The Bay Area has historically been a population magnet, but few have arrived here to find that their new homes would be train boxcars – still on the tracks – in Richmond, California. Yet this happened just decades ago, beginning in the late 1920s. Perhaps equally as odd: The new inhabitants of these boxcar villages moved here from the American Southwest, where they had lived for generations. This is one of the stories included in a current exhibit at the Bancroft Library Gallery at UC Berkeley, called “California Crossings: Stories of Migration, Relocation and New Encounters.” KALW’s Holly Kernan sat down with Sam Redman of the library’s Regional Oral History Office to find out more.