“I’ve got the strangest feeling
This isn’t our first time around”
(From the song “Past Lives” by BØRNS (Garrett Borns) and Thomas Schleiter)
She slinked across my thoughts like a Rocío Dúrcal song.
That deep romantic yearning, those heartbreak lyrics, and that heartfelt ranchera sound plucked delightfully at my memory.
I sort of recalled her face, but not really. She had those Ana de Armas eyes and that unconquerable look that melted lesser men. But who was she? What was her name? Why could I only half remember things?
Then, almost as if emerging out of the haze of fog or a cloud of vape smoke, she appeared in person and walked slowly toward me. She wore Wrangler jeans and an Ariat attitude. But it was the black knit long-sleeved T-shirt that did me in. It reminded me, dude, you need to stop being a sucker for cowgirls.
Everyone in the club admired her style and her beauty, like Pismo Beach at sunset.
My long-lost friend ignored them all. She threw down the challenge when she saw me. “So, you finally remembered me?”
Kind of. Sort of. Maybe. I was stammering and I was lying. The mere sound of her voice had brought it all back in a thundering new wave of emotion, all in less than a second.
“Of course,” I confessed. “Like the song says, ‘This isn’t our first time around.’ Hard to forget your first love in journalism.”
She was the spirit of news column-writing, playing in my writer mind’s eye, teasing my imagination, and creating a cascade of tequila sunrise inspiration.
“Is it time for us to hang out again?” I finally asked.
“Yup,” she responded, her midnight eyes boring into me. “And you better hype me up good. You can’t ignore me forever. The time is now—definitely.’’
This bout of daydreaming preceded my sitting down at the iMac this week to write my first column for the revived Santa Barbara News-Press site.
My mission, should I choose to accept it and I did, would be to shed light on Northern Santa Barbara County, and dig out and comment on news and news trends. The accent would, of course, be on Latino community issues.
News-Press Editor Joshua Molina pitched the idea recently, and it surprised me. Although I have written award-winning personal columns (yes, flexing) and news articles for newspapers across the Central Coast for a good part of the past five decades, I haven’t hit the computer keyboard like that in 13 years.
I’ve been teaching at a trade school, focused on helping students acquire hands-on skills that AI-powered machines cannot yet replicate.
So why agree to it now?
I would like to believe my bold and impulsive Sagittarian personality took hold and I shouted, “Let’s ride again! Count me in!” But honestly, it was more like a soft and persistent siren call from my past lives in journalism. There was that sense of someone calling your name in the middle of the night. To duty? To Responsibility? No, more as a reminder: you’re a writer, so get to writing or you’re a columnist so get to commenting.
I’m sure my ranchera muse would get a kick out of that. I’m not any kind of honorable cowboy, but I think sometimes I have the heart of one.
Here’s how I see my mandate:
Santa Barbara, the Athens of California, is a great and special place with great and special people. I lived there for 12 years when I worked for the News-Press once upon time, and I know that it deserves an awesome news source with journalists who care deeply about the place.
Santa Maria, where I grew up and currently live, is the Sparta of the Central Coast. It’s amazingly authentic, real, strong and industrious. It’s all ranching and farming, big trucks and big hearts, and a firm Latino culture. It is incredibly different from Santa Barbara, but equally special and profoundly proud.
I told Josh that I wouldn’t just cover the region, but that I would interpret it from lived experience, bringing my own authentic brand of popular loner melancholy and earthy and deep personal connection.
He agreed.
So, allow me to properly introduce myself and lay out my credentials since it’s been a minute since my last byline.
My origin story
For starters, I’ve been a writer and a journalist for, like, forever.
My origin story began 50 years ago at the Santa Maria High School Breeze. Like Peter Parker, I was a student journalist, only without MJ and the camera. My first story was about a bomb threat on campus. It was two paragraphs long. I was so proud to see it in print that I kept reporting and learning.
I moved on to write for the Allan Hancock College campus paper (The Voice, I think.) Later, I pounded out copy on manual typewriters for the award-winning Mustang Daily at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I joined the professional ranks just as the computer age gave us word processers. I reported from the Pismo Beach Bureau for the Santa Maria Times (my hometown newspaper!) Mom was so proud.
So, when did the column-writing begin? In a feisty little town called Watsonville, in an old supermarket building that held the offices of the Register-Pajaronian, a tiny but mighty Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper. I had left the Times to cover the education beat there but found myself contributing articles about a violent labor strike at a frozen food plant. The managing editor, a young and brilliant guy by the name of Mike Wallace, had a vision.
As I recall, he wanted a column that was a personal and introspective take on life and news from a young Latino perspective to engage a segment of the population that was growing. It was a bold move at a time when that sort of column just didn’t exist in many places in America.
My picture appeared above the Saturday Notebook. I always disliked the photo because I wanted to cover the news, maybe comment on the news, but not actually be the news. To my great surprise and delight, the column proved popular, garnering attention, several dates, at least one proposal.
On the other hand, it also drew skepticism from fellow staffers and, of course, various anonymous threats and insults from members of the reading public who would mail in cut-out copies of my column scrawled with nasty words.
A couple of years later, I moved over to the Salinas Californian, a bigger paper, where I wrote a political column (disliked it) when I wasn’t covering county government
Salinas was a bit too heartless of a city for me, and I understood why Steinbeck sometimes hated his hometown.
I hit my stride in column-writing a few years later when I moved to Santa Barbara to write for an even bigger paper, the News-Press. I was hired on to cover the police beat. But almost as soon as I walked in, I was asked to write a personal column, for the same reasons, and again have my photo plastered above it, which again I didn’t appreciate. I again had to put up with being recognized in public and with hateful (but more literary) fan mail.
Something about a true, unapologetic, boldly creative Latino male commenting on trends and forging a new reality that ticks some people off, I suppose.
As consolation, then-City Editor Keith Dalton allowed me to pick a name for the column. Since the paper’s office building was a few blocks from the beach, I pitched “The New Wave.” He loved it.
My final stop in the column-writing tour was for my own publication, Latino Today, which I ran out of an office in Santa Maria. It was a strange but fun creation, a monthly newsletter-newspaper hybrid that advocated for positive Latino community-powered change. I kept the column name, “The New Wave,” since I can be defiant when I want to be.
A lot of great developments stemmed from that effort: the Influential Latino Awards ceremony, the Young and Educated Latino Leaders (YELL) and YELL Mujer empowerment college conferences, and the Latino Men’s Breakfast Club (LAMB) discussion group, to name a few initiatives.
At the time, I was also teaching journalism (adjunct professor at Cal Poly) under three-time Pulitzer winner and Journalism Department Head George Ramos. I did a bit of weekend editing for the San Luis Obispo Tribune. It was a good time to be alive.
But all things come to an end. The decade after the Great Recession obliterated advertising budgets and small businesses. Newspapers declined and the internet and social media surged. In this climate, I put Latino Today to bed, left the Cal Poly gig, and began the trade school career. Of course, I never stopped writing, pecking away at an adventure novel/love story that I’ve been slowly cultivating.
So, now that you know a lot about me, the focus can shift to where it truly belongs—onto you.
I have a whole list of column ideas ready to go but I would love to hear from you. If you have an idea for coverage and exploration in the North County, please let me know.
I can be reached at jesse.chavarria@newspress.com. I still don’t have MJ or the camera, but I believe a little bit of experience and a little bit of optimism go a long way.
Like the song says, “Past lives couldn’t ever hold me down, Lost love is sweeter when it’s finally found.”
