What would a Trump Presidency mean to those who call Riverside County, in California, home? Photograph by Douglas McCulloh

Donald Trump came to California last week. For months, my native state has been called “the end of the road” for the candidates, the place where the nomination would be decided. Lately, that phrase has started to sound different.

In an Orange County amphitheatre last week, the all-but-certain Republican nominee went old-school, mocking immigrants, calling for the building of “the wall,” talking about how Mexico sends us drugs, terrorists, rapists, and murderers. Outside, hundreds of people protested, holding both Mexican and American flags, a common sight in my neighborhood, and in adjacent Riverside County, where people also fly black P.O.W.-M.I.A. flags and banners for Los Dodgers, Los Lakers, and the Raiders. During violent scuffles with police, seventeen people were arrested, while car speakers blared hip-hop and ranchera music in defiance.

Here in Riverside County, as in Orange County, and in many other counties in California, someone with brown skin and a “Hispanic” last name, who speaks Spanish (or even Mixtec or Zapotec) and English, might be second- or third- or even seventh-generation Californian. If Trump becomes President, is someone going to line us all up and check our papers? I drove through Agua Mansa today, which was settled in 1838 by Lorenzo Trujillo, a genizaro, one of the Native Americans who was kidnapped, baptized, and enslaved by Spanish residents of New Mexico. He and his four sons were recruited by Spaniards in the Santa Ana River Valley to protect livestock and horses from the indigenous Californians, who had been stealing them during full moons. I went to high school with Trujillos, and I work at a university with Trujillos, and a Trujillo works in the mayor’s office. If Trump’s phalanx of immigration officers arrives here, I hope they have a lot of time for stories.

Riverside County has about 2.3 million residents, nearly half of whom identify as Mexican or Mexican-American. More than a hundred and forty thousand of the people here are reportedly undocumented. We raise tilapia and grow oranges, dates, watermelons, grapes, lettuce, and most other winter-harvested produce, plus cotton and sod. The county has the highest concentration of what is now called “logistics”—warehouses, trucks, and rail traffic—in the nation. If the plan is to interrogate and deport, a lot of Americans won’t get red-flame grapes or frozen fish.

On my long block of fifty-four homes, which dead-ends at the Santa Ana River, I’ve never heard anyone asked about paperwork, or citizenship. What we care about is whether someone is a good neighbor, and what we talk about is our kids, money, cars, our kids, and the weather. On this street of wooden bungalows built in the early nineteen-hundreds, small stucco homes built in the nineteen-forties, and even a few tiny former orange-grove houses, there are contractors, a pool cleaner, a landscaper, nurses and phlebotomists and hospital billing clerks, restaurant workers, teachers, and home day-care providers. Many of us have two jobs. Many of us have lived here for decades.

My friend V stopped by the other day, in her fairly new silver truck. Three years ago, she and her daughter bought a house with an acre of land a few miles from here, where she keeps chickens and turtles and dogs. She sat on the porch in her heavy work boots. She was worried about her son. Twenty-six years old, six-four, goateed, and always wearing black clothes, he refuses to work. He rarely leaves his room now, obsessed with the Internet and smoking marijuana, eating everything in the house once V and her daughter and her daughter’s family have gone to school or work. That day, he had an interview for a job at a warehouse nearby, part of the millions of square feet of new “fulfillment centers,” which employ people with brown skin. He had already blown off one interview. V was stressed. She kept calling him to tell him to get up, get dressed, and go. He had a truck. She’d given him her old white truck when she bought the silver one.

We keep track of each other in this neighborhood mainly by truck. V is a landscaper. I met her when her third husband’s brother-in-law J was parked at a neighbor’s, cutting the lawn, and I asked if he could cut mine as well. J cut the grass every week for five years, with his sons, who eventually grew to hate lawns and moved to Memphis to work dismantling chickens, under terrible conditions. Two of their cousins came to America to work dismantling chickens, and both young men have since died. Their mother received their bodies by plane. J had to return to his home town to take care of his ailing mother, so his brother A and his wife, V, cut the grass. V didn’t like me in the beginning, because A was a huge flirt. But she divorced him five years ago, and started her own business. She employs R, who has a black Ford Ranger. She tried to employ her son, but he doesn’t want to cut grass, either.

It is the American lament, the kid who isn’t a kid, who won’t leave the back bedroom, who stays on the computer or iPhone for twelve hours at a time, who eats everything when you leave, whose dishes and dirty clothes are legion. V was truly distressed that day, because she thought her son would again refuse to travel the five miles to the warehouse interview. She bit her lip and looked at the branches of the fruitless mulberry tree next door. She said the tree needed trimming.

She and R pruned said tree four years ago, as my Christmas gift to my neighbor C, whose third husband drives two hours each way to his job at an oil refinery, in a huge black Chevy Silverado. They have six children between them, and three grandkids. Their landlord is a terrible man who will not repair or maintain anything. Swarms of termites regularly swirl around their rooms, and that mulberry tree takes down their phone line and mine.

My neighbor M drove by. He has his dad’s black 1963 Ford truck, which his father bought when he first came to America. M is a carpenter. My neighbor O drove by in his little silver Ford Ranger. O is a machinist. We joke about trucks held together not even by duct tape or baling wire, like the old days, but by twist ties.

People in this story are from Guatemala City, which has a terrifying murder rate because of incursions by drug gangs, and from the Guatemalan Highlands, where their elderly relatives are traditional Mayan healers. They are from the exurbs of Mexico City, from violent areas of El Salvador, from rural eastern Canada, from rural eastern Arizona, from Liverpool and London. Some are from here. Some of my neighbors left their homes for better lives after a war. For some of the younger ones, the prospect of death was delivered in different ways, and they fled. Some have visas, some have green cards, some have citizenship, and some have nothing. Two of the women, coincidentally, were born in the small city of Glendora, California.

To be a true citizen of my block, the requirements are simple: always acknowledge passing drivers or pedestrians; always be willing to jump-start a truck (or car) or provide gas cans, engine advice, or tools; always trade fruits from your yard (avocados, lemons, oranges, pomegranates, guavas, loquats, apricots, and mangoes); keep an eye on every child.