Exploring American Hometowns: Brentwood, California

When I introduce myself, I say I’m from “the Bay” to be strategically vague. If I’m lucky, someone mentions a cousin in San Jose or an internship in San Francisco, and we nod at each other in mutual recognition of tech-adjacent geography. If I’m less lucky, they ask the question: “Where in the Bay?”

There’s a pause when I decide how honest I want to be that day.

Sometimes I say East Bay. Sometimes I say “near Antioch,” the end of the yellow line on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), which feels concrete enough to be real but vague enough to avoid scrutiny. And sometimes I tell the truth—Brentwood.

If I’m in NorCal, someone inevitably tilts their head and says, “That’s not really the Bay.” If I’m in the rest of California, they ask if I mean the Brentwood next to the Pacific Palisades. The neighborhood with gated hedges and political power, the one adjacent to the ocean. This is not my home. From the masses in Cambridge, I get two polite nods and no follow-up questions.

My Brentwood sits at the tail end of Contra Costa County, where suburbs loosen their grip, and the land remembers it used to be dotted with farms. We are technically tethered to the Bay, but we lean toward the inland Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, toward heat that presses down on you in late August and sunsets that turn the sky a violent blood orange over the water.

The stereotypical Bay Area culture—the one of venture capital and kombucha on tap, of startup culture and transplants cycling in and out—feels sterile to me. Brentwood couldn’t be farther from that. We are dirt bikes roaring down residential streets, Norteño bass vibrating through the pavement, and low-riders bouncing to Mike Sherm. We are country music pulsing from block parties where someone’s uncle grills corn next to a tray of Ilocano empanadas. We are Americana filtered through the delta wetland breeze, blowing queen palm trees whose shadows stretch across sun-baked lawns. 

We live in the shadow of Mount Diablo, which looms so large in our skyline that it’s easy to assume that the devil himself chooses Brentwood for his summer home. Maybe that’s why everyone was so eager to renounce the town. The senior year of high school felt like a collective shedding. Loving Brentwood was suspicious because ambition meant leaving. To linger in Brentwood felt lazy; to admit you loved it felt naïve. I imagined myself packing my suitcase, feeling the sunburned asphalt under my sneakers one last time, watching windmills spin down Vasco Road, and stepping into a city that promised more than rows of orchards and chain-link fences. And yet, the pullback was relentless.

It is hard to admit that there is love in Brentwood. That I love it.

I find love in the Filipino grocery store with the flickering sign that reads MA(B)UHAY, the B perpetually unlit. It’s in the Indian market that became an Afghan outlet before becoming Indian again, but still stocks bakhoor next to bolani—a refrigerated dosa mix beside halal cuts of meat. It’s in the fruteros: white fruit carts with rainbow umbrellas, parked outside school at 3:20 p.m., plastic cups of mango dusted with Tajín, chicharrón bags swinging from wrists as kids spill downhill toward two competing bagel shops that have somehow both survived.

Brentwood is green grass hills in the spring, the kind you roll down and regret immediately because the foliage leaves green ghosts on denim. Brentwood is endless rows of coral champagne cherries ripening in u-pick orchards. People climb a clanky metal staircase to reach the sweetest fruits, brimmed hats stained red by fallen berries, by the end of the afternoon. 

Brentwood is my neighbor’s grapevines creeping over the fence, wine esters mixing with citrus zest off my dad’s sumo oranges. We sit on the edge of the Sacramento River Delta, boats idling under the Antioch bridge overpass, their wakes folding into each other as the sun drops heavily, its intensity surpassing whatever that day’s ultraviolet index predicts.

What I love most about Brentwood is how it keeps revealing itself. For a place that prides itself on its unassuming nature and low expectations, Brentwood holds multitudes of stories: Filipino, Punjabi, Afghan, Mexican, Midwestern transplant, corn farmer, commuter, and a kid plotting their escape. It is stubborn and generous and warmer than it lets on. 

Now, when I return home from college, I hear it again, the headstrong insistence on leaving, in search of an escape from suburbia’s grasp. Before, that was all I used to hear. Now, I hear sweet longings to return to a Delta sunset and a familiarity that no walkable city with good public transportation can reproduce. They were always there. Now I hear them in the quiet pull of the fields and the warm light over Freeway 580, in the part of myself that knows some places never really leave you.

I still say I’m from the Bay because it’s easier that way.

But when I think of home, I never picture fog rolling over bridges or glass office towers reflecting the sun. I see a flickering B basking in dry heat. I taste cherry skin split between my teeth. I feel the wary eye of a cow on a narrow hiking trail.

And I know exactly which Brentwood I mean.

Rohan Tyagi ’29 (rohantyagi@college.harvard.edu)is busy putting everyone on to Bay Area legend Mike Sherm.