Mammoth from Colorado looking for work. The weather and high rents are usually their biggest challenges. It's not unusual, Noe said, to find ten or more people sharing a one bedroom apartment. Noe estimates there are just under 4,000 Hispanic immigrants in the Mammoth area. That's a lot considering the town's permanent population is around 7,000. There's been little friction from the immigrants' arrival.
Three years ago Noe began publishing El Sol de la Sierra. The thinner, Spanish-language version of his folksy newspaper is more community service than money maker. He hopes it serves as a guide to the area for the Spanish-speaking immigrants because most keep to themselves, he said, and many stay for a season or two, then move elsewhere. Some are staying long enough to leave their mark. Immigrant owned apparel stores, markets, and auto repair shops are starting to sprout.
Love brought Noe to the Eastern Sierras. He fell for a lady from Big Pine, a town of about 2,000 people south of Mammoth on Highway 395. She stayed in L.A. for him. When and if they had kids, she didn't want them to grow up in a big city she told him. So Noe gave up his insurance job and uprooted his life from West Covina to the Owens Valley. He couldn't find work at first so he commuted into L.A. County. That didn't work for very long. He saw that the area lacked a publication with local columnists. That added to free classifieds make his Sierra Reader very popular. He hopes his fellow Latinos stay long enough to call the area home.
This valley's been the source of opportunity and heartbreak for many people. The success of Mammoth Mountain founder Dave McCoy is stuff of legend around here, as is L.A.'s water swindling in the early 20th Century, and the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans at the foot of the Sierras in Manzanar.
