In this fictional Central Valley town, artists address all-too-real issues and injustices
Visitors to the fictional Central Valley town of Los Suelos, where a strange phenomenon is affecting residents, can use their imaginations, broaden their minds and support California’s low-wage rural workers at the same time.
Participants can play a multiple-ending video game to unravel the mystery in “Los Suelos, CA,” or click through the website to discover art, music and a collection of stories centered on living conditions in the agricultural town and issues faced by some Latinos.
Donations are encouraged, and all proceeds will benefit the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to protect the rights of migrants, low-wage workers and their families and improve their economic, social and political conditions.
The project launched online last week after talks first began in December 2020. It features stories about isolation, identity, small-town cults, Hollow Earth lore and the power of the land beneath our feet.
Some stories have been translated to Spanish. The project is funded by a nearly $49,000 award provided through the Interledger Foundation Grant for the Web.
Artists of the project wanted to shine a light on climate change, how it’s affecting our food, social justice and health injustices, said Lauren Lavín, co-founder of Surface Dwellers Studios, a multimedia company formed in 2021 to create “Los Suelos, CA.” All those issues exist in the Central Valley, which is why it was chosen as the backdrop of the project, she said.
Artists were especially inspired by valley fever, an often underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed — and potentially fatal — illness. It is caused by a soil-borne fungus, which leaves farmworkers vulnerable.
“You can tell a more scary cautionary tale about the real things that are happening when you make it a little more fantastical on the page,” Lavín said.
Horror stories are based on morality and can be used to teach a lesson, said Beulah Vega, Los Suelos contributing author and member of the Horror Writers Association. By making the story fictional, the author can help readers lose their prejudices and subconsciously teach them about being human.
“In horror, you can definitely take people’s minds off the fact that you’re trying to teach them something,” said the 43-year-old.
Reared in Modesto till the age of 7, Vega said she wants people to see this project similar to the work of Chicano playwright Luis Valdez, who founded El Teatro Campesino, where in the 1960s and ‘70s, actors would perform dramatized scenarios about the plight of field workers. Their stages were truck flatbeds and union halls. His work wasn’t taken seriously by some at first, but it eventually became a tool of social change, she said.
Seeing Valdez create his company on the heels of the Delano strike, when field workers were protesting their wages, inspired Vega to launch her career in writing and theater and use her work to advocate for people like her dad, who worked as a field worker after migrating from Vera Cruz, Mexico, decades ago.
“I want somebody to be able to see this and see, like, it’s helping me by representing me,” she said.
So far, Lavín said $750 has been raised. She hopes people from the area can read the stories and feel like they’re seeing through another window in the same house.
To donate and dive further into the mystery of “Los Suelos, CA,” go to www.lossuelos.com.
This story was originally published March 1, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
