Creative Pieces… 47
Flat, Hot Visalia by Abby Reid
My mother grew up in Visalia, California—the city in-between everything. The city you don’t notice you pass by on your road trips up north. Another one of those “cow towns.” The speck of dust you flick off of your Google Maps screen. While it reigns as insignificant to many, it inhabited a great deal of my childhood. My family would visit as much as they could—or, rather, my mother prompted us to visit as much as she could. We would venture up several times during the summer, and spend all of our Christmases there. My grandmother lived there for about five years before moving back to Southern California. I guess she sensed a sort of instinctual duty to remain in the place that caused her family so much pain. Or, perhaps, she wanted to uphold the seldom sweet memories (the tidbits my mother doesn’t share with our family). Visalia has an average poverty rate of 20.3% (2020), where one out of five residents live in poverty. Compared to the 16.4% (2020) of individuals across California living below the poverty line, Visalia has a significantly higher than average percentage of residents below the poverty line. According to the 2020 census, Visalia has a total population of 128,904 residents, and 26,159 of those residents were reported to have income levels below the poverty line. Factoring in COVID and Visalia’s smaller population (compared to my hometown, Corona, which yields almost 200,000 residents), the numbers are exacerbated. Visalia has carried a large population of residents living under the poverty line for years, and my mother was one of them during the eighties. Born and raised in the church, my mother did what
