Magnolia Wilsonii at Quarryhill Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen. (Cece Hugo)
With all there is to love about Sonoma spring — the greening of vineyards and all those wildflowers —you might miss the gravel path less traveled at Quarryhill Botanical Garden. The former quarry turned world-renowned Asian woodland garden is home to several thousands of exotic plants, some of them critically endangered.
Spring highlights include showy camellias — “hummingbird magnets,” as Quarryhill’s new executive director, Scot Medbury calls them. The camellias’ bright colors inspire a fierce rivalry among male hummingbirds, who dive and swoop to get to the flowers.
And when the garden’s many deciduous magnolias bloom on bare branches in spring, “it’s an arresting sight that kind of floors you,” says Medbury. The rare, bone white Yulan magnolia, which flowers all year long, “would look at home in the hands of Aphrodite,” he explains lyrically.
Magnolia Stellata at Quarryhill Botanical Garden. (Mark Hullinger)
This collection exists as a modern- day ark of conservation, thanks to 15 seed-gathering expeditions to East Asia since the 1990’s, funded by the garden’s late founder, Jane Davenport Jansen. Visitors wind their way through 25 acres of wild shrubs and trees, with ponds, hilltop views, and Tibetan prayer flags to happen upon.
After the rains, ponds swell and water rushes from a couple of mini falls. This year’s drier weather has so far reduced their flow; the babbling brooks are giving off more of a murmur. But the space still enchants with its picturesque foot bridges, rock walls, and resident snowy egret and ducks.
Growing up, sixth-generation vintner and all-around adventurer Katie Bundschu loved working alongside her dad at her family’s Sonoma winery, Gundlach Bundschu. Her dad gave Katie her own short row of vines to care for; they dubbed them “Katie’s Vines.”
These days, Bundschu has a bigger project of her own, the newly launched Abbot’s Passage Winery and Mercantile in Glen Ellen, which features Bundschu’s blended wines alongside a chic collection of home goods and accessories from local, women-owned businesses. Bundschu is aiming for a relaxed, casual wine experience with tasting spots nestled right among the vineyards, as well as outdoor group games like shuffleboard. It all has a bit of a tailgating spirit, which seems right from a vintner who also has an MBA in sports marketing. And the wines are top-notch. “I get to be a little more playful and adventurous by co-fermenting different varietals together,” she says, “whether it’s Chenin Blanc and Verdejo, or Syrah and Viognier, or the Grenache-Syrah-Mourvedre.”
Just east toward Sonoma are “to die for” croissants and cappuccinos from local favorite BAKER & COOK. 18812 Highway 12, Sonoma, 707-938-7329, bakerandcooksonoma.com
Bundschu’s cocktail of choice is a Hawaiian saltedplum margarita called the Li Hing Margarita from the popular STARLING BAR SONOMA. Madcap late-night rounds of Uno and bingo are a bonus. 19380 Highway 12, Sonoma, 707-938-7442, starlingsonoma.com
Her favorite coastal getaway is DILLON BEACH, where she brings her dog Bacchus for a romp. 1 Beach Ave., Dillon Beach, dillonbeachresort.com
Bundschu is inspired by the vast inventory at SIGN OF THE BEAR KITCHENWARE on Sonoma Plaza. “You feel like you could be the best chef ever when you walk in there — ‘I can do all of these things,’” she jokes. 435 First St. W, Sonoma, 707-996-3722, signofthebear.com
For an ideal visit to ABBOT’S PASSAGE, Bundschu says, “First,
I’d have a glass of wine and I’d order a grazing board, with charcuterie, cheese, dips, dried fruit, nuts, and fresh bread. And then I’d shop and buy a hat, and maybe pick up some earrings or a necklace.” 777 Madrone Road, Glen Ellen, 707-939-3017, abbotspassage.com
Napa Valley is home to more than 400 wineries, and every one of them has a way of turning heads. From sweeping vineyard views and lush gardens to stunning tasting spaces and towering castles, picking the most beautiful wineries in Napa Valley is next to impossible. For a taste of some of the standouts, click through the gallery above. Did we miss one of your favorites? Let us know in the comments below.
Any true wine-lover will tell you that it’s what’s inside the bottle that counts. But let’s be honest — a pretty picture of a glass of Sonoma wine on your Instagram can create quite a buzz too. Whether you live in Sonoma County, or you’re planning a visit, we’ve got you covered with Instagram-worthy wineries and tasting rooms. Click through the gallery above for photos and info.
What’s your favorite Sonoma County winery location to photograph? We want to hear it! Find us at @SonomaMag on Instagram, or tag us #SonomaMagazine.
There was a time when Wine Country and kids didn’t pair well. Parents in search of a weekend getaway had to line up grandparents to hold down the fort while they were away. But, in recent years, Wine Country has had a change of tune when it comes to welcoming traveling families. Kid-friendly wineries and restaurants abound. And local hotels offer everything from safaris to robots. Click through the above gallery for Napa County properties that make it great to be a kid (and parent).
Maggie, left, and Truckee, right run for the ball during Spring Lake Park’s Water Bark, May 11, 2012.
Many Sonoma County residents have spent more time with their pets during the pandemic. In addition to being comforting companions at home, dogs also help motivate us to get outside and get moving. A majority of Sonoma County’s regional parks welcome dogs on leashes and offer paved trails, hikes through the woods and even off-leash adventures that both Fido and you will love. Click through the gallery above for the best Sonoma County parks to bring your furry friend.
When Cathy Henning got the call from a real estate agent about a small Petaluma dairy farm that had just come on the market, her first response was: Keep the news under wraps. On a lark, she and her partner John Henning been up in the area six months before, scouting out properties. But Cathy wasn’t convinced this was the right time to take the plunge. She figured what John didn’t know wouldn’t hurt either of them.
“I hung up and said, ‘John will never know about this,’” she remembers. “But then throughout the day I started feeling guilty. I thought, ‘What if I really wanted something and John kept it from me?’” So I called him and told him about it, and he said, sight unseen, ‘We’ll take it.’” That’s precisely what Cathy had been afraid of. She insisted they at least check it out. “As an omen, on the way up here his car broke down,” she says, chuckling. “I should have known then.”
What the pair didn’t anticipate was all the hours and years of work they would pour into their 50 acres, which include a 1910 farm cottage, pastures, three barns, and a picturesque white pasteurizing shed with turquoise shutters. The land posed endless possibilities for Cathy, who has gardened wherever she lived, from New York to Santa Barbara to her native Pennsylvania. And John, a retired attorney whose mother taught him how to build and fix things, relishes a good project.
John crawled on his back under the big barn— built in 1890 by a Scotsman with redwood brought down from the Russian River—to replace its foundation.
Cathy reroofed the cottage herself with steel made to look like copper. Before the couple moved up permanently from San Francisco, they had to scramble to carve out the time to work on the farm.
“I had to be at work at 6 a.m. John would be waiting for me with McDonalds in the car and we’d drive up here after work because I never knew when I was going to get out. Then we worked until 11 o’clock, I’d get in the car and go to sleep and he’d drive us home.
That’s how crazy we were,” she says.
The main home, a little white cottage, now feels like a jewel box, surrounded by two acres of English country-style gardens with topiaries, boxwood hedges, seven fountains, and statuary — most charmingly, a series of ceramic cats. Exuberant color bursts out, with hydrangeas in the shade and climbing roses in the sun.
In spring the deep red rhododendrons dazzle; in summer it’s the dahlias.
The grounds are naturally pretty without appearing too manicured, making it a sought-after backdrop for photo shoots for the likes of Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma. One popular spot is a glass conservatory at the side of the house, where John and Cathy have coffee every morning.
Cathy was committed to keeping as many features of the old farm as possible, from a weathered tool shed, to the original pasture gate, to a chicken coop that has a locust tree pushing out of it. Mature trees, including a beloved Gravenstein apple and a Colorado blue spruce, are treated with reverence.
Most of the garden was dreamed up and planted by Cathy and two longtime caretakers. One she says is like a son to her; the other she describes as perhaps the country’s best rose man.
The garden has many distinctive spaces. There is a shady nest developed around a giant 300-pound egg-like geode Cathy brought from Wyoming. The surrounding boxwoods are trimmed into circles to mimic the geode, and nearby, a flowering maple climbs wildly up a honey locust.
The majority of the garden radiates off of a 100-foot-long lawn of pasture grass, lush in spring.
At this time of year, though, it’s as russet as the hillsides. Along one flank is a large border sizzling with Alstroemeria, ornamental grasses, Buddleia, and Kniphofia (red hot poker), along with sun-loving hydrangeas that Cathy says produce pom-poms two-thirds the size of a football.
By the barns is a field of fragrant, tall Lavender ‘Grosso.’ Cathy has also created a riot of a rose garden with 400 bushes and a hot-and-sunny upper garden she’s termed “the mesa.” In the early years, she planted a small grove of redwoods, which are now massive and shade a path leading to the pasture.
Running through the gardens is a seasonal creekbed with hand-set, flat-faced rocks that look like something you might see in the English Cotswolds.
In fact, the little farm is a Beatrix Potter illustration come to life.
Cathy laughs that friends and outsiders may wonder, “What were they thinking?” But she knows that it all feels less like work than play.
Barbara Gonnella knows pretty much everyone in the small west county community of Occidental, population 1,100. She and her husband, Frank, run the Occidental Union Hotel, which has been in his family since 1925 and operates as the center of town life.
“On any normal morning, the same 15 guys are in the cafe at 6 a.m.,” Barbara says. “I really value those relationships. I’m blessed to be able to nurture that for all of these people.” Earlier this spring as business temporarily wound down in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Barbara invited people over to pick up veggies, sourdough bread, eggs and other perishables from fresh storage that would have gone to waste. And she delivered soup and pasta to her elderly neighbors around town.
Things aren’t so normal now. But even during the pandemic the Gonnellas, whose family has weathered nearly a century of ups and downs, have found a way to stay resilient. They are back in business, offering picnic-style meals and cocktails in their courtyard, as well as takeout, repurposing the old spot where the horses were tied up.
“We love sharing the goodness of the hotel. It’s fun and it’s special,” Barbara says.
French doors open up to the patio. (Rebecca Chotkowski)Inside the Gonnella home. (Rebecca Chotkowski)
The Gonnella family home, up a country road less than a mile away, is as much of a landmark as the hotel. A former equestrian center on 6 acres, the home’s imposing stone façade tops a grassy hillside with redwoods framing the view. As newlyweds, Frank and Barbara lived nearby and walked past the property often. They fell in love with the home’s impressive stonework and the beauty of the land and trees. They bought it 35 years ago; over the decades, they have improved the house and grounds while raising their daughter, Gien, a tennis player and musician now in her 20s.
It’s a remarkable transformation, led by Barbara’s eye for design and love of European antiques and Frank’s extreme DIY skills. Basically, anything Barbara can imagine, Frank can build.
Over the years, this has included renovating the kitchen and bathrooms and laying new floors throughout the home, both oak planks and antique tiles from a monastery in Italy. Upstairs, a soaking tub now sits in the bay window that looks out over the fields and redwoods. And the kitchen’s layout leaves plenty of space for visiting with friends when the two are not busy with the business. Steak, risotto and greens are specialties, along with wine and big platters of Italian-style cured meats served by a fire. “We stretch the dinners out,” Barbara says. “Just the charcuterie can be a two-hour event.”
The home’s interiors are earthy and rustic with soft, neutral colors and plenty of contrasting textures. An antique dough bowl filled with silver ornaments lies in a deep windowsill. Large green glass wine jugs, bought from a decorator friend who sources housewares in Eastern Europe, are tucked atop cabinets.
“I love stone and crystal,” Barbara says. “A little bit of shine with the rustic.”
A massive two-story fieldstone fireplace anchors the great room, flanked by a pair of deep French-country couches bought secondhand. The mantelpiece is home to a collage of chunky beeswax candles Barbara bought 30 years ago from a small shop in Santa Rosa.
Another fireplace, this one with a wood mantel carved with the Gonnella family name, is adjacent to the kitchen opposite deep bookshelves for Barbara’s cookbooks. On the walls are family photos as well as mementos from celebrated environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Barbara’s father, rancher Ed Pozzi, worked with the artists on their seminal work, “Running Fence,” which stretched across rural parts of Sonoma and Marin counties in the 1970s.
A recycled lantern in the redwood grove. (Rebecca Chotkowski)Frank spent years on landscape improvements to both front and back, including new stone walls and boxwood hedges. (Rebecca Chotkowski)Barbara celebrates the seasons in collections of potted olive trees in rustic stone urns. (Rebecca Chotkowski)
Outside, a pool and broad brick patio fill out the backyard, while in the front, stone walls Frank built surround a garden and cafe tables. Low boxwood hedges and fig and olive trees bring in more greenery. A short walk down the hill, there’s a stunning natural amphitheater of redwoods tucked into the slope.
Two decades ago, as their young daughter was starting piano lessons, Barbara had a vision of hosting outdoor recitals for friends in the redwood grove. Frank brought this to life with hand-built benches stepping up the hillside and a stage large enough for Gien’s grand piano. Whimsical recycled metal lanterns left over from a party hang in the grove year-round to accent the magical spot.
To make the most of the surrounding nature, Frank used his tractor to shape small footpaths through the woods and fields. “He begged for years to get that tractor,” Barbara jokes. Frank also built several large redwood farm tables to use outdoors with slabs hand-milled from trees that have come down around the property. And early in their marriage, the couple planted dozens of baby redwoods in one-gallon pots — trees that now stretch three stories tall along the fence line they share with their neighbor.
The demands of their business mean Frank and Barbara’s days together at home are concentrated in the gaps between restaurant service. Barbara likes to zip back up the hill to garden and relax for a few treasured hours in the mid-afternoon. Frank, a golfer, will chip some balls, and together they’ll power-walk the steep hills and forest paths for fresh air. “A big part of my day is catching a hill. I tell people, ‘Stop in and we’ll walk the loop together,’” Barbara says.
Rosemary and potted olive trees dot the property. The forget-me-nots and wisteria of spring give way to roses and long summer days spent around the pool.
Frank and Barbara Gonnella and their daughter, Gien. (Rebecca Chotkowski)A lounge chair by the pool. (Rebecca Chotkowski)
“We’ll take a moment to put our feet in the water between the lunch and dinner shift,” Barbara says. Holidays like Mother’s Day and graduations are big at home and at the restaurant. Barbara likes to give mothers small cuttings of the hundred-year-old rose growing in the restaurant courtyard as a way to mark the day.
The rose cuttings are another small way of celebrating the community where generations of Gonnellas have lived their lives and raised their families.
“My life is within this 1-mile radius,” Barbara says. “But we cherish all aspects of that mile, of being up here. It’s rich — we are so fulfilled.”
Alegria De La Cruz, the director of the new Sonoma County Office of Equity in the hallway of the County of Sonoma Administration building on Friday, December 4, 2020. (John Burgess / The Press Democrat)
Alegria De La Cruz and her family were walking home from a Santa Rosa park when they saw the Black Lives Matter demonstrators coming up Sonoma Avenue.
It was a balmy Saturday evening in June 2020. De La Cruz, the daughter and granddaughter of labor activists, felt right at home among the marchers. But her 13-year-old son, Ome, was less at ease. Picking up on tension between the police and protesters, he turned to his mother. “We gotta go,” he said. “This isn’t going to be safe.”
There were families and children among the protesters. “Do they look dangerous?” she asked him. They did not, Ome answered.
She told him about the strikes and protests her parents and grandparents had been a part of. “Imagine that’s your grandma,” she told her son, motioning to a couple. “That’s your grandpa. That little girl in the Snugli — that’s me.
“Those are our people.”
Alegria De La Cruz, the director of the new Sonoma County Office of Equity photographed. (John Burgess / The Press Democrat)
It was an apt cue for the newest generation in a line of family members who stepped from the farm fields of California a halfcentury ago and for decades have battled injustice and inequality, nearly always from outside the system. Now De La Cruz, a 44-year-old Sonoma County attorney who as a young girl held hands with Cesar Chavez at the height of his power, is waging her own campaign to right wrongs from within the
halls of local government.
She was chosen by the county Board of Supervisors last year to lead the new Office of Equity, established amid the large antiracism street protests last summer and in response to longstanding calls for action. Its mission is to root out racial inequality in county government — recommending new laws for the Board of Supervisors, crafting internal policy to build equity, and adjusting how services are delivered to prevent disparate racial outcomes.
It’s a crucible even for De La Cruz, a rising star in the County Counsel’s Office who earned acclaim in the chaos of the 2017 firestorm, when she was the lone conduit of public information for the region’s Spanish-speaking residents, translating emergency dispatches from the county and taking round-the-clock calls from those needing more immediate help.
One of her aims at this new job is to call out and fill those kinds of gaps. The county has since made strides addressing “language equity,” making sure it communicates to residents in English and Spanish. But De La Cruz said it will take more than just her small team—two people with no actual office space as of November
— to make meaningful change in the largest local government and public employer.
“There’s no way in hell we, alone, are going to be responsible for a culture shift in an organization of 4,000-plus people,” she said.
But change is coming, thanks to her allies in many of the county’s 26 departments — “champions” of equity, she calls them, “people who’ve been doing this work for a long time.”
Few have been doing it as long as De La Cruz.
Her story is, in a way, the tale of two grandmothers. Her father’s mother, Jesusita “Jessie” Lopez De La Cruz, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, worked in the fields of California’s San Joaquin and San Gabriel valleys with her parents starting at the age of 5. Jessie went on to become the first female organizer for the pioneering union, the United Farm Workers.
A confidant of Cesar Chavez, Jessie Lopez De La Cruz participated in strikes, served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, met with the Pope, and testified before the U.S. Senate, inviting the politicians to come to Fresno, where they might hear the needs of impoverished farmworkers firsthand.
De La Cruz recalls her maternal grandmother as another pivotal figure in her life, a “lovely” white woman from Long Beach who meant no harm when she told her, “Well, Alegria, if you’re going to be a short Mexican, at least stand up straight.”
As the daughter of organizers for the United Farm Workers, De La Cruz moved 15 times in the Central Valley by the age of 11. After graduating from high school in Boston, she went to Yale, where her extracurriculars included organizing local labor unions and leading the university’s chapter of MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, which succeeded, among other things, in getting table grapes banned from Yale’s dining halls — part of a wider movement in universities at the time meant to honor a UFW boycott that began in the mid-1980s.
She also majored in history, played varsity lacrosse – she was a twotime high school All-American in the sport — and fit in comfortably with her fellow classmates. “When I went to Yale,” she recalls, “I knew which fork to use, because my grandmother drilled that into me when I was little. Not my brown grandma, my white grandma.
“I feel like I’ve always lived with a foot in two worlds,” she says — at ease on the fields of the Ivy League and in the crop rows of the Central Valley. The duality has made her keenly aware of white privilege, “of knowing what that looks like, and knowing what that feels like.”
It also helped prepare De La Cruz for the job now facing her. She took the reins of her new office at a uniquely charged moment: amid a global pandemic that has ravaged, in particular, the region’s communities of color. The county — and country — like few times before, has also been in the throes of a protest movement demanding greater accountability for police, more diverse leadership, and an end to systemic racism.
Her immediate priority: to focus on the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on the region’s Latino and Indigenous communities. At its peak, the county’s Latino residents made up nearly 80 percent of area coronavirus cases – including 98% of infections among children 17 and under. Latinos comprise 27% of the county population.
The virus “feeds on, and exacerbates, inequity,” says Supervisor James Gore, who helped spearhead the establishment of the equity office. So glaring was the need for such an agency that the supervisors
earmarked $800,000 to quickly get it up and running, despite a projected $50 million budget deficit.
The supervisors plucked De La Cruz from the County Counsel’s Office, where she’d served since 2017 as chief deputy county counsel. After earning her law degree at UC Berkeley in 2003, De La Cruz leapt into work geared toward improving the lives of underserved, invisible Californians, crisscrossing the state to litigate cases ranging from fair pay to housing, civil rights to environmental justice.
“A complete rock star,” is how Gore describes her. Supervisor Lynda Hopkins calls De La Cruz “a powerful leader,” and, in a less guarded moment, “a badass.”
The two got to know each other during the North Bay wildfires of 2017, when “Alegria and (deputy public defender) Bernice Espinoza “were the only people in county government trying to help Spanish speakers through the disaster,” says Hopkins.
De La Cruz recalls the awe she felt, working in the Emergency Operations Center with people “from all walks of the county in one room, solving critical problems in real time.”
She also remembers thinking: “I don’t hear Spanish. Why don’t I hear Spanish?”
She raised that concern with officials. Their response: “Can you help with that?”
She could, and did.
“For a while,” says Hopkins, “anyone calling 211, seeking information in Spanish was literally routed to Alegria’s cell phone.”
De La Cruz filled another yawning gap this past spring by helping to form a working group that directed the county’s resources as Covid-19 took its disproportionate toll on the region’s minorities. The resulting outreach has sought to ease access to medical care and quarantine space for affected residents and help with lost wages for those convalescing or tending to a loved one.
“The existence of this racialized spike tells us that we have failed,” says De La Cruz. The spike exists for a variety of reasons, she added, “because these folks don’t have a medical home, because they’re not connected to county messaging, or access to masks, or because they work for employers who maybe don’t know these things either.”
Long before the Office of Equity was founded, De La Cruz, Espinoza, and countless others were working to root out racial inequities and unjust policies in county government. But much of that work was extra — “on top of their normal jobs,” says Gore, resulting in frustration, demoralization and exhaustion.
Gore recalls being challenged at an “equity summit” last spring. Herman J. Hernandez, founder of the Latino leadership group Los Cien, told him that all the talk of diversity, inclusion and equity, without more meaningful action from the county, was “starting to taste like burnt coffee.”
By forming the equity office — one modeled off similar entities in Marin,
San Francisco and Santa Clara counties — and putting De La Cruz in charge, Sonoma County was “walking the walk,” Gore said.
De La Cruz has been on that path most of her life.
Eleven years before Alegria was born, her grandmother, Jessie Lopez De La Cruz, was making coffee for the men.
It was December 1965, and Cesar Chavez was going from house to house in Parlier, 20 miles southeast of Fresno, talking to laborers about joining his movement.
After answering the door, Jessie’s husband, Arnold, invited Chavez in, then sent his wife to the kitchen.
Jessie stood at the door, eavesdropping. She heard Chavez ask Arnold, “Does your wife work in the fields?”
“When grandpa told him yes, he said ‘She should probably join us for this conversation.’” It’s been a source of mirth – alegría – in the family ever since: When Arnold opened the door, his wife nearly fell into the living room. “She always said, ‘I was ready for my life to change,’” recalls her granddaughter.
Jessie was one of the first women to go into the fields and recruit for the UFW, a job at which she excelled. In 1968, she and Arnold ran the UFW’s first hiring hall out of their garage. After her death — on Labor Day, 2013, at the age of 93 — she was recognized by then-UFW president Arturo Rodriguez as “one of the best organizers the UFW ever had.”
De La Cruz’s mother, Jan Peterson, was a fearless organizer who once won 33 straight union elections, mostly in the tomato fields of the Stockton and Patterson area in 1975, while she was pregnant with Alegria.
“’She spoke Spanish like a farm worker,’” De La Cruz recounted Chavez telling her once about her mother, a tribute included in Peterson’s 2018 obituary. ‘She would stand up on an empty box in the middle of a field to be heard and all these workers would follow her out on strike. I never saw anything like it. I want you to know that is your mom — and what a really great organizer she is.’”
So committed to the cause was Alegria’s father, Roberto De La Cruz, that he returned on leave from his Navy tour of duty in Vietnam to join Chavez and other striking farmworkers in 1966 for part of their historic, 340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento.
“My dad talks about what it means to never have your own land,” says De La Cruz, “to always be working someone else’s, and to know that land better than its owner, because you’ve worked it so hard, yet to be treated with such disrespect, so little value.”
She was 11 when the family moved to Boston. The real estate agent helping them find a home looked at her white mother and Mexican-American father, and suggested that he not join them when it came time to look for homes.
As “a little Chicana” from California, De La Cruz was “a fish out of water” at her public school in Milton, Mass. But she hit her stride, as a student and athlete, at Thayer Academy. When financial aid officers at the private school south of Boston reviewed her application for assistance, they ‘wondered if there was a zero missing from our tax docs, because my parents made so little from the UFW,’ she recalls with a smile. ‘I was a scholarship kid all the way.’
De La Cruz relished “the release” that lacrosse gave her at Thayer and noticed that those playing fields “felt more level than the rest of my life.”
De La Cruz emerged one day from the counselor’s office at Thayer with
a list of colleges to which she intended to apply. On it were lacrosse powerhouses like Maryland and Delaware. “I was fired up,” she recalls.
Reading that list, her coach — a short Italian woman — became angry, then marched with De La Cruz back to the counselor’s office. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” her coach told the counselor, “but this kid’s frikkin’ smaht,” recalls De La Cruz, breaking out her Boston accent.
“I want some Ivies on her list.”
The counselor obliged. De La Cruz was scouted by Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, where she majored in history, with a focus on the labor movement. Her final project was an oral history of her grandmother.
The lacrosse team was another proving ground. After two years “riding the bench,” she was named most improved player in 1997, and got plenty of playing time in her final two years. But what she remembers most vividly — and painfully — about her time with the squad was something that happened off the field.
In the spring of her junior year, a group of first-year players dressed up as the Ten Little Indians as part of an initiation ritual. Furious and hurt, De La Cruz “marched them home and scrubbed off their faces,” she recalls, letting them know how disrespectful she found their costumes. “This is a Native American sport,” she recalled telling teammates, her voice still quavering with outrage decades later. “You can’t do this to people.”
After returning to California, she enrolled at the UC Berkeley School of Law a few years after the passage of Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in California, resulting in, as she remembers, “the whitest classes” at the university since before the Civil Rights Act. “We stood out,” she says of her fellow students of color. With allies in the law school’s Coalition for Diversity, she wrote amicus briefs and organized with other groups to fight Prop. 209–like efforts in other states.
Her first job out of law school was back in the San Joaquin Valley, with the California Rural Legal Assistance, fighting environmental injustice, including water pollution and pesticide exposure that disproportionately affect low-income farmworkers in the region. Those six years were also formative: She came to see, more clearly than ever, huge gaps in systems that were supposed to be airtight. “My clients were the ones who fell through the cracks,” she says. Because they were poor and dark-skinned and often spoke little English, “they were invisible.”
“The thing I remember about her,” said Martha Guzman, who worked with De La Cruz at the CRLA, “is that she’d go anywhere and everywhere there was a case.” Guzman, who is now an appointed member of the state’s Public Utilities Commission, remembers in particular a case in Del Norte County involving a large group of Indigenous Mexican farmworkers who were being housed at the fairgrounds, and given inadequate food.
De La Cruz was on it, working cases from one end of the state to the other.
“Del Norte, the Imperial Valley — she was always willing to get up and go,” Guzman said.
It was Guzman in 2011 who suggested to De La Cruz — by that time the legal director of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in San Francisco — that she might do even more good working inside government.
“What are you talking about?” she replied. “I sue the government.”
But she changed her thinking, and, after an interview with then-Gov. Jerry Brown, joined the state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board as a supervising attorney, based out of Salinas, the urban engine of California’s other famed agricultural valley. The work was rewarding, but grueling — and stressful.
At her direction, that board was filing more litigation than it had “in 30 years,” says De La Cruz. “So there was a lot of controversy, a lot of personal attacks, a lot of big white trucks sitting outside my house at all hours of the night.
“My office got broken into, my car got broken into. I’m like, ‘It’s 2012. How am I living the movie “Silkwood” practicing labor law in Salinas?’ But it was still that frightening for some people to think about farmworkers having their rights respected.”
After three years in Salinas, De La Cruz and her husband, the artist Martin Zuniga, looked north. During their time in the Central Valley, Ome had been diagnosed with asthma. She had an aunt in Cotati. In 2015, the family of four relocated to Santa Rosa, opting for a new part of California with cleaner air.
The timing of that move exposed the family and De La Cruz to the brunt of three historic fire seasons in Sonoma County, including the 2017 infernos that earned her a spotlight for service to Spanish-speaking residents.
Fast-forward to the wildfires that ravaged the West Coast this past summer and fall, and the threads of De La Cruz’s career have come full circle: environmental pollution layered on the deep deprivation imposed by the pandemic.
“I was like, damn, we came here so we could breathe, and now we’ve got air filters in the house, and nobody can go outside,” says De La Cruz, with a laugh.
Upon joining the county counsel’s office, she found a mentor in Bruce Goldstein, who has “a justice warrior’s heart,” says De La Cruz. Goldstein retired in September 2020, after running that department for a decade.
Over a beer in November, he and De La Cruz had a laugh recalling her disastrous job interview in 2015. Inspired by what she knew of the Santa Clara county counsel, which went after bad actors like polluters and opiate manufacturers, De La Cruz spoke passionately about how she could do the same thing in Sonoma County.
Around the table, people looked down at their hands. Sonoma County wasn’t interested in that kind of aggressive, plaintiff-side practice. “And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Ooooh, this is not going well,’” she recalls. “I remember walking out and saying to myself, ‘OK — didn’t get that job.’” She was wrong about that. Goldstein and Sheryl Bratton, now the county’s administrative officer, reached out to De La Cruz, asking “What would make you happy here?”
She started off working on land-use policy, advising Permit Sonoma, the county’s planning agency, and the Community Development Commission, which focuses on, among other things, affordable housing and homelessness. De La Cruz also helped create the Secure Families Collaborative, a legal aid initiative aimed at helping immigrant families following the election of President Donald Trump.
To further knit herself into the community, she sought and secured appointment to an open board seat with Santa Rosa City Schools, where she has served as a trustee since 2019. De La Cruz also serves on the board of Los Cien, the Latino leadership organization, which had long pleaded with the county to more proactively address its structural biases.
As she stood in mid-June on Sonoma Avenue with her son, watching Black Lives Matter protesters file past, De La Cruz recalls Ome asking: “Why do the police have so much armor on?”
She smiled, and replied, “Those are the questions I want you to be asking.”
In her new role, De La Cruz faces plenty of key questions herself, including from the Board of Supervisors and a public pushing for change at a moment of “national awakening,” says Chair Susan Gorin. Foremost among them: How will we know the Office of Equity is succeeding?
In the long term, De La Cruz replies, it will it result in changed outcomes — in life expectancy, health, wealth, educational attainment.
In an equitable society, she points out, those outcomes won’t vary between racial and ethnic groups. Latinos in Sonoma County, for example, will be no more likely than other groups to contract the coronavirus.
It’s a daunting assignment, but De La Cruz’s work begins with the task of helping her colleagues in the county understand that the roots of inequity are located “in government inaction,” she says.
“Government created redlining, fencelining, and other programs that exclude minorities,” she notes. “Now government can change those outcomes.” But first it has to acknowledge its role in the problem. “You have to see the gaps you created,” she says.
In that light, the work ahead of her is revealed as both a continuation of the campaigns her loved ones led for years and a manifestation of some of the very change they sought. Because she is doing it from the inside.
“I think about where I come from every day,” she says. “I do my best to honor that history.”
Architect Olle Lundberg had to laugh when the real estate agent brought him to a 1930s fishing cabin on the shore of Bodega Bay.
“What happened to the rule about finding a house with good bones?” he joked. The house was undeniably in terrible condition: partially collapsed into the water, with a badly sagging floor 18 inches off square. But the site was like nothing else, a completely private cove on a shoulder of the bay with no other houses in sight — just a sweeping, uninterrupted water view. It wasn’t hard to imagine the promise of a setting like that.
But it was his black Lab puppy, Curly, who sealed the deal, running off to romp in the sand, getting incredibly mucky and loving every moment. So Lundberg and wife Mary Breuer bought the cabin, and they named it Curly’s Cove. As the couple likes to say, it’s hard to argue with a dog.
Curly the dog. (Rebecca Gosselin / Sonoma Magazine)
Lundberg leads a groundbreaking San Francisco architectural practice known for creatively reimagining structures with a strong sense of place (for a decade, he and Mary made their home in a one-of-a-kind decommissioned 7,000-square-foot car ferry docked in San Francisco Bay). He knew right away what kind of building the couple could create at Curly’s Cove, one that would keep the basic structure of the traditional fishing shack but add a modern feel with a massive wall of glass facing the bay. “That glass wall would be the big gesture. You’ll walk in and immediately see that view, and nothing else matters.”
Remodeling the cabin and making it structurally sound was a two-year process. Because the home’s existing wooden pier foundation sat at the edge of the bay, the California Coastal Commission had sway over what could be done on the site.
Respectful of the need to preserve the delicate ecosystem, Lundberg created a plan that removed the falling-down piers and moved the entire cabin back from the edge of the bay onto a shored-up concrete foundation. “We built the new foundation in line with the house, but 10 feet further back, and literally rolled the house onto the new foundation. It was a little bit scary when we did that, because you don’t know if the whole house is just going to fall apart, but we had plywood sheathing on the walls to make it stouter, and it worked just fine.”
On the exterior, a new deck cantilevers out over the edge of the wetland and surrounds the home on two sides, with metal grates that allow light to shine through and reach the plants that grow underneath. The old house came with a patchwork of green asphalt shingles on the exterior which, due to the sagging foundation, were all out of whack and looked a bit like the scales of a dragon, Lundberg says. He reimagined the siding with narrow strips of Ipe wood, which over time has faded to a silvery grey, reminiscent of the cabin’s original redwood siding. A fireproof slate roof, topped with solar panels, also hews to the original rustic character of the fishing cabin. “One of my goals as an architect is to do buildings that blend in with the landscape and become better, not worse, as they age. It’s about understanding the materials, how they weather and change.”
Inside, Lundberg says, the whole idea was to not lose the feel of the old building but open it up to the bay as much as possible. All of the rooms in the 1,100-square-foot space except the master bedroom connect through sliding doors out onto the deck. The great room has cathedral ceilings, a modern wood-burning fireplace, and those incredible views through the new glass wall. Two simple bedrooms and a single bath are connected by a hallway that runs front to back through the center of the home.
That hall is lined with photos Lundberg took of the construction process. And a chef’s kitchen, with rugged stainless-steel cabinets and a commercial-grade stove, is open to the main living room.
Lundberg saved the vintage redwood beadboard that came with the house and managed to accumulate enough to cover all of the interior walls. “It was a crazy zebra look with all the old colors, which was actually kind of cool, but we ended up painting it white,” he says. “It’s got splices everywhere, and you can see the drips from all the old paint. It’s by no means a perfect interior wall, which is kind of the point.” And because it’s the beach, Lundberg installed a new slate floor throughout, which stands up to muddy dogs and sandy feet. “The slate captures the colors around here, tans and grays and blues, a really nice mottled patina that does well with the palette of nature outside.”
Furnishings mainly came second-hand from a website called Chairish, except for the custom redwood slab dining table and a coffee table Lundberg made in his studio workshop from the root ball of an Indonesian teak tree, which weighs over a thousand pounds. “My idea was for it to look like a big piece of driftwood that might have floated up on the tide,” Lundberg explains.
It’s a comfortable, easy-living home that Lundberg uses as a getaway with friends and family and occasionally rents out to guests. Days there are relaxed: walking down the lane to Fishetarian for fresh fish to grill out on the deck, heading out on the bay for a paddle in the canoe, and settling by the fire to watch dramatic winter storms roll in. The comings and goings of birds on the bay, including sandpipers, herons, and all sorts of gulls, adds to the peacefulness in the rainy season.
“It’s a favorite spot for birds to come down and feed, particularly in the morning and at sunset. Sometimes you’ll have a hundred pelicans out there feeding on the herring. They don’t pay much attention to people, and especially if the tide is in, they’ll come almost to the edge of the building.”
Big winter storms also flush out the waters of the bay, washing up all sorts of flotsam and jetsam — old wooden buoys, telephone poles, even, once, a small wayward sailboat — on the edge of the shore.
That ever-changing line of shore has become one of the couple’s favorite places in the world, made special by the time they spend romping on the beach with Curly, now 9 years old but not slowing down much. “She likes you to sit there and throw a stick into the water or hours on end. That’s what she lives for. She’ll go out crashing into the water and get as muddy as possible, and then come in and sleep for eight hours. It’s the best.”
