With before. Its something that millions grapple with every day. I want to communicate to people what it feels like or for them to understand that theres a cost to policing. The one did you push the button . [laughter] host is a show airs on msnbc at 1 00 p. M. The macbook tvs live coverage of the los angeles festival of books continues were here on the campus of Southern California another beautiful california day about 150,000 people are due here this weekend. Attend the festival. Will go back inside and this is an author panel on california and some of that california issues that are currently being faced. Again, if if you want to see our full schedule of coverage go to tv. Org. Welcome to this panel which has four terrific people on it. My name is miriam and i will be moderating. Hopefully will be facilitating a conversation on housekeeping manners, turn turn cell phones off, please. Most important thing is after the panel all the authors will be signing books in assigning area one. This is a really Interesting Group of the books that all were put together by the folks who put together the festival because there really, all four authors are in search of what the title is lost the stories and will delve more into what that means. Ill be very brief with my introduction. Everyone has a website if youre interested in more background on anybody. Googled them they all have great material on their website that refers to the work theyve done and their bios. Tim hernandez, starting on the end, a true a true renaissance man from fresno and teaching in texas. Splitting his time back and forth. Tim is a poet, novelist, mural painter and an author of the most recently terrific book called, all they will call you which he calls documentary fiction. Well talk about what that means and we can also talk about. [inaudible] tim has great experience. Kimball taylor is the author of three books. Most recently, the the coyotes bicycle. Hes a san diego resident and has done a lot of stories about surfing and working for server magazine. Migrated into oceanography into a remarkable story about an impoverished teenager who built an empire smuggling migrants across the border on bicycles. Christine pelisek is a Crime Reporter with a canadian transplant from los angeles and is covered now working for people magazine. Did some really remarkable work connecting the past crimes of the serial murderer who became known as she and his editors coin frame, the grim sleeper because of the big gap between his two murder sprees. Gabriel thompson is a writer, journalist, social activist, occasional Community Organizer who has written for lots of publications and National Media and has done three books . Right . His most recent one which is called chasing the hardest which will talk about today is oral history of farmworkers throughout california. He builds on a terrific build book which he did about a quart hundred Community Organizer which i urge you to read that as well. Look up fred roth his legacy is well known today. Well have a conversation and keep things brisk and moving and leave time for questions for you all in last 15 minutes or so. Ill start unconventionally by asking tell us one thing thats not in your official biography that you think would be fun or useful for readers to know about you. Gabriel. I got turned on to reading books and writing the year after i barely graduated from high school. I was working as a pizza delivery guy for roundtable in san jose and my shift started at 10 00 a. M. And people dont buy pizzas at ten am, although, with more legalized marijuana they might start doing that more often. [laughter] i would show up at roundtable and there was a period where i was sucking down cokes, now i i do diet cokes or coffee but back then it was pure carbonated soda. As i waited for the first delivery order, my dad had grown up in north dakota and he was a student radical at what point and got tossed out of an event and i found that extremely exciting. He sort of dropped a bunch of books that he had in his basement in north dakota about the student movement, history and i spent a couple hours a day waiting for the first pizza delivery to be ordered, you know, getting hyped up on caffeine and reading these books. That was was the first time i thought books were cool. Its not a lesson i learned in high school. That was the start that, i think, think, led me down this path i never wanted to write a book. [laughter] it just kind of fell in my lap in a way back so youre an accidental writer . Yes. Kimball . Hearing my biography i realize how disjointed it is. If theres one thread its someone who becomes obsessed with certain things and thats how this book came about. I walked into a pile of bicycles, abandoned bicycles, in an odd place at an odd time and i became intrigued and obsessed and followed it through. Thats the result here, is this bookfor me, the last two books was about my search for a woman. [inaudible] this book all i will call you is about the surviving family members of 32 unknown passengers that happen in 1948. They go man, tim, youre such youre such a good researcher. I say, i actually have a secret weapon that helps me do all the research and the one who was my mother. Lydia hernandez was here in the front row. [applause] tim, that leads me into my first question for you. You were on this multi year quest to identify, people who know the song, all them will call you which is a guthrie song popularized. You spent years on this sort of quest to name the people who were anonymous people and raise money to put a plaque on the graves. What drove you to do that to spend so much time. Like christine said. That story like my previous book as well, i accidentally happen. One of those things where you cant go searching for that subject. One day, you find that with material and think someone should do something for me, this mystery was guthrie song about friends who were scattered by dry leaves. My thing was who are these rents . I wanted to know who they were. Because i come from a background of migrant farmworkers from the San Joaquin Valley where to place, there was the sort of inherent investment in that gabriel, your your book which was oral history and a departure for you in a different kind of writing, you had complete, unlike tim who tried to figure out the work, you got to pick the characters that you wrote about. Why did you pick the people that you did . Its an interesting collection and what was the guiding theme for you . What do you want people to come away from the book with so, there were certain people one way to say this is that i studied. I evaluated which people would be more interesting and usually it was someone gave me a phone number to go see a woman in stockton who was working in tomatoes and i drove out knowing nothing about her except the one thing i thought i knew was incorrect, she harvested why am graves in napa and the narrators i reached out to advocacy organizations in california and he gave me a list and sometimes i wanted to find people who illustrated a big crisis in california farming. For example, sexual sexual harassment, Sexual Assault against female farmworkers is a big problem. I went and found someone who had been raised on the job and then complained after six months of debating whether or not she should go forward or worried that she would be fired, may be deported, did it anyways. Was fired. Was deported. There were certain pieces i wanted to touch. What was interesting for me i also, the book is 17 narrators and the vast majority are current or former farmworkers but i also want to look more at the farm worker ecosystem. The people that make it all possible, in some ways. Their social service providers. Theres an elementary teacher in east salinas and grew up as a migrant farmworker families and now teaches migrant families. A couple growers or farmers are in the book as well. I want to paint a picture like i said, the ecosystem of farm work was in california. One thing i really appreciated about this book versus other more journalism or history books and approaching interviews is that we all have to listen so we get to listen to people stories all the time and we generally try to go to towards the directions theyre telling us about. We also have these constraints where we have these assignments and if im writing about weight theft in the valley, ill be asking questions about their experiences with weight developed in Central Valley and thats a part of their life and theres what youll see constantly and farmworkers in california about them being oppressed and economically disadvantaged and fearful of being deported and theyre all real but theyre all. [inaudible] what i really loved about this oral history experience with getting down and letting the conversation really go in ways they determined. Often in the first couple minutes when i met with someone and they didnt quite know what i was up to and i didnt know what i was up to that point, they would have a three or four sentence summary of their life. They came here to help their parents. And i would say im more interested in lets go broader and i would ask options like, what was was the first time you really enjoyed being with your mom in your village in mexico . Those kind of questions we both realize this is a different kind of experience. Hes not looking for me to prove a point as much as learn about their lives in ways that capture not just the hardships but also what emerges from the stories, i think, is a sense of joy and pride in the work. The ways in which you spend working on a crew often with family members and friends that theres a kind of culture and solidarity in helping each other out and enjoy sometimes in the work. Thats one of the things im ensuring this book is presenting farmworkers as people who have much more, get a relationships to the work they do then as its presented. Anyone here, if you are, you probably have a pretty complicated relationship to the work you do. You know . I was excited about that part. So, you use use the individual narratives to get into that oral and bring that effectively into the world of farmworkers. Kimball, you going to this netherworld of smuggling and border life through bicycles. Youre a surfer writing about this sort of underworld of smugglers on the border. How did you make that transition . How did you talk about how you use the michaels and had bicycles to get into that world . There were a couple of things going on. My initial strategy was to talking to border people, people on the border. The thing about a bicycle is that it is fungible, even though they have serial numbers, with a bicycle leaves your hands it joins the sea of bicycles and just the way a dollar it leaves her hands it joins the idea of a dollar. The only way i could track of the bicycles where they had come from, where they were going was to talk to the people that handed them one to the next. Another author said about bicycles said, theres three things to the underground economy, drugs and bicycles. [laughter] its true. Bicycles travel through our economy in ways that in the book i describe it as the die in the plumbing. If you follow a bicycle youre going to meet a thief, policeman, casual joy writer and all these are very interesting people but another aspect of the bicycle is that it connects to this part of our childhood and its our First Experience with free mobility. At one point its our gateway to travel in the world. I dont think that leaves people subconscious very easily so that when i started tracking bicycles that went to very dangerous world and when i first started asking about bicycles it wasnt as though i was asking about a drug tunnel or some other kind of smuggling technique. People whats left their leg and say aha, the bicycles bicycles. They would open up to the extent that i started to learn things that i didnt want to know at one point. [laughter] thats a great answer. Christine, you are navigating a world that is much more familiar to you. You open the book talking about how frequently the you went to the Coroners Office and that was your beat. Who are the new dead people this week, kind of. Yes, this story has to make you in a way thats very very different and as you said, earlier, led you to feel that it should be a book. Theres a part of the end of the book where the murderer is convicted and the brother of one of the victims comes to you and in the emotional moment says, you cared. Tell us about that and how much you cared and what that meant to the people and why you felt the responsibility to tell their story. Well, the book is the grim sleeper and the murderer started back in the 80s and so a lot of the families, their daughters died in the 80s and they felt that the police werent doing anything about their cases. For 20 years they knew nothing about it. They didnt know that their daughters were killed by a serial killer. I ended up finding out about it in 2006. I went to the Coroners Office ands office and looked at the list of women that were found dead in la county, 38 women were on this list and some of them were shot, some were strangled and the la county thought that these women could possibly be victims of a serial killer. I actually got this list from the Coroners Office and some of the women had died from Natural Causes but there were two women on the list and one was a 15 yearold runaway and another 35 yearold prostitute. I found out that those two cases were linked to a series of murders that happened in the 80s. Back in the 80s, there were six activists serial killers killing at the same time. There was a lot going on in the 80s, crack epidemic there was driveby shootings, a lot of stuff that was going on. A lot of Police Resources were going into driveby shootings in dealing with gangs, drug dealers and so there were all these bodies of women that were all over South Los Angeles and there wasnt a lot be done about them. The women were all black women, all of them had drug addictions and their bodies were tossed in alleys and some of them are shot, stabbed, the grim sleeper his victims were shot in the test. Test. The families of the victims lived in South Los Angeles and had no idea. They first spoke to the cops once or twice and that was it. When i started doing the story i ended up going to the egg Alexander Family and she was talking about Danielle Kania i went to their house until then them their daughter was a victim of a serial killer. They hadnt spoke to the police or anything. From that moment on, i had a relationship with them. Finally, with with a number of the family members and in 2010, the man who is the grim sleeper was caught through familiar dna testing and it took for 60 years for it to go to trial. The families would go every two weeks, they show up and be there hoping that justice would be served and i go to the hearings and we were almost like a family. You know . So, at the very end he got convicted and a lot of us went out in the hall and you see the Police Detective and they started the task force finally in 2007 when the last victim was murdered, they they started a task force to look into it. When i went out into the hall as the detectives were hugging victims family members and the prosecutors were hugging the police and then daniel came up to me and hugged me and thanked me for my role. I end up writing a story about it because the police kept it hidden. It wasnt until my story came out that the Community Found out that there was a serial killer and so, he was thanking me for constantly writing about it and keeping it open. I should have mentioned, im sorry, her book will be out in june. Its not for sale today but you can order it online in advance. I want to ship to talk about how you guys wrote these books and decided what should be how you evaluate the material that you collect from your sources, both documents and people and i mentioned earlier that tim holt was booked a documentary novel and i would like you to read a passage from the introduction where you talk about what is truth, a topical issue today. While the telling itself is true, its loyalty is not to people of fact but rather to people a memory. This is all of us. In this way its inevitable that some memories will contradict other membranes. Several people witnessed the same tragedy and offer opposing accounts, whose version is most accurate . In this case, perception is truth. And how reliable is fact anyway . When the quote official documents themselves have been incorrect. Beginning with the names of these passengers. Officials have this inconsistencies. To stumble upon a stumble upon a plane stumble upon a fragmented and broken shards of stories. And to have faith that from these clues our own glaring humanity offers enough right to fill in the unknown. The facts of what occurred on the day are not, nor have they ever been the purpose of this book. This telling is not interested in the calculus details but rather the testimony themselves for the people whose lives were touched directly and incalculable ways. Can you expand on that a little bit . That was eloquent, articulation of your approach to telling the full story. You did a lot of research for this, you did a lot of on the Ground Research and you try to find the facts and find the people and get their stories. You also got oral history and a tape recorder. Youre a novelist and a journalist. How do you reconcile those and how did you make some of the decisions about what to include in his stories to tell . Sure. Its a daunting task and there were 32 families and and i didnt know what the story would be about. I know that i wanted it to be more than mere data or information that youre getting about who the people were or what happened in the plane crash but what i wanted for the reader to be any physical, threedimensional space, with these people so they got a sense that you lived with them, knew, knew they were. To do that, after getting when i found the initial research about the progress the documents that were out there, i realized there were so many errors within these themselves that i thought what the truth and im after . What is that . When i found first family, the ramirez Family Living in fresno, and they began to talk with me about who their family members were and share their pictures and the last letter he wrote to his wife and all of these things became real to me in a way that if im going to write the book it has to be grounded in their oral history. It all has to be tethered to their stories. Even if it time they contradict each other, i have to let them exist because thats the humanity of stories. Their story, the story. To suture them together was to to when theyd be telling me about Guadalupe Bay and he come over here and he put people on the shoulders of his back because he was tall and he would cross the rio grande in that way he became known, you cant but help but seek waterloo bay with women and children on his shoulders walking across the river. I love myself recreate the enactment of these things. The fictionalization that are in the book are in service to the greater truth. Their reenactments and the way you would view a documentary film, right . How do we know the first word spoken by native american, pilgrim when they landed at Plymouth Rock were exactly as tim burns pulled as they were . How did tim burns know what they said . Theres a lot of information and data and what he does is put us to the closest three intimidation of what might have been. Thats what i do here its a remarkable meeting together of stories. I admire your dealing with that issue forthrightly in the beginning. Youre not saying this is what happened pointblank. Kimball, you approach approach it in a simple way in some sense. Your story is two stories in one, alternating chapters of recording the bicycles in a grounded way and recreating the story of this guy who built an empire out of nothing. You expressed doubt even at the end of the story about what was true and was he really, was the letter that gets passed to you at the end from the protagonist, if you really write it. How did you wrestle with those things . Part of your book documentary is it true in a sense . How would you characterize it . Well, youre right in the sense that on the american side when i was tracking the bicycles there was so much data and other kinds of ways to verify what i was seeing. Once i crossed the border into tijuana, it was all in a sense, oral histories. I had to wrestle with what im hearing is true and in the sense of how smugglers smuggle people, i did a lot of work. I went to the trial of two Border Patrol agents who are struggling migrants and or Border Patrol to see how the operation worked and i did a lot of back research. In the end, it really came down to believing my sources and believing what they said was true. I wrote a lot of that into the book so that any reader can follow the thread and decide what theyre hearing is true or not right. You did a great job, i think of, separating out what is the more traditional very heavily grounded reporting versus where you had to rely on sources and characterization. Its beautifully it together. Kimball, its very suspenseful, i found. You it moves you along because the way use those oral histories on the other side of the border. You just dont really know until the end where were going. If book. Gabriel, a completely different approach in terms of history but the question to you. People people are telling you things and you have to make decisions, editing oral histories very significantly, right . How did you weigh what people are telling you and what you are going to select out of them . How did you edit the oral histories . You know, donald trump is not very articulate. If you read read his transcript from interviews it looks like a mess. But i looked at the transcripts of my conversations with these farmworkers and what i say often is a total mess as well. In that, if you see a transcription of our panel right now, there be plenty of times where i shouldnt have said that. You get a big body, five or six hours of conversation and you have to figure out how that becomes most of the stories is from birth to present, more or less. Thats a a lot of it material. You have to tease out what are the pieces that move forward. You have to find out whats most important to them. Then you start hacking away a little bit or if they allude to something, yeah, you dont always get to the first time but that sucked when my younger brother was deported for three years. Then i was over the next day and i was like, wait a second. When you see the transcript you think that mightve been something important and youll follow up with questions and youll ask how is he deported . Where was he deported . What were your first thoughts and when did you first find out about this . All these details that make it much more immediate for people. You did a great job with seamlessly we mean the multiple interviews so it seems like a totally coherent story. The end product is mainly, my questions are there. The end product is someone telling their life story and trying to organize it in some way, chronologically. That was a lot of work. The plus side was i wasnt writing a lot of these words. Man, for a writer, to put out a book that doesnt have to write very much is, we all love writing but id almost do anything other than right. [laughter] we love having books come out. Christine, accidental book writer. I was the experience of writing a book different for you from the journalism . What did you learn from the process that you would be interesting to share . What makes a book different and what can you do any book that you cant do in daily or weekly journalism . It was really hard writing books. When you write a story you have a thousand words but this is like, what, 50000 words or a hundred thousand words . It was the same but trying to figure out how to go about doing it. Who would be the stars . For me, i decided decided early on that i wanted to have a victim as the key players. A lot of books that you read about silly her up killers and the main focus is on that particular serial killer but i didnt want that. I wanted people to know about the women that were murdered and why they ended up in the situation they were in. Also, throughout the book as well, i put in the investigation like each investigation, murder for example, the first chapter is deborah jackson. The police thought it for the longest time but her girlfriend was the killer. Theres a lot of twists and turns and in the Second Chapter with henrietta, she came from a family of ten. Everything was going fine for her, she had a boyfriend and and was working at night and working during the day. Then she started doing crack and from there it went downhill. Her house burned down, she ended up living on the streets and came across Lonnie Franklin and in her case, they had two people . There was a female informant who said, my boyfriend did it. The police went off in that direction and then she changed her mind and said no, it wasnt him, it was my other boyfriend. You know what i mean . There were so many murders going on in the police they were working hundreds of cases like, two detectives. Someone would would say this is the murder, they say like sounds good. And theyd arrest that person and it would turn out to not be him. There were so many twists and turns and with each chapter i put in the story. Also, the politics there were going on in the time. A a lot of activists were saying that no one cared because the girls had prostitution records, they were black and other areas. Richard ramirez was big and everyone knew Richard Ramirez that no one knew about this outside slayer in South Los Angeles. I was really trying to get into the politics of it and leading up to the final you leave unattended a great job about leaving in the minor characters but keeping the focus and thats what makes your book a terrific work of journalism. Its very grounded in journalism but its narrative nonfiction. You initially focus on the victims allows you to shape that narrative to shape the book and to weave in the other materials. That make great sense. Gabriel mentioned how all of us are writers have many moments when we wish we werent writers or wish we had written. At the pinnacle of my career. I want to ask, low point any high point for each of you in your work. Tim, you mentioned in your book a point where you are almost ready to give up. Tell us about that and tell us about a high point. The research itself, dont get me wrong was difficult but thats the easiest part. The hardest part is how do i make the story. What i had been doing since beginning. I didnt know what the story it would be necessarily, i wrote everything, every aspect. At first i would write my Research Today that im going to hear and talk to them and it was monday and stuff. Then i would do the oral history and i would transcribe the interview. Then i had that language. Then i had the language from the documents themselves to look out. I had photographed and there were so many wonderful photographs and how do i put photographs in this book. I dont want it to look like a coffee table book. All of this and that was low point. When i had about four500 pages of wrought management material and i thought, ill start to eliminate and tear back so that i can find the story in there. As i started to do that i ended up with 30 pages of something and i thought, god, when you you have a sweater with one loose thread and you pull it internally, you ruined it. I ruined it. I ruined it. I put all that aside and started over from the beginning. That was the low point in the high point was that i finished it. [laughter] so you stole that line. No one else can use it. Kim. My highs and lows were fast and furious. Like something monitoring my heart rate. Id be waiting in a hovel of tijuana that looked like something out of the gaza strip waiting for someone to show up. So excited for the opportunity to finally crack this part of the story but also terrified at the same time. I think the biggest high for me in researching this story was peeling back the layers and finally learning the very personal story of the young coyote at the heart of this tale. There is a love story and a tragic love story at the center of it that was so human to me that even the sources were crying when they were talking about it. I think thats when i realized that it was a book. I think the low for me, many of them but the main low for me was trying to get it all together. The story went back 40 years. Lonnie franklin was in the military back in the 70s, as well. It wasnt wasnt a case of him focusing on one person and in a couple years. Forty years in multiple different people and multiple victims. Trying to put that together, was the main focus . Is there a main focus . Or will people get lost because there so many names . Its a possibility still, when you read it. That was one of the concerns i had. Writing in general is difficult. The high was, honestly, honestly, finishing it. I was quite happy about that. [laughter] congratulations. Think you. [laughter] when i first signed this book i was told that i had complete freedom to drive up and down the state of california, interview farmworkers and animals i wanted to to interview to get oral history and create some sort of not definitive but complicated somewhat comprehensive picture of what farm work and agriculture in general look like in california. I hung up and i thought thats awesome. Tons of freedom. Then i was like, whos advising me here. This is a big state. [laughter] i dont know if it was a low moment but it was a moment when i was like, boy. How will i do this . For me, the part and this is late in the game but first of all, i drove around with a recorder and talk to people at length in all these little towns in the Central Valley and often Imperial Valley and salinas, all these small rural farm communities and i loved doing that. Right now ive spent a lot of the families, farmworkers have have kids who are in college or younger, in school, farmworkers generally, parents arent excited about their kids going into farmer but i shared the narrative of the parents with the children and three of the children started crying when their reading the stories about their parents life. Their parents were taught theres this one man who came from peru to care for sheep and ends up protecting valley fever almost dies but a lot of the stories are about why he left peru and why he had to leave to try to improve the lives of his kids. When the kids read the stories about their dad they would tell me that it was completing a huge picture about their parents that they had never known about. So i think for me that was a really exciting moment. As a teenager you when i remember things like two, three, four, four and i wasnt curious about what my parents had gone through. Being able to have the children and a bit of a deeper understanding of what their parents had gone through for me it was exciting. I it spoke to the fact that oral history format which i had it done before allows you to broaden the topics that people can talk about and sometimes they if you lay that out they Start Talking about the topics that mean a lot to them. It might not fit really well in a headline of a newspaper article but are keith to how they see their lives and also, keith the many choices they made, they made thinking about how their kids would have better opportunities in the future. Cable, response from people who are in the book who have read it, your sources on the other side. Have you gotten much feedback . I have gotten feedback. Its been varied. Theres this photographer named maria to Teresa Fernandez is profiled in the book because she began taking pictures of architecture in tijuana and she came upon this house that used the border wall is the back wall of the house and it was almost as though her obsession skipped tracks and suddenly she became obsessed with the border wall itself. One of my favorite stories and she came upon this migrant camp that had just been it must have been rated or something because left things scattered there was a young woman purse they are in lipstick and candy spilling out and theres a diary. She turned to the left page in the diary and it said as soon as i get to america im going to start losing weight. I loved that detail because you think of migrants as a category of person, not as individuals and that detail really struck me as a human. I could relate to that person. Maria theresa loved the book but there were other people who gabriel and i were talking about this on the walkover. One of my characters hes upset and i dont think he told me its because of the way i portrayed tijuana as violent as i think it sometimes can be. Also, because i portrayed him him as i saw him. Hes a strange guy. Id be doing a disservice to my readers and a disservice to the story if i didnt relay the odd things about him that made certain facets of the story work. I could see that didnt set right with him. Its a hard thing, you get to know these people over a long period of time and they dont like you so much. [laughter] tim, same question to you . What was the question . Whats the feedback from people . They were moved by it. They expressed in the families that this book meant for them closer in many of the situation. The remains of the 28 mexican passengers in the airplane were actually shoveled into a massive unmarked grave seven decades. At Holy Cross Cemetery in fresno. While the four american crewmembers were sent back to their respective communities. Some of these, many of the families didnt know where the remains of the family were out. They didnt know what happened. They had heard there was a plane crash and that was how their lives and it but that was all he knew. When i showed up wanting to know about the story and writing a book, they instantly, expresses interest but this was closer for them. In 2013 as we earlier mentioned, we were able to with the help of the Fresno Diocese and the Musician Friend of mine and will committee we raised 14000 to put a heads stone there and theres a four by eight slab of granite has the names of everybody who died in that cemetery. And all the english and spanish what happened. At that time, the families i were was able to locate and only found two or three of the passengers families by then they were there present at that service. [applause] thats great. On that note, we will take questions from the audience. Here here are two people with microphones will come to you. Please, make your question in the form of a question question. Well get in as many as we can. I would like all the operators to talk about what kind of writing schedules you keep and if you are writing these books while you having other job. Gabriel . Know on the other jobs and the schedule is totally, not, ten hours and sometimes 20 minutes a day depending on the behavior of my one yearold in sixyearold. [laughter] i have a longterm i have due dates for which i have to crank it up spec we all like having deadlines. Its helpful. I dont like deadlines, i dont work with deadlines at all. Thats why my book took six years to write. My other job is being a professor and father to three children. Trying to fit all that in his writing early in the morning. Kimball . I was freelancing the entire time while i wrote this book. In the end, it worked out and i met people through assignments that had connections. For example, i met this fisherman lobster fisherman the work on this island that was offshore is one of the last places i needed the bicycles to arrive at. He told me where he was working and i was like, wait a minute, can i get a right on your vote . Writing . Whats your schedule for when youre writing. After i worked out all the things i could do before hand thats when i get it done. [laughter] christine . I was working fulltime as a journalist writing a book so it was really hard. I would spend the weekends from like 8 00 a. M. To ten at night and sometimes during the week from seven to ten and days off, holidays. Every second. [laughter] the title of this panel was tales of the west, lost tales. Im curious to know to what extent do your stories reflect something unique about the American West or do they not . We have Migrant Workers all over the country, we have crime, serial serial crime happening all over the country but theres something uniquely western about your story that you discovered in the course of reporting and writing . You do realize, tom, that we dont make up the titles. [laughter] [inaudible] [inaudible] the stories arent lost on the farmworkers im interviewing , they know those stories. What get lost is the way there portrayed to readers. Thats a lost art. But hes asking about the western part. The major farm work in the west is different in the country. I dont know its hard because migrant farmers going back to steinbeck theres this armor of migrant farmworkers that show up in different places and their welcomed until the crop is harvested and then there threatened to leave immediately once that crop is harvested. Thats an outdated vision of what the need for farmworkers. Yeah, i would say in the west, at least, in in Central Valley and salinas valley, what you have and its not quite as powerful on the east coast and midwest but you have this really tightknit cruise that have been doing the same work for decades and decades and decades. Out of that theres a much stronger farmworker culture because people have been working with each other, crewmembers, for a long time. In some ways that allows different ideas of what farm work can be like or how they experienced farmer in california. Deeply rooted agricultural communities and in some of these cruise two thirds of the people on the crew are family or Close Friends and so im not sure thats what reporting of Migrant Workers in North Carolina, a little bit in alabama and you didnt get that sense maybe because history is diverse. With the proximity of the border . That makes a huge difference. Give a lot of people who go back and forth between mexico and california in a way that you dont and other places. In the case of my book, i hope the people see this could happen anywhere else. Thats the idea. The other side of that is specifically tied to the west is that yes, there is farmworkers all over the country but not the degree in the San Joaquin Valley which is the agro micro cultural mecca. The other thing is for this book, anyways, it was tied directly to the program of 1940s and before that as well. The program, Pilot Program started and stopped in california. There is that link that ties this piece of history to california and not to other places. Were later on, they were dispersed. Yeah, id say the coyotes bicycle is a western western book and it couldve only happened in the west because the border is two thirds of the country and its an artificial boundary that had to get to know well the physical structures and how they work and, i think, that could only happen here. I thought it was important to get out to. The National Debate really covers the way the border actually works. And what a successful and what is not. The debate is actually disenfranchised from the reality on the ground. Christine . I think there serial killers all over the us but theres a lot of them in california. You know . Since the 70s, theyve had so many guys who come from california, i dont know if the weather or what. [laughter] and they stay for the prey, i dont know. I found i was talking to sociologist because i was curious about the grim sleeper book that there were six serial killers operating at the same time in the 80s and i found that unusual. I was talking to people in the fbi in different psychologists and i asked them, have you ever heard of another place like new york city where there was that many serial killers operating at the same time and so far, i havent found that. A couple of these guys were drifters they were going through murdering people and continuing on their murderous rampage where as other ones were born in the south arkansas area. We just have more of everything. [laughter] theres the shadow of cesar chavez and the idea that farmworkers were middleclass, uppermiddleclass workers, i dont think existed in a lot of the country. Part of the contradiction in doing these oral histories was the notion that better and farmworkers had fought and thought they were on the cusp of becoming the next bluecollar workers with great benefits and that colors everything because thats not how it works out. They had this hope that i think farmworkers may be harvesting tobacco in North Carolina never have access to. We have one of the time for one or two quick questions. About the investigative process that the authors went through. Whats the change in immigration culture right now, would you still be able to have your sources for another book or is it just a. [inaudible] that they wont come forward and tell you their stories . I dont think i understand the question, to be honest. Are you asking about the process . [inaudible] [inaudible] you know, when i think think about that immediately ill say all right, i have no background in Investigative Journalism or journalism at all. I studied as an undergraduate in poetry and my graduate was also poetry. For me the only thing i did know was what i didnt know. I was able to use that to my advantage. By that i mean, i would go to places and ask questions that i didnt know you werent supposed to ask questions. I knock on doors on people that youre not to knock on doors on. I would say i was following the story it was a naive approach but it worked. It was a guerrilla tactic. There were times it wasnt my job and i wasnt getting paid to do this. I had to rely on what i did have at my disposal. I was able to travel quite a bit because of my other poetry books and i banged on the idea that there may be other families in this audiences and i would take strips of paper with the names of the passengers on them and my phone number and tell the story to every audience and i pass these papers out and i found to family that way. Thats the kind of research i had to do. It was guerrilla tactics, go there, peter and knock on doors and know what you dont know. I would say one thing. This book i compiled last year and a lot of the stories are coming from 2007, 2008, 2000 night. Thousand eight, 2009. Theres a handful of migrant farmworkers who were deported or not. Under obama and their someone who is the head of migrant in the valley saying that parents are getting deported all the time. Its true that tom trump has designed but i hear people say that i just heard about this deportation and he only had a minor criminal offense and this is not the country that i know and it is a country that you know. You just werent paying attention. This has been happening for a long time. Its worth remembering that when you read and especially problematic deportation story now, do not think that this just started happening in january. You know . If i understand the question correctly, i do think there is a certain amount of animosity caused by the Current Administration between our two peoples. I also think, on a certain level, people as borderland people we have more in common than we dont. I was walking along with one of my closest contracts and a research he had come to tijuana and i pointed to the poster and he said, hes a liar. I said, yeah, i guess that makes sense. Nothings different here than in united states. All four of these books are remarkable for the personal relationships and the deep way they are reported and those kind of relationships transcend any specific political regime. Go to signing area one and you can continue to have this conversation. [applause] [applause]