It ironically translates to "Happy Ranch". Remember this every time I talk about this place.

My name is Atma and I grew up in Rancho Feliz in Rohnert Park, California. It's in Sonoma County. The county itself is at least worth a visit. I am thousands of miles from it now so you won't find me there and even if you do, why would you go anyway? Rohnert Park is a town roughly 60 miles directly north of San Francisco, right at the edge of suburbia and the incredibly vast rural farmlands and real ranches and dairies that spotted coastal NorCal from there until Oregon. After that, towns become a population of 4k people at most about an hour north of Rohnert Park. It was a planned community in the 60s. "The Friendly City"! You can live there, if you want, it's okay. You're not far off from some cool shops and small towns. The water and air are clean. They got a cool casino now with a huge food court. You can smell the dairy farms just a mile behind the city. You get used to it. Watching Rohnert Park Expressway go west and turn into Stony Point Road, where the suburbia and cheap housing completely stop and the farms begin and never, ever end. Rohnert Park - You could live there!

Rancho Feliz, you don't.

If Hellmouths exist and each town has one to attract the Worst, Rancho Feliz was it for Rohnert Park. 222 mobile homes in an oval that Google Street View has no footage of because whatever current management decided to remove the rights to it despite the fact it was there for years. It looks like a footprint from a cheap sneaker from above. Directly behind it was a creek that'd flood every year but the path made for easy access to a lot of stores, it's only good feature. Mobile homes barely above the quality of a trailer, but the culture was well beyond that of any trailer park I've ever seen depicted. It went through at least 4 or 5 different management companies owning it the time I was there, possibly more, and they all couldn't do a damn thing to contain us on the rare times they actually looked in on us, spying slowly on each house with the manager in a tiny golf cart sneering at us like he was some sort of God. Bitch, you're too white for that.

My first memory of it, or of life in general, is a few days before I turned 3, the Loma Prieta Quake happened and rumbled all the way to us and shook the house so hard I thought I was on a ride and having the time of my life, laughing my ass off. The next memory I have is being 4 and climbing a tv stand that hosted a CRT TV bigger than me, because the adults at the house were all too drunk to watch us kids, and next thing I know a CRT is on top of me. I escape without a scratch. Both these memories and incidents set a good precedent for how rickety and irresponsible the place and people were, and also precedent for my ability to just shrug shit off and laugh.

We lived in the very back. When I finally left it for good somewhere between the fall of 2018 and summer of 2019, it was the last mobile home there was of the original 222 installed. The rest had been scrapped, replaced once people moved out by management with newer houses, or more likely it burned down trying to make meth. It was the most in shambles but somehow still working house I'd ever been in, and an incredible mess I'll detail another time.

It was a predominantly poverty neighborhood. It also had a lot of Hispanic immigrants and was majority people from Mexico doing day labor work. A lot of us were either in gangs or by chance were affiliated with one by knowing someone who was in it and you're only finding that out now after a decade of knowing them. Rohnert Park is next to Santa Rosa, which is the main NorCal base of operations for the Surenos, and Rancho Feliz was one of its unofficial territories. This influenced a lot of the flavors of crime I witnessed. I remember watching outside my bedroom window all this shit go down and by my teens I was used to the sounds of arguing between rival gangs and knew if I kept out of it, especially since I'm white and it was beyond not my business, nobody would bother me. Cops knew all our names and faces, even if we were never involved.

Rancho Feliz is a neighborhood where you only went by your first name. If there were multiple people with the same first name, you were Name 1 and Name 2, etc. I never knew anyone's last name and don't know how to find them now, so the people I do fondly remember will have to stay that; fond memories/friends. I couldn't check up on them if I tried. Maybe it's better off this way.

It's a place you were lucky to leave at all. I escaped with some severe alcoholism I am now in active recovery from for 6 years now and a CPTSD diagnosis to go along with my lifelong hefty Bipolar II, way too much knowledge of drug manufacturing and street prices, as well as an expunged criminal record that contained a 3 year probation term. I am considered lucky in how "unscathed" I am to have come out of this.

Let this be the start of finally chronicling my time there and what it did to me and why I wouldn't trade it raising me for anything, in spite of it all.

At least the taquerias and corner stores kicked ass.

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