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| Groves in Duarte -- Sometime in the Past |
Duarte.
Duarte is a city in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles. It was once quite rural, mostly small holdings of orange and lemon groves and avocado orchards at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains by the San Gabriel River.
Of course, before it was groves, it was a California Spanish rancho, Rancho Azusa de Duarte as it was called, only 7,000 acres of scrub and manzanita, where cattle and sheep were raised. Before that it was Indian land, where the tribe that would be called "Gabrieleno" lived well by the river that courses out of the mountains and off the abundance of the oaks and the other plants and animals of the region.
And now? Well, now it's a standard model San Gabriel Valley suburb of Los Angeles, chock a block with little stucco houses, mostly built in the 1950's before the freeway went through (the 210 wasn't built through Duarte until the 1970's). Even as a suburban enclave, Duarte was somewhat apart.
Duarte was the region where playwright/actor/musician Sam Shepard grew up in the 1950's and into the early 1960's and where (in a sense) he sets his "family plays" that won so many awards in the 1970's and '80's when they were seen as a revelation of the darker side of the California Dream as well as for what could be done on stage when the strictures of realism were violated.
I say that "in a sense" Shepard sets his family plays in or near Duarte, because you don't really know where his imploding families are, except that they are somewhere in California, Southern California, not far from the desert, but not actually in it. A transitioning rural/suburban area, where coyotes were sometimes still heard, where a future in agriculture was still imagined to be possible, where living could be harsh, and yet where the Dream of what might be possible was ever-present.
