Chumash

Another begins with an inexpert “A Day in the Life at Temple Hillel Public Access Film,” in which Rabbi Marty points out that the bound Torah is called a “Chumash” — it’s left to the viewer to make the connection to the Chumash people who first lived in the area, from whom Rudy is descended and in whom Harrison is interested.

It also is home to marine fossils and Chumash paintings considered among the most impressive examples of Native American rock art.

Long before Europeans settled in Los Angeles — and even before the Chumash tribes inhabited the land and engaged in controlled burning — the Santa Monica Mountains and its landscapes of chaparral, oak woodlands and coastal sage scrub were no strangers to fire.

She recounts the time an aunt surprised her family by disclosing their Chumash heritage through an email that contained old maps and newspaper clippings of an ancestor’s obituary.

“Even though we grew up in the concrete suburbs east of East LA,” Mora Hidalgo writes, “the rolling hills and valley oaks and wine country roads up there feel like home to us because maybe, as Chumash descendants, it once was.”