California Dreaming: Coming of Age in America’s Other Heartland

What’s it like to grow up in one of the highest opportunity towns in rural America?

To answer this question, Trevor Auldridge Reveles spent over 1,000 hours–and traveled over 20,000 miles–following young people who live in Dixon, California. Why? Because over the past 45 years, children who’ve grown up there have had some of the highest rates of “intergenerational upward mobility” of any small town in the United States. “Intergenerational upward mobility” is the degree to which children achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents. And if the historical trends continue, that’ll be the case for many of the current generation of teenagers living there. This exhibition features black and white photographs pulled from thousands of images that document Dixonite’s travels around their community and America.

 

Trevor Auldridge Reveles is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. His dissertation research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the UCSB Chicano Studies Institute.