1600s map of California from Honnold-Mudd Library Special Collections.

Somehow it seems fitting that the story of California should begin with a fabulous tale about a mythical island.

Both the island and the myth, along with the state’s future name, seem to have sprung first from the pen of Spanish writer Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, whose lavish romantic novel Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Deeds of Esplandián), published around 1510, described a race of griffin-riding Amazons living in a far-off realm rich in gold and precious stones—“an island on the right hand of the Indies … very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise.” He dubbed this imaginary isle California, a name that may have been constructed from Latin roots meaning “hot oven.”

So, right from the start, California was portrayed as isolated, rich, strange, adventurous, bigger than life, sunburned and next door to Paradise. Is this starting to sound familiar?

The real California—the Baja part—was first discovered by Europeans in 1533 by an expedition commissioned by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. Sailing west from the Mexican mainland, the crew set ashore on what they believed to be an island. After their shore party was slain in a clash with the inhabitants, the survivors returned to the mainland with tales of an island full of pearls and other riches.

No one knows exactly when or where place and name actually came together, but at some point in the ensuing years of failed colonization, someone—probably some conquistador familiar with Montalvo’s tale and eager to believe in its treasures—gave the presumed island its suitably mythic name.

Here’s where things get a bit strange. Through the rest of the 1500s and early 1600s, the few surviving maps depicted the west coast of North America as a continuous line and Baja California as a peninsula. Then, in the early 1600s, the supposed island of California suddenly returned to the scene, apparently firing the imagination of mapmakers across Europe. For more than a century thereafter, California would be depicted as a huge, rugged outline separated from the west coast of the North American mainland by a narrow strait.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about maps from this period is that the truth was already known by the time they were made. As early as 1539, one of Cortés’s lieutenants, Francisco de Ulloa, sailed north and confirmed that the so-called island was actually a peninsula, and by the mid-1600s, the geographic facts of the place had been pretty clearly established by its Spanish masters. So why did the island of California resist reattachment to the mainland for so long?

One practical reason may be that the people most familiar with the actual place weren’t making the maps. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish held sway over much of western North America. Most of the surviving maps from this period, however, were drawn by cartographers in Venice, Paris, Amsterdam and London. These maps were meant for public consumption, so they needed to appeal to the romantic notions of the time. Meanwhile, Spanish mapmakers were drawing their maps behind closed doors to be used by actual navigators, and Spanish officials, jealous of their secrets and worried about foreign intrusions into their New World possessions, had good reason to keep them under wraps—or even to encourage misinformation.

Historian Dora Beale Polk blames the voyage of the famous English explorer (and gentleman pirate) Sir Francis Drake into Pacific waters in 1578 for the myth’s 17^th-century revival. Confused stories about Drake’s exploits along the west coast shores seem to have lent new strength to the notion that there was a continuous strait separating those lands from the continent.

But by the beginning of the 18th century, the only remaining prop for this geographical blunder seems to have been the persistence of myth. Mapmakers who should have known better still clung to the diminishing evidence that California was an island. Perhaps they were so enthralled by the notion of California as a strange and magical place—a place that simply felt more suitable as an island—that they couldn’t bring themselves to accept the more pedestrian truth.

A lot has changed, of course, since those maps were made. The California of the 1600s was eventually subdivided into three huge, modern states, one north of the border and two south of it. Here in the United States, the 31st state became the biggest, most populous, most diverse, and, in many ways, most controversial state in the Union.

And yet, as a metaphor, the island of California still feels eerily appropriate, even today. Maybe because there’s so much truth in it. After all, as a bio-region, California has been termed an “island on the land,” isolated from the rest of the continent by such natural barriers as deserts and mountain ranges. And from an economic standpoint, the state is frequently described as if it were a separate nation. (With last year’s economic surge, California reportedly regained its theoretical place as the eighth largest national economy in the world, just behind the United Kingdom and Brazil and just ahead of Russia and Italy.)

Perhaps most importantly, California continues to occupy a place in the cultural life of our nation that sets it apart. Admired by some as a place of innovation and a harbinger of national change and decried by others as a narcotic in the body politic, intoxicating the rest of the country with its crazy ideas, the state seems to inspire in Middle America just about every emotion except apathy.

In 1747, Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a royal proclamation declaring: “California is not an island.” That may have helped bring an end to the literal vision of California as an enchanted isle, but the idea of California as a quasi-myth—a strange and wonderful place in the distant west where venturesome souls might go to find adventure or wealth or simply a spot in the sun—was just getting started.

Children are always asked what they want to be when they grow up. As far back as he can remember, Juan Jose Guerra ’85 always had the same answer. He wanted to be a doctor. But unlike other boys who grow out of fantasies of being firemen or Air Force pilots, Guerra never let go of his goal. He forged ahead despite his immigrant background, his parents’ modest means, his lackluster test scores and the skeptical advisors who doubted he had the mettle for medicine. He persisted even after “crash-landing” through freshman chemistry at Pomona College and getting a D+ in biology, forcing him to switch majors from pre-med to economics.

You might say Guerra made an end-run around what he considers the brutal “weed-out system” of traditional pre-med. He took encouragement from professors outside of the sciences. He took summer courses at Georgetown to complete pre-med requirements. And he took time for a year of post-baccalaureate work at UC Irvine to help him boost his score on the MCAT, the medical school entrance exam, which he fumbled the first time around.

After all that, he was put on waiting lists for medical schools in California. In an admissions interview, one dean asked why he wanted to be a doctor, but arrogantly rejected the answer when Guerra said it was to serve his community. Finally, he found a spot in the urban health program at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, in Champaign-Urbana, which had fostered diversity in the field since the early ’70s, when Guerra was still a boy translating for his Salvadoran grandparents at their doctor’s visits.

By the time he graduated in 1993 with that hard-fought diploma in hand, it was like scoring a last-minute touchdown for the underdog team at the Super Bowl. “I think if it were an end-zone celebration, the referees would have thrown flags,” jokes Guerra, whose other outsized dream was to be a basketball player, despite his soccer-size stature. “For me, the future was just so vivid as a physician. That’s all I could see myself doing.”

Yet, even after all these years, he wonders why so many minority students in similar circumstances still don’t go the distance. “I don’t have an answer,” says Guerra. “Each person has a different reason for why they let go of their dreams. The journey to become a physician—to become anything—is different for many people. I was weeded out after getting that D+. I was told that was the end of the story. But in reality, it was just the beginning.”

Guerra didn’t really do an end-zone dance at his graduation. He seems too reserved for that. The young doctor simply went to dinner with his parents, then packed his bags and headed back to California to start his residency at Kaiser Permanente’s flagship hospital in Oakland, a city with a high population of Latinos. Guerra still works there today, leading an experimental program that he helped create to address the health care needs of Spanish-speaking patients. Named Salud en Español (Health In Spanish), the small clinic features an interdisciplinary approach to treatment, housing a team of 14 doctors, including family practioners as well as specialists in internal medicine, pediatrics and obstetrics/gynecology, Guerra’s chosen field. He likes to call the clinic “a medical home for our Latino members.”

Guerra’s fourth-floor office is located in a gritty urban neighborhood near the intersection of two freeways. It overlooks the outdated hospital where he started his career, and which is now being replaced by a modern facility. But not just the buildings are changing. The profession itself is being revolutionized, with use of digital case files, the advent of “Obamacare” and the pressure on doctors to produce measurable outcomes. That simply means they must prove that their patients are getting better, which he argues is one of the biggest benefits of culturally competent care.

But as he walks past that old hospital building, with its dreary Soviet-like architecture, Guerra often reflects on the things that haven’t changed in his chosen occupation. Society is still struggling to produce more physicians from underrepresented minorities, especially Latinos and African-Americans. In that respect, medicine is much the same as it was when he started 20 years ago.

Today in California, fewer than five percent of doctors are Latino, though Latinos constitute a third of the state’s population and half of the children born here. That sends the crucial doctor-to-patient ratio completely out of whack, according to the Sacramento-based Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, a leading advocacy group aiming to improve Latino health care. To reach parity today, California would need to produce an additional 27,000 Latino physicians—instantly.

There are recent signs of progress. A 2012 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges shows that, nationwide, minority applicants to medical school increased for the third straight year. Last year, applications from Latino students hit an all-time high of 1,731, a six percent increase over 2011.

However, the Latino population is growing at an even faster rate. This year, they are on track to surpass whites as the state’s largest ethnic group. The pipeline through medical schools just can’t keep pace.

Guerra believes educators must address the problem with new ways of assessing candidates and measuring success. “Telling someone they can’t become a doctor based on a grade, I think, is a disservice,” he says. “Everyone learns differently.”

The doctor’s prescription is simple: Develop talent. Don’t just select it.

On his desk, Guerra keeps a framed photograph taken of him last year with a group of pre-med students at Pomona. It was his first trip back to his alma mater, and he found students hungry for guidance. They signed the picture: “Thanks for your encouragement!!”

Guerra, however, came away discouraged. “That was just a reminder of, es la misma cosa—still the same old thing,” he says. “It was like meeting myself all over again, meeting students who were struggling to pursue their dream of becoming a physician, and maybe they had gotten a C+ and were feeling that pressure.”

Professor Roberto Garza-Lopez, a Mexican immigrant who now chairs the Chemistry Department, believes things have improved at Pomona since Guerra’s day. He cites several programs designed to help Latino students—mentoring, tutoring, peer support—that didn’t exist when he began teaching there 22 years ago. And today, the College has more people of color on the faculty to serve as role models, says Garza, who in 2007 became the first Mexican citizen to be named full professor in the sciences at Pomona.

Mentoring is key. Establishing a one-to-one personal relationship with students can make the difference between success and failure. Students in crisis, whether personal or academic, must feel they have a lifeline, says Garza, who encourages students to email or call him any time, even on weekends. They can also come to his lab at night for counseling, or just a pep talk.

“So the door is always open for them to encounter a professor who is willing to help them,” says Garza, who comes from a family of physicians in Mexico. “It’s this type of relationship with students where the trust is established, then the growth process starts.”

All these efforts try to head off the sense of isolation Dr. Guerra felt when he first arrived on campus. The High Achievement Program (HAP), for example, works with entering freshmen during the summer before they start at Pomona. They do coursework and research that gets them primed for college-level work; plus, they establish mentoring relationships that carry forward through that key first year, so they don’t fall through the cracks. In addition, they establish peer connections with students in the other Claremont Colleges through workshops sponsored by the Office of Chicano/Latino Student Affairs.

“That is very helpful because when they enter Pomona College they belong to a group,” says Garza. “So if they experience problems, they know where to go and whom to talk to, and they have this network of people who are trying to help them. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have that. Believe me, now they do not feel isolated.”

Professor Garza proudly points to several of his own success stories. One of them is Dr. Gerardo Lopez-Mena ’04 (pictured), the son of Mexican immigrants, born and raised in the blue-collar community of El Monte. Lopez-Mena—who uses his dual surname from his father, a custodian, and his mother, a homemaker—got a generous college scholarship and graduated with a degree in chemistry. But he couldn’t have made it without mentors, he says, including Prof. Garza who encouraged him to do research and made him co-author of a serious scientific paper published in the journal Chemical Physics Letters.

“Unfortunately, many of us go to medical school and don’t have the privilege of having had doctors at our dinner tables who make us feel that we belong,” say Lopez-Mena, who this year is completing his residency in internal medicine at The Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. “But I’ve been blessed to have mentors throughout my life. So when there was someone telling me no, I had more people telling me yes. I had mentors who saw something in me even at times when I didn’t see it in myself.”

Guerra was 4 when his parents brought him to this country in the mid-’60s from his native El Salvador. His family settled in mid-town Los Angeles, just west of the Pico-Union neighborhood that would later explode as a dense nucleus of Central American immigration. Within two years, his maternal grandparents came to live with them.

Their arrival would change the course of his life. By the time he was 8, little Juan was recruited to accompany his abuelitos to their medical appointments, going by bus to nearby barrio clinics. His job: to serve as translator because they didn’t speak English.

That was a heavy and scary burden for a little boy. He worried about interpreting the medical information correctly. “It was nerve-racking,” he recalls. “My grandmother’s health was in my hands. What if I get it wrong?”

Communication was not the only challenge. Juan found it excruciating to have to witness the intimacy and probing of a doctor’s examination. He had to be there when his grandmother changed into her gown or when his grandfather had a rectal exam.

“Come on!” he says, with exasperation still in his voice. “How do you process that as a kid? Being in adult situations at that age was an eye-opener. It was just my reality, and the elements of justice resonated.”

Or rather, injustice. In those days, finding a Spanish-speaking doctor in the City of Angels was close to a miracle. Once, a doctor addressed his grandmother’s high blood pressure by telling the boy that “she’s got to stop eating so much Mexican food.” “But we’re not Mexican,” Juan responded. Maybe, Guerra says, the doctor should have just asked what kind of food his grandmother was eating. After all, she lived to be 95.

 One mild day in December, Guerra is sporting a guayabera at work. Though the traditional tropical shirt is casual, his demeanor is formal, like his table manners at lunch. During an interview, he occasionally answers questions like he’s taking a test. Is wearing the guayabera a conscious choice?

“Correct.” Does he wear it to send a cultural message, to connect with patients, or just because he likes the style?

“All of the above.”

Many Latinos, Guerra says, cling to superstitious myths about health. For culturally competent doctors, the goal is to dispel those cultural mitos without condescension or condemnation.

Some patients, for example, think insulin actually causes the death of diabetics, because they see people forced to take it at the end stages of the disease. Guerra was still in junior high school when his own grandfather died of the disease, plus complications from alcoholism, another public health scourge among Latinos. Sharing that family story can help form a bond with his patients.

It’s all about establishing relationships of trust.

“The role of culturally sensitive care is very dynamic,” he says. “It requires agility and cultural humility, because not every Latino is going to be the same. But I point to the importance of family and being able to distribute messages of health, of empowerment, of encouragement. How those messages are perceived depends on who the messenger is.”

Lopez-Mena shares that vision. His desire to be a doctor also goes back to his childhood. He was born prematurely and suffered severe asthma growing up, so doctors were his role models of success. But he also had doubts and detours. He took the MCAT three times with less than stellar results, leading counselors to steer him to other careers. After college, he used his chemistry degree to work for a pharmaceutical company, which he didn’t like. Then for a couple of years he was a PE teacher in elementary school, which he loved.

In the end, he realized medicine was his vocation. After a year of post-baccalaureate study, he was accepted at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “Nowadays,” says Lopez-Mena, “the main reason I want to be a doctor, and the main reason why I love my job, is that I want to be an advocate for people who don’t have a voice and really transform the Latino community into a healthier one.”

Guerra had originally planned to be a family doctor, but he changed his mind in medical school. During his clinical rotations in Peoria, where there was an influx of migrant farmworkers, he saw women who came to the hospital to deliver their babies. And he was struck by how traumatic it was for them because they couldn’t speak English. At the time, there were no Latino doctors in the training hospital’s ob-gyn department.

“To see the look of fear and despair because they felt out of place during what should be the happiest day of their lives was really powerful to me,” he recalls. “For a young medical student to be empowered to make a difference during a woman’s labor by being able to speak the language was just amazing. When you think of how I was able to calm and soothe patients who were otherwise in a scared state of mind, alone and worried. I think it was almost as effective as a good epidural.”

It reinforced his own reason for choosing medicine. That motivation remains as solid as it was during that humiliating admissions interview. When the medical school dean asked why he chose medicine, Guerra explained passionately about his childhood experiences with his grandparents and his desire “to bridge the gap between quality health care and individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds.” The reason was rejected. The increasingly impatient dean asked him three times, waiting for the “right” answer. But the increasingly defiant Guerra gave the same response each time.

Wrong, scolded the dean finally. He should want to be a doctor for the sake of science.

“I knew deep in my heart that the reason for my becoming a doctor was not going to be the fact that I love science,” says Guerra. “It was more because I love my family, and I reflected on the challenges that they had in obtaining quality health care. I came into medicine because I wanted to leave it in a better state.”

Trees number 2110 and 2111, perhaps Pomona’s most expansive pair of oaks, stand side by side and largely out of sight at the eastern edge of the Wash, far from the center of campus. The two have no grand names, just ID numbers etched on metal tags, and their centuries of survival are a silent success. “This is what happens when we leave trees on their own,” says Cy Carlberg, a Claremont-raised arborist, while taking a walk through campus on a crisp December day. Looking more closely at one of the giants, she notices an emerging area on the trunk revealing fresh-looking wood. “This is wonderful. See how this is expanding?” she says. “This is active growth.”

The College itself has seen plenty of active growth since its founding in 1887, and the changes in buildings, programs and people make it tempting to see our trees as stalwarts, rooting the campus to a time before its very existence. There is plenty of truth to that notion, particularly when it comes to Pomona’s coast live oaks and sycamores. And yet the history behind our trees—which also include eucalyptus from Australia, crape myrtle from China, coral trees from South Africa—is more tangled than the neatly-maintained landscape lets on. Pomona’s soaring sentinels form more than just a scenic canopy. The trees reveal a Golden State story, but one with ties to nearly every continent.

Strolling through campus, Carlberg is quick to identify noteworthy trees with roots around the globe, from “very, very old” Italian stone pines towering over Walker Beach to an unusual Chinese wingnut tree in front of Harwood. Well-groomed Pomona trees like these helped shape Carlberg’s career path. She was in her early teens when one day her father drove her past campus and she “saw a tree that I knew had been pruned just impeccably.”  Soon, she was working for the tree care company that did the work. Later, as she went on to get her degree in landscape architecture, Carlberg became fascinated with Ralph Cornell, Class of 1914 and Pomona’s first landscape architect, and today she treasures her copy of Cornell’s Conspicuous California Plants given to her by his widow, Vera. The arborist is only one of a number of Ralph Cornell aficionados still found among plant-lovers in the region.

 THOUGH CORNELL GRADUATED a century ago, his plantings remain a conspicuous presence, and the late landscaping genius is still central to the story of Pomona’s intriguing mix of trees. Cornell was fascinated with foliage from his first semester at Pomona, when he took a botany course with charismatic Biology Professor Charles Fuller Baker. Soon, Cornell had a business venture selling saplings grown from Mexican avocado seeds, and the profits enabled him to go on to Harvard and earn his master’s in landscape architecture. Cornell found his way back to Southern California, and Pomona quickly hired him as the campus’ landscape architect, a role he would hold for four decades.

This all comes from a senior paper by biology major Nik Tyack ’11, who learned about Cornell while examining campus water use on a sustainability fellowship. Tyack became so taken with the work of Pomona’s first landscape architect that, along with writing the paper, he also co-founded the Ralph Cornell Society, a group of students devoted to tending native plants on campus.

Cornell’s advocacy for California flora is well-chronicled in Tyack’s paper, which recounts the landscaper’s pioneering ponderings about the state’s plants and the possibilities of creating a “Genuine Southern California Park.” But once he became Pomona’s landscape architect, Cornell took a very different approach, “designing mind-boggling creations in which plants from areas as far apart as New Zealand, Central Asia, Europe, Australia, Japan, China, South Africa and Southern California mingled in a single landscape,” writes Tyack, now an environmental consultant back East.

Why the shift? Simply put, Cornell cared most about the look and design of his landscaping and, according to Tyack, bringing in plants from around the world was “merely a means to create beauty.”

This was the thinking of the time. With a climate unique for North America, the state became a center for arboreal experimentation. “People began to think of California as this place where you had this cosmopolitan mix of trees from around the world,” says Jared Farmer, author of Trees in Paradise: A California History. That thinking was fed by the acclimatization movement, which sought to systematically and scientifically spread species globally to increase local biodiversity. “The idea,” Farmer says, “was to find the perfect place” for a particular plant.

The reality of this experiment wasn’t so perfect, with the state’s long-ago eucalyptus craze serving as a case in point. The Australian imports were widely touted as super-trees, Farmer says, growing to great heights in California during their late 1800s heyday, when they were planted along College Avenue at the western edge of campus and in countless other locales across the state. In time, though, these trees brought worries ranging from fire risk to falling limbs, leading to their removal in some locales. (In his book, Farmer notes the tragic 1998 incident in which a falling eucalyptus branch killed two Pomona students on their way to class.)

Eventually, the focus at Pomona and beyond began to shift back to native plants. Cornell was on board, returning to his advocacy for native plants later in life. In a 1966 letter urging preservation of the Wash, Cornell sang the praises of its oaks and sycamores. “They are part of the heritage which we should protect and, yet, in much of California, they are being decimated and destroyed by the march of ‘progress’ in a manner most frightening to behold.”

CORNELL WOULD BE REASSURED by the direction Pomona is marching in today. When it comes to campus trees, the emphasis now is on native ones, though not exclusively. And grounds crews keep planting new ones as the College works to preserve—and in some cases expand— green space. As an example, Assistant Director of Grounds Kevin Quanstrom points to a previously- paved area north of Big Bridges recently converted to open space, with walkways and seating. Add to that a perfect row of California fan palms, the only palm native to the state, along with newly-planted sycamores and, of course, oaks, which make up about a quarter of Pomona’s roughly 4,000 trees, reaching into every corner of campus.

These native oaks are “the classic tree of Mediterranean-climate California,” notes Bart O’Brien, co-author of California Native Plants for the Garden. Not only are the oaks sophisticated ecosystems unto themselves, he points out, but their acorns also once played a role in the seasonal food supply for Native Californians. Today at Pomona, the old oaks help tie the campus to a time long before the College was established.

Deep in the Wash, where the wild oaks reign, trees Nos. 2110 and 2111 hold their ground— and keep a secret. Arborist Cy Carlberg has a hunch that these two are somewhere in the range of 300 to 400 years old. “It’s just a gut thing,” she says. “I look at old wounds. I look at the way the wood has adapted. It’s just a feeling.” The trees’ size alone doesn’t prove their ages—the rate of growth can vary greatly with water supply. Without intrusive measures, there’s no way to count the rings and know for certain their ages until these oaks come down through rot or storm. And that day, we can only hope, is still centuries away, leaving a lingering mystery to this California tale.