San Diego Reader, March 1, 2017. Image credit: Sydney Prather
Our little hills forever near
Tell us your secret rare,
Through progress of change you never care?
Though they plow up your cover of greens and browns,
Disturbing your colorful restful mounds?
We humans would learn from you the way
Of patience and peace for every day,
Just taking what comes of sunshine or rain,
Trusting God’s care will forever remain.
Gloria Esterbloom, a longtime resident of Bonita penned this poem in her 1954 memoir, Our Beloved Valley, expressing admiration for the environment and an anxiety of what man does with it. Specifically, she was worried for the Sweetwater Valley, where Bonita resides, and how progress looms as a threat. It is this same worry of expansion and penchant for the pastoral — despite numerous real estate developments and population changes — that has kept Bonita as a defiant answer to the urbanizing world around them.
Esterbloom and her husband John were ranchers. For them Bonita was an agricultural town that harvested lemons, raised dairy cows, and benefitted from the labor of Mexican migrant workers, or as Esterbloom called them, “little brown men.” It had been that way since she moved to the area in the early 1900s. Yet, in the second half of the 20th Century, Bonita, as with most near-city agricultural communities, began to display suburban characteristics.
In the 1970s and 1980s, developers built large housing tracts throughout the valley and along the hills and canyons. Bonita Vista High School and Bonita Vista Middle School were established in the late 1960s. Shopping centers opened along Bonita Road. In the coming decades, Bonita’s population exploded from about 500 in the 1950s to more than 6000 by 1980. In 1976, Esterbloom died at the age of 79 while Bonita transformed before her eyes.
I live in my childhood home, which sits within one of the large housing tracts of Bonita.