Sounds of California: Bayview (2018) captures themes of migration, immigration, and home through the music and voices of Bayview-Hunters Point, and nearby Bay Area communities.

Developed by the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, in collaboration with community organizations, artists, and residents, the collection includes rich oral histories from Bayview’s artist-activists, a commissioned video essay on Bayview’s history, neighborhood fieldwork, and recordings from a concert at the Bayview Opera House.‍‍

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The Bayview is a beautiful neighborhood where the fog lifts when the rest of the city sits in its cool gray. It is also one of the last African American neighborhoods in San Francisco.

This area has historically been a site of migration; its original peoples are the Muwekma Ohlone who traded up and down the coast as seafarers. The promise of work was a major impetus to subsequent migrants and immigrants, whether it was the lure of California’s Gold Rush, the building of railroads bringing new Chinese laborers to the area, or the Great Migration of African Americans from the South who came to work in the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in the 1940s–1950s. These significant and subsequent populations make up the core of the Bayview. With more recent arrivals from Central America and Southeast Asia, new faces, cuisines, and markets are now part of a changing neighborhood.

In 2018, while planning for this Sounds of California project, San Francisco was in the midst of intense gentrification. As Silicon Valley, situated less than 90 miles away, pulsed with tech start-ups and captured worldwide imagination, the local housing crisis was at its peak. Long-time residents and renters as well as many established families, feeling the inequities of the new economy, moved further inland or left the Bay Area entirely. Others sold their homes or businesses in an unprecedented and hungry real estate market. The majority of people adversely affected were communities of color and the elderly.