An ode to the offramps not taken

His intimate acquaintance with the I-10 isn't uncommon, since many Southern Californians either live near the behemoth or travel it routinely for work or play. Yet the structure has gone largely unnoticed by historians and commuters. "It's a paradox of modern California history that freeways play such a powerful role in defining our lives, yet the subject has generated few studies," says Mike Davis, an L.A. historian and author of "City of Quartz" and the forthcoming "Monster at Our Door."

What's different about Gonzalez is that he did notice the freeway. He noticed that some kids were afraid to come over to his side, the Mexican neighborhood of Redlands. (The "wrong side of the tracks" became "the wrong side of the freeway" when the I-10 was built.) Riding his bike through the underpass, he saw how the streets of his neighborhood once connected; houses and businesses were obliterated when the freeway bored through in 1964, the year he was born.

Gonzalez's attention to the eight-lane elephant in Southern California's backyard has yielded "Living on the Dime" (the "dime" is a nickname for the freeway), a collection of oral histories, a touring photo exhibition and a documentary that tells the stories of people who live along the freeway from Blythe to San Bernardino.

"The 10 is a powerful symbol of division in our community," he says. "It's eight lanes of concrete -- of course it's going to divide."

The communities featured include Beaumont, where the freeway separated about 50 Mexican American families from the rest of the town; Bloomington, once a thriving travel center that essentially died when the freeway diverted business from the old Highway 99; and Blythe, where the freeway eradicated homes and scattered a community of blacks, Native Americans and Mexican Americans.

The project is the first major attempt to look at the human impact of L.A.'s mother freeway, the main artery that connects L.A. to the rest of the U.S. "He's ahead of everybody else," says James Sandos, professor of history at the University of Redlands. "He's shown us a whole new scope of activity that we've missed."