Alexandro Lopez was attending elementary school in 2009 when his father introduced him to the music of the late rapper Tupac Shakur. Lopez was immediately drawn to Shakur and now the 21-year-old Santa Rosa native is a hip-hop artist himself who goes by Guapely. “English was always my strong suit in school” says Lopez, who graduated from a Santa Rosa High School. “I was into poetry before I started rapping.”

Guapely is part of a vibrant and Latino cultural scene that’s grounded in southwest Santa Rosa. After the 2017 wildfires it’s easy to notice the volume of people leaving for more affordable housing or better jobs (some 7,000 people are estimated to have the county after the fires), but what’s not so easy to see are the people who have chosen to stay—or who have no choice but to stay.

Guapely has put down roots in a county that’s not generally considered a beacon of upward mobility or a hub of cultural diversity. He channels the experiences of the 24 percent of Sonoma County who identify as Latino, and anyone else who might enjoy hip-hop music. But is Wine Country ready to enjoy Guapley’s brand of hip-hop?

“It’s a challenge to reach the market I want to reach,” says Lopez. “Sonoma County is very strict about working with hip-hop artists who want to reach out to local schools. I feel like the city is fearful that hip-hop will bring a negative image to the community. But when you look at the artists in Santa Rosa, a lot of the rappers are speaking about positivity.”

As a student, Lopez turned poetry into his first rap song, which he recorded on a flip-phone. His stepfather was impressed and bought some recording equipment for Lopez, who used the new gear to release his debut CD in 2012 while he was still a student.

“I started selling my music in middle school, and sold more at Elsie Allen in Santa Rosa. I made back all the money I spent on my CDs. That was a good feeling, and that’s when I started investing in myself with flyers and an in-home studio.”

Lopez says he reached out to the Santa Rosa City Schools district with the hopes of speaking to and performing for students, something he says he’s done for school’s in Fresno, Los Angeles and Richmond. The homegrown rapper says he was given the runaround by the city and the school district.

“The city kept sending me to the school district, and every time I reached out to them, they never responded back. I would walk into local schools and speak to the principals, who would send me over to the district,” he says.

This bureaucratic back-and-forth led Lopez to believe that hip-hop artists are viewed negatively in Sonoma County—and says it’s a factor that explains why local artists leave for greener pastures.

“I even see artists moving to Vallejo because they feel so limited in what they can accomplish here. It gives artists a helpless feeling when their community doesn’t back them,” he says. “Sonoma County is one of the hardest communities to realize your dreams.”

The school district says it has no record of conversations with Lopez about performing. “We have no information that any of our schools have told Alexandro Lopez anything about performing,” says district spokesperson Beth Berk. “If he had applied to use our school facilities, we would have that record at the district. We can tell you that Latino families are valued members of our school community, and Latino culture is embraced in countless ways in our schools.”

The sentiment is echoed by the city, which adds that it has been supportive of hip-hop events. “The city of Santa Rosa welcomes opportunities that bring diversity in arts and culture to our community,” says spokeswoman Adriane Mertens, “and through programs funded by the Santa Rosa Tourism Business Improvement Area, has consistently provided support to events and programs that include hip-hop artists, along with a range of other musical genres and art forms.”

But Guapely still feels shut out. He recently organized a free art show in southwest Santa Rosa, in part to counteract what he sees as the negative perception of the hip-hop scene. The rapper is planning more community events, as he invests his own money to create a space for artists to be seen and heard.

“Having a strong art and music culture will provide a financial boost for the city and even the wine industry because it will attract people who normally wouldn’t come here,” Lopez says.

He’d like to see the community create an easier path for local artists to express themselves by providing increased venue spaces at affordable rental rates.

“People ask me all the time what’s there to do [in Sonoma County] and all I can say is ‘go winetasting.’ I want to help change that,” he says. “I’m trying to build that here; that’s why I’m still here. [But] when I reach out to certain venues in Sonoma County, they shy away from it. They just say ‘we don’t do hip-hop events,'” he says.

Lopez says he thought he found a venue willing to work with him on a hip-hop festival he organized to take place at Santa Rosa’s House Of Rock. He says he invested his own money in securing a DJ and sound engineer, and says he booked the artists for the event only to be forced to cancel.

“At first, they were cool with it,” he says. “Then, all of the sudden the venue refunded my deposit and told me that it was going be too much of a headache and didn’t want to deal with it.”

Lopez believes pressure from the city forced the venue to change its mind about hosting the event, but offered no evidence.

Evan Alexander, general manager at the House of Rock, says the venue has never been pressured by the city over hip-hop acts, and that it’s called the House of Rock for a reason. He said Guapely’s crew wasn’t entirely up front about the show they were hoping to book there. The venue does not book hip-hop acts as a matter of policy, Alexander says. “We made our decision as a venue not to get into the hip-hop world because of issues we’ve seen in other places,” he says, adding that “we never took any money for a hip-hop show and then canceled.”

Guapely’s holding his ground. “Of course they would try and make it seem like it never happened and not look bad. We went there because the venue was really nice and we wanted to perform there. There was no secret about what we were trying to do. And just because it’s called House of Rock doesn’t mean they only have rock events.”

The city says it never intervened to get the proposed hip hop-show canceled. “House of Rock was issued a conditional use permit by the city of Santa Rosa for operation of an ‘entertainment assembly venue’ and music genre was not discussed during the permit approvals process,” says Mertens in a written statement. “Because the venue operator is the holder of an approved conditional use permit, additional city approvals are not needed to book individual events and performances, and city staff are not involved in those processes.”

Danny Chaparro is Roseland’s first Community Advisory Board appointee and the man behind the Street Soldier clothing brand. He’s focused on helping local youth find a passion, establish a goal and connect with locals who can serve as viable role models.

“The Street Soldier brand kept me community-based,” he says. “Kreative Living allows me to bring out the artistic outlet in the community’s talent.” The Roseland-based renaissance man wants to be part of a region that’s known for more than catastrophic wildfires and world-class wines.

“People think big city, big dreams,” he says. “They never think it could be small city, big dreams. I want to show people there are resources here that make the big dreams possible. You don’t need to be in big cities anymore. All you need is social media.”

Chaparro’s pushing local youth to embrace active roles in shaping the community, to avoid feeling trapped and limited in their environment. The Community Advisory Board and the city of Santa Rosa are working on strategies to motivate local, disengaged youth, who often place little value on their own self-worth.

“Younger people who move away to bigger cities are a little more privileged to afford to start over in those places,” he says. “People don’t realize how to find the right resources in their own city to accomplish what they want.”

This summer, the Community Advisory Board will start a series of “neighborhood fests,” featuring community-based block parties. Chaparro hopes these events can show local youth that instead of leaving to making moves elsewhere, they can stay in Santa Rosa and succeed here.

For a county in the midst of a massive rebuild, he says, the presence of an actively-engaged core of locals willing to help repair the foundation of the region is at a premium.

“It goes back to why I started Street Soldier,” he says. “To really be the change.”

Do Latino artists like Guapely face an uphill battle in Santa Rosa?

“I could see how a school wouldn’t want to take the blame for a kid going home and telling a parent about a hip-hop event,” Chaparro says, “and the parent asking: ‘Why they are letting the kids listen to that?’ I think it’s more real and authentic for schools to allow a local performer to come in and tell their story. We take the time to tell the kids what not to do, but we don’t take the time to understand why they are doing what they are doing.”

If schools are not allowing hip-hop events it’s because they are about protecting, instead of about understanding, he says. “We need to understand where they are coming from instead of where the kids are going. In order for this community to be more united, we need to involve the youth.”

The problem isn’t the Latino kids or hip-hop artists like Guapely, he says—it’s the perception that they deal with in Wine Country. “This county has a big problem with truancies and it isn’t because these kids are out there gangbanging or anything like that. It’s that they just aren’t motivated because they have no one that looks like them, that came from where they did, providing inspiration for a different way.”

Tom Gogola contributed reporting

California’s hot on the trail of Hawaii for bragging rights over which state will be the first to enact a ban on fur sales and manufacturing—but there’s a potential catch in Sacramento when it comes to rabbits.

Assemblywoman Laura Friedman (D, Glendale) sponsored AB 44 this year and calls fur production “completely out of line with our state’s values.”

The sentiment is largely shared by her colleagues, as AB 44 has sailed through two committee votes in Sacramento. But citing concerns about the impact on Northern California’s rabbit farmers, Assemblyman Marc Levine (D, San Rafael) has proposed an amendment that would exclude from the ban rabbits grown for their meat.

There’s a small but sturdy rabbit farming industry in the North Bay that mostly provides meat to regional restaurants. Animal-rights advocates say Levine’s proposal would defeat the purpose of the proposed ban on the sale of fur in California—and offer the state’s rabbit industry a monopoly on legal fur production in the state. Friedman says she’s talking to the rabbit industry about a way to exempt “animals that are clearly and demonstrably raised as food,” but so far, Levine’s amendment has not been attached to the bill.

“This is not a de facto ban on eating rabbits and I totally agree that if you’re killing the animal for food, that you should use every single bit of that animal,” Friedman told fellow lawmakers at a recent meeting of the body’s Water, Parks and Wildlife committee

“The flipside is that we don’t want to encourage killing animals just for their fur because that’s wasteful and not sustainable. We are afraid the rabbit exemption would create more of a market to do just that,” Friedman said.

Levine proposed his amendment at a March 12 meeting of the Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee.

Levine spokesperson Terry Schanz notes via email that “Assemblymember Levine supports maintaining the highest ethical standards for the production of legal animal products in California.” Schanz says that “AB 44 currently exempts most commercially produced fur and hide products including cowhides, lambskin, sheepskin, or the skin or hide of any lawfully taken game mammal. Including the skin or hide of an animal that is raised for food production in AB 44’s exemption is consistent with ethical farming standards, reduces waste and maximizes limited resources.”

His office also notes that Levine has a 100 percent voting record with PawPAC for his work on animal-rights issues. PawPAC’s 2018 voter’s guide confirms this, but gives Levine an A- grade because he hasn’t written any animal-rights bills.

“I support the goal that you are trying to seek,” Levine told Friedman during the March 12 hearing. “You have a number of carve-outs about the use of the whole animal. There are a number of [rabbit] farms in Northern California that do use the pelts and I’d like you to incorporate amendments that allow for that use.”

The proposed bill already has a number of exemptions, including wool, cowhide, and religious uses, but some rabbit advocates say Levine’s proposal would gut the broader ban if it exempted rabbit fur. The prohibition on fur would apply to the sale and manufacture of clothing, handbags, shoes, slippers, hats or key-chains that contain fur, according to the text of the bill.

While beef is equally if not more popular than leather, rabbit meat is significantly less popular (and valuable) than rabbit-fur products, says Noah Smith, a volunteer with SaveABunny, a Mill Valley nonprofit that focuses on rabbit adoptions.

Marcy Schaaf, the executive director at SaveABunny, a rabbit advocacy group. says that if Levine’s amendment is included, the fur ban “has the potential to set rabbit advocacy back to the Dark Ages.”

San Francisco implemented a fur ban in 2018, joining Los Angeles and a couple other cities around the state that have banned fur. The local ordinance in San Francisco doesn’t have a carve-out for rabbit fur, even if its high-end restaurant customers have a taste for the meat. While rabbit meat is not generally popular with the general public, the rabbit fur industry has continued to grow across the nation. And as the politics around claims of animal cruelty associated with fur farming or trapping has intensified in recent years, clothing brands such as Versace and Gucci stopped using furs in clothing and accessories. Meanwhile, rabbit fur sales increased by more than 50 percent in the U.S. between 1993 and 2015, according to a report on AB 44 compiled by assembly staff.

Locally, there doesn’t appear to be much of an appetite for rabbit meat on the supermarket shelf. In September 2015, Whole Foods announced the end of the sale of rabbit meat in its Northern California stores, officially ending a short-lived experiment to test the market.

A company employee leaked sales figures to NBC Bay Area showing that Whole Foods was selling one to three rabbits in each store per day.

Still, a smaller and largely high-end market is still alive and kicking.

Mark Pasternak, owner of Devil’s Gulch Ranch, a diversified family farm in West Marin, says he primarily sells rabbit meat to restaurants. He also sold a trio of breeder rabbits to Split Grove Family Farms in Penngrove farms several years ago as they were building their rabbit business. Split Grove now sells rabbit meat to regional restaurants for $8 a pound. Old World Rabbitry in Sebastopol is engaged in similar business.

Business is hopping, he says.

“I’m almost always sold out,” says Pasternak. He supports the intention of Friedman’s fur ban to discourage farming animals just for their fur, but says the ban would force him to throw away rabbit pelts or sell them out of state. He’d be affected, he says, but wouldn’t go “completely out of business,” because of AB44, he says.

Pasternak and his wife sell a variety of rabbit products online and at local farmers markets, including rabbit-foot keychains, rabbit fur and rabbit-based cat toys. He dismisses the argument that Levine’s proposal would incentivize the production of rabbits for their fur within the state.

“You can always do an end run around regulations,” Pasternak said. “You can do that in any case. It wouldn’t act as an incentive [to raise rabbits for their fur].”

The religious exemption in the bill applies to federally recognized Native American tribes and other religious uses of fur. But the bill also singles out key-chains containing fur, which are, in many cases, made from rabbits’ feet and are considered a lucky charm. According to Wikipedia, “the rabbit-foot charm in North American culture” stems from its use in West African hoodoo rituals.

Friedman’s still in discussion with industry representatives as her bill makes its way to the Appropriations Committee later in April.

“My biggest concern is that they’re going to exempt rabbits to get the bill passed,” says Schaaf. “It’s either a ban or it’s not. I’d rather have no ban than a compromise.”

Only a few years ago, a visit to the main branch of the Santa Rosa public library on E Street downtown was a visit to no man’s land. It wasn’t just the homeless who congregated outside, used the bathrooms and sometimes monopolized the newspapers. The homeless were the least of the problem.

The library was underfunded, resources were dwindling and a kind of malaise hung not only over the Sonoma County library system, but on public libraries from coast to coast. The onrushing digital future meant that print was dead, books were dead, libraries were a relic—and everyone loved their Kindle so much that they didn’t notice that their local libraries’ hours had been slashed.

Well, not so fast. As libraries emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 Great Recession—and with the assistance, locally, of Measure Y—they adapted and reinvented themselves for the digital era. Now the E. Street library feels new, clean and sharp—and is a more vital community resource. Along with its usual functions, for example, Coffey Park fire victims flocked to the library after the catastrophe to help them find records of deeds, maps and property lines that were buried under ash and soot.

A big part of the library budget—$30.5 million for the current fiscal year—comes from about $19 million in property taxes, which can vary from year to year; when Sonoma County prospers, its libraries prosper. Measure Y, approved by voters in 2016, pumps an additional $11 million a year into the library budget.

Amy Tan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants and the author of The Joy Luck Club, attended grammar school in Santa Rosa and recalls the impact the local library had on her.

“I borrowed books from the public library and read all the Little House on the Prairie novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Tan says. “I won a prize for an essay titled, ‘What the Library Means to Me.’ I said that it “Turned on a light in the little room in my mind.”

Clare O’Brien has been a librarian in Sonoma County for 22 years, and has watched as young readers have grown up in the library. “The public library is often the entrance to the big world beyond the family,” she says. “Reading books brings people together and instills a sense of empathy for others.”

The revived culture of the book is growing in Santa Rosa, Cloverdale, Petaluma, Cotati, Sebastopol, and beyond. Books live. “People are reading a lot,” says Sonoma County librarian Nancy Kleban. “They’re reading more than ever before.” Why? Because books like Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance provide the kind of in-depth information unavailable on radio, TV or the internet. Books present unorthodox viewpoints that tend to get buried under the sheer mass of data that saturates markets. A book is a friend in a way that a computer rarely if ever is.

The Sonoma library system is 12 branches strong, and most of the libraries have a built-in specialty collection. For researchers, the main branch downtown is just a few paces from a county building that houses the History and Genealogy library.

For enologists, there’s the Wine Library on Piper Street in Healdsburg. For archivists and genealogists, there’s the Petaluma History Room at the Petaluma Fairgrounds. For readers at far-flung Sea Ranch and Stewarts Point, a bookmobile delivers the latest bestsellers, along with the classics.

Jack London’s literary career began when he wandered into the Oakland Public library and met Ina Coolbrith, who sent him home with an armful of books. London never forgot the librarian who started him on a literary journey that led to the publication of 50 books, many written in Sonoma. His books are in constant circulation at the Sonoma branch (rare editions of his work are kept under lock and key at the History and Genealogy library).

According to the county, 223,771 Sonoma County residents have library cards. An additional 23,000 public school students are enrolled in a new, innovative program that provides them with unlimited access to all the technologies that the 21st-century library has to offer.

The students don’t have a library card and use a school identification number that serves as a passport to the library. They don’t pay fines for late books.

Last year, Sonoma County library patrons checked out 2,000,000 individual items—CDs, books and DVDs—a stunning figure that’s on the ready fingertips of Ray Holley, community relations manager for a library system that now offers digital services, e-books, e-audiobooks, streaming movies, language-learning programs, reference databases, magic shows, storytimes for children, trivia nights, live music for all ages, writing workshops for teens, and workshops for adults to help them maximize their Social Security benefits.

And plain ol’ books, too: Right now the most popular book with Sonoma County adults is Delia Owens’ bestselling debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing. The library system has 116 copies of the book. As of late last week, 350 people were on the waiting list.

Holley has an office at the new library headquarters on State Farm Drive in Rohnert Park. It’s a step up from the former headquarters housed in the basement of the central library. The new headquarters is bigger, brighter and well-staffed. Some employees spend the day doing nothing but ordering books. Holley attended Santa Rosa Middle School in the 1960s and says he still has his library card from when he checked out adventure stories from the main branch. “I was a bookworm.”

The library system also has a new director in Ann Hammond, former librarian for the city of Lexington, Ky. who brings with her library experience in Maryland and California, and at both private and public institutions. She’s making $183,000 a year at her new post; beginning library aides earn around $16 an hour, and branch managers make up to $58 an hour. Holley says the 11-member Sonoma County Library Commission is tuned in to the acutely high cost of living in the county “and are committed to a fair, equitable and sustainable contract” as the commission negotiates a new labor agreement for non-executive library employees on the lower rungs. Holley says Hammond’s doing a fine job in her new post. “From what I’ve seen, she’s earning every penny of her salary,” he says.

Hammond’s still finding her way, she says. “I’m trying to get a handle on everything. In Lexington I had a simple budget. Sonoma is a challenge, though I know that the library here has amazing programs, great collections, and a staff that wants to do more than it’s doing.” It’s a challenge, she says, because Sonoma County has nine cities and a population of about 500,000. Lexington is a single city with a population of about 322,000.

Thanks to Measure Y’s passage the Sonoma County library system’s in good shape to meet the challenges of literacy in the digital age. They’re buying lots of books and DVDs, upgrading computers and buying 500 wifi hot-spots at a cost of $400,000 to help residents without internet access. None of it would have happened without Measure Y, which allocates an eighth-of-a-cent from county sales taxes to fund libraries, and pumped $11.5 million into the library system last year.

As part of its mission to democratize information, the library is making it easier for people without access to the internet—because they live in remote geographical areas and can’t afford it—to get online.

A poster at the Roseland library reminds patrons, many of them Spanish speakers without home computers, that one-fourth of all households in America don’t have internet access. In Sonoma County, many of those households are clustered in southwest Santa Rosa and along the Russian River.

Kate Keaton, the Roseland branch manager, says that many kids assume they’ll have to pay to take a book home when they come to the library. They’re elated when they learn that they can leave with a picture book in English or Spanish.

Marlene Vera is a native of Peru who works at the Roseland branch. She helps the neighborhood kids learn the letters of the alphabet in English.

“There are no real libraries in Peru,” she says. “Not like here.”