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Carlos Gauna surveys the wind-blown waves off a popular Santa Barbara County beach. It is a cold, gray afternoon and only a few people are in the water: a father teaching his son to surf, a lone man wading in the whitewash.
Gauna launches his video drone, hoping to spy what might be moving stealthily among them great white sharks.
In decades past, this might have seemed a quixotic venture. Great whites were thought to be somewhat rare in these southern waters, wandering now and then from the wilder coast up north. Most surfers considered it supremely improbable that one of these apex predators was hunting for food at their break.
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Even in a comparatively middle-class coastal neighborhood in economically ravaged Guatemala, Hernandez felt like he had no prospects. He also had no father or mother his dad having left before he was born and his mother traveling to the U.S. when he was 6 to try to find a job and send money back to her family.
Now the maras, local gangs, were breathing down Hernandez’s neck. They wanted to rope him into arms dealing and drug smuggling. He repeatedly refused.
“I told myself, if I do this, I won’t be able to live the life I want to,” Hernandez said in Spanish. “I won’t ever see my mom again.”
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But when she signed up to speak at their meeting Tuesday, she was denied. There was not space, officials said, for her to voice her opinion.
“It’s understandable that there would need to be some changes because of COVID but doing things telephonically should allow more people to participate,” said Walters, who works as a professor at Cal State Long Beach.
Last week an emergency meeting called to approve a lease with the federal government to hold up to 1,000 migrant children at the Convention Center received unanimous support from the council after a list of speakers almost unanimously praised the idea.
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Gerald Locklin, Long Beach poet and defining West Coast literary voice, dies
Gerald Locklin, 79, of Long Beach
(Family photo)
March 3, 2021 1:38 PM PT
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Known by many as the preeminent poet of Long Beach, Gerald Locklin was perhaps even more esteemed among those who knew him as Professor.
Over half a century, Locklin was a defining literary voice on the West Coast and beyond as a writer of poetry, fiction and essays, tracing an evolution from hard-drinking, bear-like bacchanalian to gray, slender, sober and ever free-spirited elder statesman of letters. Poet Charles Bukowski’s long-ago praise of him as “one of the great undiscovered talents of our time” has been eclipsed by the years: Locklin published some 150 books and thousands of poems, many in translation and studied and admired around the world.