Marcia joined us to the movies and afterwards she insists on going to Norma Jean’s in Castroville – she had been wanting to go ever since she got here, in January. with the year was close to ending, it was about time. Norma Jean’s is thé gay latino bar in the region. which is not the only thing that gives the bar its aura of local legend; the place is named after Marilyn Monroe who was the artichoke queen of the town, back in 1948. Castroville is artichoke land.
after marcia got her surfboard out the pick-up truck and stationed it at our house, i jump in and we drive down south to Monterey County. it’s my first time to meet her; marÃa had met marcia at a thanksgiving dinner in her house. marcia is a new professor in Community Studies at UCSC, and we talk about the experience of living in Santa Cruz. she also hated it at first. she lives in the “Beach flats” (“there’s no other place i could live in Santa Cruz”), the tiny latino neighborhood of town next to the Boardwalk which is considered, according to racist common-sense, to be an unsafe part of town. she continued to consider to move back to San Francisco for the longest time, till she found pacification in being in Santa Cruz in this moment of her life: the ocean. our conversation elaborates on the privileged and white character of this place, and i find out that the guilt side of white privilege, which maggie had observed in dealing with high school kids in Philly, is also present here. the self-righteousness strikes me deeply, but i haven’t come across much guilt. it would almost seem a welcome break from the self-righteousness. wait till you have them in class, marcia said, then the guilt comes out. it’s almost worse than the self-righteousness. cause somehow they look for her to fix it. drawing the boundaries in order not to take care of their guilt.
after passing the surreal landscape of the PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electricity) plant at Moss Landing, the lowest point of Monterey Bay, we approach Castroville. once we leave Highway One i get a sense of how small this place is. we find ourselves in a sea of darkness – the fields, no doubt. then we hit the main street, with an arch that announces: “Castroville. The Artichoke Center of the World.”
Norma Jean’s is on the left side of the street. on the other side, the straight bar. people hanging out in front of both bars, mainly a bunch of guys, cowboys, on the straight side, who have their eyes fixed on Norma Jean’s, in a way that suggests that the interesting stuff happens on at the other side of the street. actually, Norma Jean’s might be the only thing happening in this tiny town. one inevitably enters the center of attention marked by their gaze to enter, and i feel myself straightening my shoulders when i do.
once we’re inside we’re overwhelmed by the crowd, the music, the dancing, the atmosphere. (a latino crowd indeed, i must have been the only white person.) and in between, Marilyn Monroe images all over the place. once on the dancefloor, the variety strikes me: from what looks like old land laborers with cowboy hats dancing to the banda music, to incredibly dressed up women; from cool butches in lumberjack shirts to fashionable kids eagerly waiting for (latin) hip hip to do their thing. men and women and everyone in between – and then there’s line dancing! and a drag queen show later in the night, in a part of the bar that kind of invokes a saloon. (marcia gives me some dollars to offer it to the performer on stage, but as i shy away she does it, with a quite impressive performance herself.) all of this is worlds apart from the kind of sexual identity politics that i associate with white middle-class and urban crowds, like in San Francisco. and Norma Jean’s definately is a far more attractive and interesting space. i discovered my favorite bar in the region tonight.
