Cris Mazza’s Indigenous: Growing Up Californian is a promising memoir. In her prologue, she adamently insists that her childhood and upbringing was not the tanned-surfer, laid-back California experience that has come to be a cliche in books, movies and television. Instead, Mazza’s family camped, fished and hunted in rural areas of southern California.
Growing Up Californian
However, though Mazza’s childhood may not have resembled Gidget’s, her upbringing was actually very “Californian”. A child in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1970s, Mazza and her family spent full days at the beach (building sand castles and roasting marshmallows, and eating, as she puts it the “requisite” sandy potato chips), went to the movies and rode their bikes around the neighborhood.
Parental Influence
Some of the best parts of the book are when Mazza talks about her parents – how and why each of them came to California and how they met teaching at Chadwick school (where many sons and daughters of celebrities attended.) The decision that Mazza’s parents made not to eventually send their children to Chadwick was based on the fact that they were worried their kids would be around too many spoiled children and too much excess – a parents’ decision and sentiment that remains in the world today.
Problems
As compelling as some of Mazza’s recollections are, there are two main problems with the memoir.
- Organization: There’s no rule that memoirs must be written in chronological order – in fact, some of the best ones are not – but the placement of chapters and anecdotes lacks cohesiveness. Just as the reader begins to get involved in Mazza’s childhood, for example, she goes into a lengthy discussion detailing how her family hunted. The hunting information need not be so excessive; it matters more why Mazza’s family did certain things rather than how. For all the information, she never really states why her father was so passionate for his hunting and fishing. (She does give a more well-rounded portrait of her mother, however, who was progressive in her era, majored in physical education and became a P.E. coach).
- Veering from the main topic – Mazza is at her most interesting when discussing her family and, as the title says, growing up in California. But chapters digress to the extreme: she rambles about marching band, dog breeding and her eventual move to Chicago. These topics may be important to her, but they don’t reflect to larger picture of what California was like for Mazza.
Overall, readers will enjoy aspects of Mazza’s memoir but will be longing for more of the “good parts” and less of the tangents. The memoir would have benefited from a better editor as well as some additional information that seems to be left out (her father still remains elusive). Some of the stories are compelling, but unfortunately it’s tempting to skim over other parts.
Indigenous: Growing Up Californian
Cris Mazza
Available in Paperback
City Lights Publishers (2003)
ISBN-13: 978-0872864221
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