The Brief

Maybe this has happened to you: A loved one dies, and then, while sorting through their remaining belongings, you discover something about them, something that makes you see them in a different light.

A new art exhibition at Scripps College has the same effect.

In “Pintor de Poemas: Unseen Works by Alfredo Ramos Martínez,” a series of mural studies, drawings, and paintings by the acclaimed Mexican modernist — some of which have never been shared with the public — recasts the artist's legacy.

In art history circles, said gallery director Erin Curtis, there’s a tendency to regard Ramos Martínez’s work, which often features Mexican landscapes and Indigenous people, as merely “serene, beautiful, decorative.”

But the exhibition, guest-curated by Scripps alumna Robin Dubin, shows that Ramos Martínez’s work was anything but apolitical.

A quiet rebellion

The bilingual show is divided into four sections: “revolution,” “labor,” “indigenismo,” and “war.”

In the gallery, kept dim to preserve the artist’s work, viewers will encounter a series of arresting images. This includes: A woman weeping over the body of a loved one; torture victims hanging with their feet and ankles bound; men toiling over the construction of new buildings, while, in another frame, another gaggle of men, clad in suits and bowties, smoke cigars and sip apéritifs; in another frame, four barefoot women — a group of flower vendors — walk in unison, with a determined look in their eyes as they face a day’s work.

Through wall text in English and Spanish, attendees learn that after 10 years of studying art in Europe, Ramos Martínez returned to Mexico City, just ahead of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. During that time, he established art schools, where students were taught to get out of the studio and paint the world around them. In 1929, Ramos Martínez came to the United States seeking medical treatment for his infant daughter, who was battling a serious bone disorder. Then, in the 1930s, amid the Great Depression, the country expelled or pressured an estimated 1 million people of Mexican ancestry to leave, including scores of U.S. citizens.

To understand Ramos Martínez’s work — including what he made public and what he shielded from view — knowing these biographical details is important, said curator Dubin.

At a lecture in 2023, she said the artist “was somewhat pigeonholed by his reputation as a painter of idyllic, rural, and poignant religious scenes.”

“Any commissions that came his way probably would have been with the understanding that this was the type of imagery that they could expect,” she said.

For a Mexican immigrant, failing to abide by expectations could be perilous. In 1932, the famed Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros — one of Ramos Martínez’s former students — was deported after completing “América Tropical” in downtown L.A. The mural, a sharp rebuke of imperialism and the oppression of Indigenous people, was whitewashed after its unveiling.

“Ramos Martínez was the primary earner for his family, which included a sick child who needed regular and extremely expensive medical care,” Dubin added. “Especially in the midst of the Great Depression, it's probable that he could not afford any loss of income ... that could affect his ability to access or pay for medical care for his daughter. These realities likely had an outsized impact on the types of public art commissions he was offered or prepared to accept.”

But, in private, Ramos Martínez was more rebellious.

In 1932, he used conté crayon and tempera to draw a man on a page from the L.A. Times. The man has high cheek bones and a strong, straight nose — features that according to curator Armando Pulido, the artist typically used to represent Indigenous subjects. The work is titled “El Defensor/The Protector,” and in this image, the unafraid man holds up a fist. This piece is an integral part of the show.

"El Defensor/The Protector," one of several pieces created by the artist on newsprint.

(

© The Alfredo Ramos Martínez Research Project

/

Courtesy Louis Stern Fine Arts

)

Dubin named the exhibition after reading a line by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, whom Ramos Martínez befriended in Paris.

“Ramos Martínez es de los que pintan poesías ... no copia, sino interpreta. Él expresará la tristeza de los pescadores, la melancolía de las aldeas, los hombres inclinados por el peso del trabajo,” Darío wrote.

Those words are imprinted on a gallery wall: “Ramos Martínez is one of those who paints poetry ... he does not copy, but instead interprets. He will express the sorrow of the fisherman, the melancholy of the villages, the men bent under the weight of the work.”

Where else to visit after the gallery

Just a short walk from the gallery, visitors can continue learning about Ramos Martínez.

About 80 years ago, Scripps College commissioned the artist to paint a mural in the Margaret Fowler Memorial Garden.

The garden is housed in a tranquil courtyard, centered around a small fountain. Draped in wisteria, the garden walls are now home to a Ramos Martínez fresco. Here, students stop to leisurely read a book or catch up with friends. As a student at the women’s college, Dubin spent many afternoons there.

Making a fresco can be tough — it involves painting with water-based pigment directly onto wet plaster, so that the image becomes part of the wall.

Ramos Martínez died in 1946, before he could complete “Vendedoras de Flores (The Flower Vendors).” And because fresco work must be done in stages, viewers can see the progress of his work, how the mural was coming together.

“Las Vendedoras de Flores (The Flower Vendors)" at the Margaret Fowler Garden.

(

Julia Barajas

/

LAist

)

When Ramos Martínez painted the fresco, he was housed in Dorsey Hall, the same dorm where Dubin lived decades later.

(

Julia Barajas

/

LAist

)

One of the walls features a Zapotec woman, wearing the same type of headdress worn by women in Yalálag, a village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

During her lecture, Dubin reflected on the significance of her presence: “The elevation of this Zapotec woman, as an iconic and powerful figure, is a significant statement on the walls of an institution that in the 1940s admitted very few, if any, students or faculty of color,” she said.

It is also significant that Ramos Martínez painted this image at a school that was “constructed on Tongva land, using Spanish mission revival style architecture,” Dubin added.

In her view, the fresco was and remains an act of defiance.

“She represents a reclamation of Indigenous humanity,” said Dubin, “in a time and place that sought to dehumanize people like her.”

Plan your visit

“Pintor de Poemas: Unseen Works by Alfredo Ramos Martínez” will launch with a free opening reception Saturday from 7-9 p.m. The exhibition ends Dec. 14.

Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery: 251 E. 11th St., Claremont

Time: Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.

Margaret Fowler Garden: 1001 Amherst Ave, Claremont

Cost: Both spaces are free.

Where to park: Free street parking is available around the gallery.

Writer Aida Salazar did not spend endless hours on devices as a teen. She grew up in the 1980s, way before TikTok and Instagram. But she has raised teens, a boy and a girl. She felt she lost them to their screens during the pandemic.

“To the point where they were harming themselves on different levels,” she said.

The antidote to the overconsumption of screens, she and her husband realized, was found when they spent time outdoors near their home in Oakland.

“We went to the redwoods, or we went to the ocean, or we went somewhere else where they were my kids again,” she said.

Salazar, who has received numerous awards for some of her 10 YA books, has drawn on that experience for her latest work, Stream.

It’s written in first person rhyme in the voices of the two main characters, a teen boy named Elio and Celi, a girl. (Both appear in Salazar's previous YA novels).

In this book they’re both eighth graders who live separately in Oakland. After their parents realize the extent of their tech dependency, they take the drastic action to send them to rural Mexico for an IRL shock.

“To detox digitally in a rancho, or a place that has no running water, no electricity, and of course, no internet,” said Salazar.

Out of their digital element

Salazar was born in the Mexican state of Zacatecas and grew up in Maywood, in Southeast L.A. County, before earning a master’s degree in writing from CalArts.

The rural Mexican setting of Stream is partly based on her mother’s hometown in Zacatecas, where she wrote some of the book. The title is inspired by a vibrant stream there that once sustained the community but is now in the shadow of crumbling adobe homes.

The cover for the YA book Stream, writren by Aida Salazar.

The book begins with Elio’s narration that brims with excitement about his last day of school.

The first page of the YA novel, Stream.

(

Digital book screenshot

)

Celi’s narration of that last day is more dream-like.

A page from the YA novel, Stream.

(

Digital book screenshot

)

In Mexico, out of their digital element, some connection blooms which, Salazar said, may be love.

Adults can read the book, she said, but it’s meant for teens to read in order to see how Elio and Celi struggle to balance digital and in-person relationships as well as connection and disconnection to nature and their families.

“I don't want our young people especially, to lose their understanding of their source, of who we are as natural beings connected to land, to ancestors, to legacy,” she said.

She believes nurturing the stream of connections to those things will go a long way towards helping teens rise above the various social and environmental challenges they will face in their adult lives.

A battle over a first-of-its-kind tax on billionaires is heating up in California, with tech moguls pumping millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat it and union leaders who support the measure insisting the state's very wealthiest residents should pay their fair share.

Voters in November will be asked whether to pass the ballot measure, known as Proposition 40, which imposes a one-time 5% tax on the assets of the nearly 250 billionaires in the state. Backers say the new revenue would mostly fund healthcare services.

The tax was envisioned by union leader Dave Regan, who said millions of the state's neediest patients could lose health insurance in the coming years, driven largely by President Trump's 2025 tax and spending bill. Dubbed by the White House the "One Big Beautiful Bill," the law slashes federal funding to California and other states.

"Proposition 40 was developed specifically to backfill those cuts from the One Big Bill that are scheduled to take effect in the next five years. It is a five-year solution to that plan," said Regan, who is the president of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West.

If passed, the measure would direct 90% of the tax revenue to fund healthcare services and the other 10% to food assistance and public education across California.

"We're not even talking about the top 1%, we're talking about the top 0.0001%, the billionaires: 250 individuals in California, $2.4 trillion worth of wealth, and that's an amount of money equivalent to the annual income of all Californians who are not billionaires, including extraordinarily wealthy people," Regan said.

But the populist fervor fueling supporters of the measure is being met with a growing coalition of resisters, from tech billionaires to other unions and some state Democrats. That includes Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has said the tax would hurt the state's economy, which is powered by profitable tech companies in Silicon Valley that have spawned many of the billionaires who would be taxed under the measure.

Opponents of the tax argue it offers a short-term fix to a long-term problem and could ultimately backfire.

"I'm not against taxes. But this is not the right tool. What we need to develop is something that is stable and consistent," said René Bravo, president of the California Medical Association, in an interview with NPR. "Human beings need and deserve health care that is financed in such a way that you're not increasing the insecurity."

Bravo argues Proposition 40, if passed, would make patients more unstable by providing them with bridge coverage now, but no longer-term solution — making it difficult to plan out medical coverage over many years. Bravo also said he does not trust state lawmakers to spend most of the new revenue on healthcare, speculating that they could direct the money to other pet projects.

"Not accurate, not true," responded union leader Regan. He said voters face a choice between more immediate healthcare funding for Californians or none at all, and that a third way being proposed by some critics is not on the ballot.

Will billionaires leave California if wealth tax passes?

Another major rift between both sides of the fight is whether the first-of-its-kind state wealth tax would drive billionaires out of California.

It's a crucial issue, since California's Chamber of Commerce estimates 1% of the state's residents pay nearly 50% of all personal income taxes.

Few disagree that a mass flight of the ultra-rich would throw California's budget into a tailspin, but the measure has sparked a fierce debate about whether billionaires will actually pack up and leave the state.

French economist Thomas Piketty, who has written extensively about disparities in international wealth, has argued that what's known as "capital flight" is often overstated in debates about wealth taxes. "If one builds a fortune while relying on the country's infrastructure, education, and health systems, there is no reason that one should so readily escape the collective obligations that fund these systems," Piketty wrote last year about a proposed wealth tax in France aimed at the ultra-rich.

Adam Michel, who studies tax policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, believes taxing high income earners will be destructive for the state.

"A wealth tax of this magnitude will be bad for California and for California taxpayers. We should expect not just targeted billionaires to leave, but anyone that expects to be a billionaire or expects to be the target of aggressive taxes like this in the future to leave," he said.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the richest people in the world, agrees.

He has poured $102 million into a group known as Building a Better California, which he co-founded with former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. The group has also received millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalist John Doerr, crypto executive Chris Larsen and others. Building a Better California's mission is to defeat the effort, in part by supporting a separate ballot measure that would invalidate the wealth tax. Other tech billionaires, including Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who no longer lives in California, have funneled millions of dollars into other groups hoping to topple the measure.

A spokesperson for Building a Better California did not return a request for comment, but Brin told The New York Times: "I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don't want California to end up in the same place."

Brin recently moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Critics of the tax say there will only be more billionaires leaving California if voters pass the measure.

Union leader Regan calls Brin's move political theater. He pointed out that the wealth tax applies to California residents who lived in the state in January of this year, so moving out of state would not allow anyone to dodge the tax, nor would relocating after November, if the ballot measure prevails. Bloomberg estimated the tax could personally cost Brin around $13 billion.

Regan said Brin owes his success in part to government-backed research that helped create Google and insisted that a one-time 5% tax would not be overly burdensome for the tech mogul.

"You are now one of the five wealthiest people in the world in the state that made you rich, enormously rich," said Regan as if speaking directly to Brin, noting that California "needs to stabilize its healthcare system."

Some polls show that Californians are nearly evenly split on the tax.
Copyright 2026 NPR

A California Senate committee just gutted one of the state’s most substantial DUI reform bills in years, despite widespread support from other lawmakers and families of drunk driving victims.

The bill would have required in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI, bringing California in line with most states. State law currently only requires the devices, called ignition interlock devices, after repeat offenses or injury crashes.

Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from the Inland Empire and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, provided a hint of changes last week when she said there were amendments to the bill that had been approved unanimously by the committee. This week, an updated version of the legislation emerged, and it effectively killed a key provision to start requiring the devices for thousands of first-time offenders. Such changes are commonly referred to as “hostile amendments” because they are made without the involvement or support of the bill’s author.

Cervantes was arrested for a DUI in a high-profile incident in Sacramento in May 2025. The District Attorney’s Office did not prosecute her after a blood test showed no drugs or alcohol in her system. Cervantes then sued the city of Sacramento and several of its police officers, alleging that that police fabricated evidence and falsely arrested her. Cervantes’s sister, state Assembly candidate Clarissa Cervantes, has herself been convicted of two DUIs in Southern California, according to media reports.

Sabrina Cervantes did not respond to our request for comment for this story. We will update it if she does.

As news of the bill’s gutting spread this week, Kellie Montalvo was left wondering if there’d been some sort of horrible mistake. Montalvo, whose 21-year-old son Benjamin was killed by an impaired driver in Cervantes’s district in 2020, said she was just in Sacramento two weeks ago lobbying lawmakers – including Cervantes – on a slate of dangerous driving bills. Many of those bills have already failed.

“It’s heartbreaking, and I try to tell myself not to lose hope,” Montalvo said. “I mean, California has got to do something. Our numbers are horrific.”

Alcohol-related roadway deaths in California spiked more than 50% in a decade — an increase more than twice as steep as the rest of the country, federal data shows. More than 1,300 people die each year statewide in drunken collisions.

Over the last two years, a CalMatters investigation has shown how state officials have allowed dangerous drivers to stay on the road and kill, and how elected leaders have looked away even as the death toll skyrocketed.

For years, lawmakers have tried and failed to require in-car breathalyzers for all DUI offenders. Progressive justice reform groups and the DMV have opposed similar bills in the past, citing fears about unfairly penalizing poor DUI offenders, high costs and the DMV’s aging technology.

Montalvo and other advocates thought this year might be different. The DMV has actively participated in state hearings and, she and others said, provided technical advice to make sure the bill was realistic. Gov. Gavin Newsom also instructed lawmakers last year to continue to work on the state’s breathalyzer laws and develop “a lasting program that strengthens public safety.”

It’s unclear why this year’s bill was gutted at the 11th hour. Public records show that Senate Appropriations committee staff recently expressed concern about costs.

The amendment process is opaque even to Sacramento insiders.

“Honestly it’s sometimes a bit of a black box even for us as legislators,” said the bill’s author, Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Orange County Democrat. “I am still trying myself to get to the bottom of it.”

Petrie-Norris, who has spent the past three years trying to pass a version of this bill, said she does not believe Cervantes’ personal experience played a role in the decision to amend the bill. She added that she is still working to re-amend the measure after “unintended consequences” that she says would make the policy unworkable for the DMV and hurt California’s eligibility for federal funding.

Asked for an interview to explain the changes to the bill, Senate President Pro Tem Monique Límon’s office referred questions to Cervantes. Diana Crofts-Pelayo, Newsom’s chief deputy director of communications, also declined to answer questions about the breathalyzer bill, saying the office does not typically comment on pending legislation.

While the bill heads into the final days of negotiations, Montalvo and other victims’ families are grappling with deja vu. It was just about a year ago that they were standing in the Capitol with photos of their loved ones and told the bill was doomed.

She stays busy checking in with the parole officer for the Riverside County driver who killed her son. Last she heard, the driver was trying to get her license back after being released early from prison.

Long Beach streets got deadlier last year than they’ve been in a decade. Now the city wants to build a whole new division bent on reversing that, powered by the $5 million it expects to get annually by ticketing people with new speed cameras.

As part of Long Beach’s budget, city leaders are proposing a new traffic safety division, which consolidates two Public Works teams and adds more than a dozen staff who will administer a state pilot program for 18 automated speed cameras around the city.

A proposed traffic safety division

It comes after the city saw a record number of fatal traffic collisions in 2025 — 53 last year, the most in more than 10 years — that includes 32 pedestrians, cyclists and e-scooter riders killed. That eclipsed the number of people murdered in the city that year.

High rates of traffic deaths and collisions coincide with a record number of public requests to overhaul dangerous arterial streets, calibrate traffic lights and add traffic calming measures to neighborhoods known for dangerous driving. Long Beach currently sits on a backlog of more than 1,400 open traffic requests.

Many delays are tied to the 4% completion rate of traffic investigations. Officials explained many of those unresolved cases involve arterial streets the city already knows need expensive, yearslong overhauls. Neighborhood traffic calming requests have also spiked, from about 35 in the second half of last fiscal year to 306 in the first half of this one.

Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie said the shift reflects years of pressure from residents.

She added that the old system wasn’t built for the volume of requests coming in now.

“I think we all recognize that the old ways of managing these requests simply just wasn’t working for the volume that we are seeing come into Public Works,” she said.

Public Works Director Josh Hickman put it more bluntly: “We’re barely keeping up,” citing data that requests have risen swiftly this year compared to late last year.

He explained the current model only adds unnecessary delays, even on simple fixes.

“In order to do street sweeping and in order to enforce parking control, you need to have signs,” he said as an example. “Those require our engineers to review and approve the signs, which are in a different bureau. Once it gets approved, well, then it requires another bureau to go and install those signs.”

The new division could streamline the city's traffic system

This division would alleviate that, he said, by folding the city’s existing traffic engineering and traffic operations divisions into one unit under the Transportation Services Bureau.

The new division will be powered by citation revenue generated from the city’s automated speed enforcement program, a state pilot that will bring 18 cameras to handpicked streets and intersections later this fall, with warnings starting in October and citations beginning in December.

Officials say the cameras will rake in about $5 million a year, half of which will go toward operating costs with the other half restricted to funding traffic-calming projects.

Hickman called that estimate “quite conservative,” in hopes that the cameras will discourage drivers afraid of paying for tickets — which start at $50 for those driving 11 mph over the limit.

New speed cameras

It’s a program that has seen success in other California cities.

In San Francisco, the program’s 56 cameras led to 163,906 citations and brought in $7.2 million in its first year, according to the city’s transit agency. About 65% of drivers who got a warning or ticket didn’t reoffend, and 82% were cited no more than once or twice over the year.

Madhu Unnikrishnan, a spokesman for SFMTA, said that has led to $3 million in street improvements across San Francisco, while the rate of drivers going 10 mph or more over the limit has fallen by 80% in the enforcement areas.

By state law, that money has to cover operating costs first, and anything left over must go toward traffic calming — such as crosswalk upgrades, no-turn-on-red signs, speed humps — within three years. It can’t be spent on anything else, even to help close a city’s budget gap.

Jonathon Bolin, a Public Works bureau manager, emphasized that the point of the cameras is to change driver behavior and discourage speeding, not “bankroll revenue.”

Long Beach’s 2027 budget would add seven new traffic and five new customer service positions to the division. Hickman said the department plans to fill the new positions “as quickly as possible.”

Seperately, the city is also proposing $37.3 million for roadway improvements, curb and sidewalk improvements and traffic safety projects funded by the Measure A sales tax.

An additional effort by state Sen. Lena Gonzalez is looking to place more speed cameras along Pacific Coast Highway.