The Flea Market is America
Story by G. Melesaine // Photo by Chris Lepe

Today is bad news. I know for a fact bad things are happening around the world, but also more closer to home. My grandfather died of cancer yesterday and they are closing down the Berryessa flea market. Two very different things, but there's a heartfelt correlation between the two. My grandfather died in New Zealand and he spent most of his life away from me, so when he came to America for the couple of months he did, the first memory that came across me was the tour of America we gave him, when he saw the Berryessa flea market for the first time.

The Bumb family, who have been owners of the flea market for years, have decided to cash in and sell the land to developers so they can rebuild high cost housing and more big businesses. The San Jose city council has already approved the development plans. The vendors are organizing the flea market somewhere else in San Jose, to keep it living, but loosing the Berryesa site is a great loss.

The Berryessa Flea Market is 120 acres where anyone who is trying their hand at business begins here, the first step to the American Dream. Hundreds of families begin their small shops here, selling anything from televisions, to produce, to furniture, to clothing and if you can't find what you're looking for here, you probably can't find it anywhere else. Thousands of people from miles away travel here, sometimes not even to buy anything, just to browse to see if everything they've heard about the flea market is true.

When my grandfather came to America, I thought of all the places that would amaze him of how great a place America was. I showed him photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the beaches, the malls and explained to him how amazing the Bay Area was. He really didn't seem interested in going anywhere until my mother started talking about where she buys her green bananas for cheap. My parents always buy produce at the flea market on the weekends, it was fresh, it was cheap, and all international foods were easier to find here than at a regular grocery store. I thought to myself, wow how easy it must be to entertain Western Samoans in America, take them to the place where green bananas are cheap. It didn't occur to me as a 10-year-old that the flea market wasn't anything more than a place to buy fake Nike shirts for 5 dollars.

So as usual, we planned the next Saturday around a trip to the flea market. I'm not sure if it's just my family but I'm pretty sure a lot of families do the same thing. The flea market was like church, like a ritual, where the whole house would wake up early, take at least two hours to get ready, an hour to eat breakfast, another half of hour to get situated in the car, and another hour to get there. Waiting for a large amount of people to cross at the stoplight to enter the market, I could see my grandfather's anticipation growing. He kept his eyes on the entrance even while we turned into the parking lot.

Walking into the flea market, you feel a different aura, culture still remains here, untainted by corporate America. The scent of churros fills the air and the colors are not only saturated by the market but also by the people. The first thing my grandfather bought was a disposable camera. He wanted to take photos of things that made him wonder, which made me wonder about him. He posed for shots at the booth where they sold fake flower arrangements, the booth where they sold rugs, places that seemed so common to me that I was embarrassed in a funny way. How could a person be so amazed of the place where green bananas are cheap? The flea market is what he thought of America.

The flea market is a place where real people support real people. You will never find a mall with a saleswoman who will sit there arguing with you for 5 minutes about why she can't knock off 2 dollars until you tell her a sob story about being poor. The place is a community filled with a lot of low income families who work hard to sell cheap to other low-income families. Here, everyone understands the struggle for the American Dream. Now that gentrification has made its hit on the flea market, the struggle will become even longer than anticipated.

I was reading the history of the Berryessa flea market on its website and one of the first lines reads, "Smack-dab in the heart of Silicon Valley, the global center of technological innovation, sits a bustling 120 acre land bastion of "no tech" business that host 80,000 visitors a week, more than 4 million people a year." Those numbers say enough. George Bumb, the owner, who dealt in the solid waste and landfill business thought it was a good idea to make recycling profitable by creating a place for people to sell those treasures he constantly saw being thrown away, so he created the flea market. Now it seems like the profit part was really the most important part, different than my grandfather's perspective of the flea market, and America.

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