O Santa Maria

By: Kristin Sanders

Santa Maria is three hours north of Los Angeles and four hours south of San Francisco, in an area of California called the Central Coast. Santa Maria is home to a lot of broccoli, spinach, and strawberry fields, some vineyards, cattle ranches, and the 2005 Michael Jackson child molestation trial, where fans gathered to show their support for what they were convinced he could not have done. The city has a reputation of smelling like broccoli when you drive through on Highway 101, toward better places in either direction.

Santa Maria is the hometown of no one particularly famous. Few people seem to know it’s where Zach Bowen, the “Katrina Cannibal” who murdered and dismembered his girlfriend Addie in post-Katrina New Orleans, spent his teenage years. It’s the birthplace of a handful of writers, like Inga Muscio, author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, published in 1998, and Myriam Gurba, author of Mean, the 2017 memoir of her sexual assault in Santa Maria. And me—I wrote a poetry book called Cuntry. It’s okay if you haven’t heard of any of us.

Santa Maria is not a sexy town, not a beautiful town, not an intellectual or creative town. During the Michael Jackson trial, one writer described it as “a plug-ugly agricultural town.”

There are 32 towns in the world named Santa Maria, and only one in the United States. With a population of 108,000, California’s Santa Maria is a flat, sprawling city shaped like a squashed bug and which seems to encompass everything sad about the United States: a depleted downtown, poverty, racial tensions, gang violence, a recent boom in box stores, undocumented immigrants working grueling jobs picking crops like strawberries—nicknamed la fruta del diablo because the work is so hard—and high rates of teen pregnancy due to a devoutly Catholic Chicano population. Not to mention an ICE facility. 

Little bursts of hope: In November 2018, 29-year-old Gloria Soto was the youngest woman ever elected to Santa Maria’s City Council, and only the sixth councilwoman. She beat my dad’s male dermatologist. Gloria works in development and public affairs for Planned Parenthood, which makes her election even more of a coup in this conservative town, where there is always someone protesting outside the Planned Parenthood building.

What are the cuntry origins of Santa Maria? Why would it birth so few bold women? My childhood, as I have written in my book, was porn and country songs. My first kiss happened at a New Year’s Eve party in a barn. Prom was held at the Elk’s Lodge.

Santa Maria is known for its barbecue, in particular a “Santa Maria-style” which entails a cut of beef called “tri-tip” grilled over native coast live oak, usually served with pinquito beans, bread, and salsa. The men who barbecue, in the style of the 19th-century vaqueros, lord over the scalding iron pit like sweating gods. I want to know: where are the women of Santa Maria-style barbecue?

An hour south of Santa Maria is Santa Barbara, the “American Riviera,” the gem of the Central Coast, a wine country unto itself, and, below that, the town of Montecito, where celebrities escape the crush of L.A. and Oprah owns “The Promised Land,” a $90 million estate. An hour north of Santa Maria, the college town of San Luis Obispo, 2010’s “happiest city in America,” and two hours north of that, Big Sur, the one-time home of Henry Miller, the location of one of Jack Kerouac’s largely autobiographical novels, an inspiration for the Beat poets and Robinson Jeffers alike. 

Big Sur: its windy gorgeous greatness, the opulence of this edge, treefall, height, ocean. The soaring of everything, the hairpin deadly turns, what Kerouac called its “horrible washing sawing.” The Henry Miller Memorial Library, with its twinkling lights strung between giant redwoods, the small wooden library itself, cobwebbed bathroom, gravel drive.

There is this beauty to the Central Coast: the fog, cliffs, light, hills, mountains, ocean, the rock sticking out of the sea at Morro Bay, the towns with names like a stuck record: Los Olivos, Los Alamos, Los Osos, Santa Maria, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, San Simeon. Hearst’s zebras, the lounging sea lions, the otters, the quail, how the hills grow golden with the light of poppies in spring. The Central Coast is what California used to be, has retained its pure, undeveloped charm, its laidback 1960s beach-town vibe.

And there is, too, this flaw, the complacency of the people, the racism, the blaming, the building, the fear, the very important something that is missing from this rural region, from Santa Maria, with its sad statistics—a teen pregnancy “hot spot” in the early 2000s—the gross underside, hypermasculine cowboys with their guns, their lifted trucks, charred meat of dead cows, Republicans, gang violence, immigrant detention: this is not the cinematic beachy California dream.

The documentary Audrie and Daisy, made in 2016 by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, details the stories of three survivors of high school sexual assault and slut shaming: Audrie Pott, of Saratoga, California, who killed herself; Daisy Coleman, of Maryville, Missouri; and Delaney Henderson, of Santa Maria. 

Delaney Henderson went to my alma mater, St. Joseph High School. Her assault happened in 2011 and the court proceedings were drawn out through 2013, a full decade since I’d attended the school, and also well before slut-shaming and victim-blaming were household terms. I remember being in Santa Maria for Christmas, visiting a high school friend whose younger siblings still attended St. Joseph High School. They told me about the accusations against the boy, Shane, who was later accused by a second underage girl and who eventually went to jail. My friend’s siblings, however, were already on the boy’s side, calling his accuser a slut and a liar. He’s a good kid, they said. 

All of Santa Maria, it seems, supported the boy. Students went to school wearing shirts emblazoned with “Team Shane.” Delaney had to move away.

Emily Lindin, founder of the Unslut Project, sells a t-shirt with the words “DEFINE SLUT” written across the chest. There are, we know, a variety of answers. None of them have to do with male sexuality. Its roots are sunk firmly into a biblical notion of what a woman’s body is for, how a man gets to decide.

I’ve always imagined the other Santa Marias around the world, and the ways our towns are connected through colonization, religion, and language. These threads—if woven together, what would we find?

Who roasts the meat. Who gets the biggest share. Who writes the books. Who deems the art great. Who sits on the city council. Who makes decisions. Who can do what with their bodies. Who must not do that with their bodies. Who is not guilty. Who has been guilty all along.