East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte

By Carribean Fragoza, Alex Sayf Cummings, Aurelie Roy and 26 more

East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars. 
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978805507

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East

Introduction

Finding Silenced Histories, Lost Intersections, and Radical Possibilities in Greater El Monte

ROMEO GUZMÁN, CARRIBEAN FRAGOZA, ALEX SAYF CUMMINGS, AND RYAN REFT

For three days in May 1935, El Monte’s white residents worked tirelessly to cement their place in history by performing the past on the community’s streets and in its auditorium. To set the scene, men, women, and children wore their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ old clothes: overalls for the men, dresses and sunbonnets for the women. Working from T. H. Cooney’s scholarship on western expansion, El Monte High School staged an ambitious performance of The End of the Santa Fe Trail with a cast of five hundred. In the ensuing years, the celebration stretched into a five-mile street parade of canvas-covered wagons and horse-drawn buggies and included a rifle and pistol tournament, rodeo, quilt and antiquity showcase, and barbeque. Collectively, the various activities and performances of the first annual El Monte Pioneer Homecoming sought not only to articulate a history for the community’s residents, but also to situate El Monte within the larger history of Southern California and the U.S. western expansion following the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848.

Like Spaniards before them, white settlers were attracted to the region’s fertile soil, abundant water supply, and green and lush landscape. Beginning in 1851, Americans from Texas and other Southern states settled in this region and formed two villages, Lexington and Willow Grove, with the former eventually emerging as the larger one. The majority of settlers pursued farming, and by the 1860s there were at least thirty-six farms with an average of ninety-three acres.¹ The arrival of 500,000 white Americans in California was accompanied by a shift in power relations, which included a new racial hierarchy—albeit one that continued to view the indigenous population as inferior—and a distinctly different social, economic, and political order.² Though many whites (along with much smaller numbers of Asian and Latin American prospectors) hoped to cash in on the Gold Rush in Northern California, many would eventually move south to places like Los Angeles and El Monte. By 1866, notes the historian William F. King, El Monte was well established as an important farm center.³

Economic change paralleled demographic change in the San Gabriel Valley (SGV). New arrivals from the American South settled and brought with them the political and racial beliefs dominant in their place of origin. The frontier environment only exacerbated their dependency on such ideologies and encouraged vigilantism. In El Monte, vigilantism might have represented popular conceptions of so-called frontier justice, but this form of enforcement was hardly free of the racial and class biases inherent in the nation’s formal legal system. As a well-armed mob on horseback, the El Monte Boys enforced their own brand of vigilante justice throughout Southern California, which frequently targeted Mexicans and Native Americans. The ‘El Monte Boys,’ in the words of Horace Bell, were long celebrated for their proclivity to seek out trouble and add to it.⁴ Residents of Alta California, many of whom were ethnically mixed due to the territory’s long history of diversity, had embraced the identity of Californios. But the members of this group were soon dispossessed of land; voted out of political office; and in the end found themselves, like other so-called minorities in this new California: with few rights and forced to sell their labor.

Throughout California, one finds a similar trajectory of shifting economics, demographics, and political consolidation unfolding across the late nineteenth century. After settling in new territories, white Americans worked to solidify their political, economic, and social position. As the state entered the twentieth century, this process was followed by an effort to create a past that would serve the present. Particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century, white businessmen, politicians, boosters, and residents were eager to create a sense of place by pointing to California’s past. But there was a problem: the contours of American racial hierarchy prevented any references to Native American history. Even Americans like Hubert Howe Bancroft, who valued recording and documenting the past as carefully as possible, did not understand Native Americans’ sophisticated relationship to the natural environment. In the words of the nineteenth-century historian, these people went naked, or nearly so, ate grasshoppers and reptiles, among other things, and burrowed in caves or hid themselves away in brush huts or in thickets.⁵ As California’s newest arrivals, white Americans could not point to themselves, their ancestors, or even their own cultural achievements as a means of bolstering the state’s cultural standing.

FIG. 1 Pioneer parade in El Monte during the 1930s. (Courtesy of El Monte Historical Museum.)

It was under these circumstances that white Americans looked to the old Spanish past and raised funds to restore the California missions, create a highway that would connect them throughout California, and structure its history in the service of the present.⁶ This narrative, which scholars have dubbed the Spanish Fantasy Heritage, provided a romantic and idealistic vision of the past and most importantly portrayed both Spaniards and Mexicans as lazy and incapable of exploiting the state’s rich resources. In short, the Spanish Fantasy Heritage firmly positioned white Americans as the only people equipped to lead California to its economic and political future.

In El Monte, white residents joined this statewide effort to imagine a past and present that would firmly place the future in the hands of white Americans. However, instead of looking to Spanish California, El Monte pointed to a much more recent past: the city’s white pioneers. The city, residents claimed, not only marked the end of the Santa Fe Trail, thus linking the Midwest and East Coast to California, but also boasted the first public school and the first Baptist church in the Los Angeles Basin—both symbols of American civilization. In short, El Monte prided itself as the first American settlement in Southern California and thus the central hub connecting this new territory to the rest of nation.

Throughout the twentieth century, El Monte writers, residents, politicians, and educators promoted this pioneer narrative through publications, performances and celebrations, school curricula, and the erecting of monuments. In 1935, as mentioned above, El Monte launched its inaugural three-day pioneer homecoming. It grew in surprising ways. In the festival’s second year, it attracted 60,000 Southern California residents. And just three years after the first homecoming, the El Monte Historical Society was founded and began to house material related to the community’s pioneer history in the El Monte High School (at the time on Valley Boulevard).⁷

As the twentieth century pressed forward, El Monte experienced unprecedented growth and important demographic shifts. From 1930 to 1970, the population increased twentyfold, from 3,479 to 69,892. Such changes, though important, have often been ignored or underexplored, particularly with respect to how the city’s diverse communities interacted and related. James Ellroy, a former El Monte resident and celebrated noir writer, described the mid-century SGV as the rat’s ass of Los Angeles County—a 30-mile stretch of contiguous hick towns due east of L.A. proper … white trash heaven. Housing covenants sequestered Latinos in slum districts and tin roof shantytowns across the valley. Negroes were not allowed on the streets after dark, Ellroy wrote. El Monte was the hub of the valley, where you had Dust Bowl refugees and their teenage kids. You had pachucos with duck’s-ass haircuts and Sir Guy shirts and slit bottomed khakis. Yet Ellroy collapsed the Mexican presence in El Monte to the winos and hopheads living in Medina Court and Hicks Camp.⁸ A skilled storyteller, he nevertheless revealed the powerful sway that pioneer narratives still held over the ways people understood the region in his appraisal of mid-century El Monte and its residents.

Indeed, the pioneer narrative endured well past Ellroy’s 1950s boyhood in El Monte. In 1973, Lilian Wiggins, the museum’s director from 1961 to about 1990 and a descendant of El Monte’s first American families, affirmed the museum’s focus and perspective.⁹ Its collection, she told the Los Angeles Times, is strictly ‘wagon train.’ ¹⁰ Well into the 1960s, El Monte High School students, regardless of their own ethnic background, were required to dress up as pioneers on pioneer day. Finally, in preparation for the city’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1987 and after decades of proudly proclaiming this site as the end of the Santa Fe Trail, the city and a committee of residents succeeded in gaining recognition for it as a historic landmark.¹¹ The state Historical Resource Commission concluded that El Monte was the first place in Southern California to be settled by Americans rather than by Mexicans or Spaniards.

However, it also found that El Monte was not the end of the Santa Fe Trail. It marked the end of some trail, but not the Santa Fe Trail, the Los Angeles Times wrote in reporting the commission’s findings.¹² Following this new historical designation, the city council spent $226,000 to make improvements to the park and to add a marker and historical artifacts, including a covered wagon.¹³

The pioneer narrative’s greatest achievement is its endurance and power. It is embedded in the city’s official logo, proudly memorialized at Pioneer Park, and narrated in the city’s museum. Its most egregious offense is placing white pioneers at the center of El Monte’s history, excluding some of the region’s most important ethnic groups and events. Most importantly, this narrative designates pioneers as the single most important actors in El Monte’s past. In his classic 1995 text, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a theory of the production of history that includes not just the writing of historical narratives but also the dissemination of history to the public—such as through museums, films, and folklore (the creation of relevance). The production of history, he argues, is deeply intertwined with power. We must expose the roots of power to unmask how it operates and show how the production of any history involves silences at four crucial moments: "the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)."¹⁴

Radicalizing the Archive

For the South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP)—an arts collective made up of writers, scholars, urban planners, and educators based in El Monte and South El Monte—these silences are personal, experienced, and felt. As children of migrants and grandchildren of Braceros, we found that the omission of Mexicans as well as our Asian classmates and neighbors stood in stark contrast to our experiences growing up in a multiethnic neighborhood, watching generations of people of color do the back-breaking labor of building these towns. It stood in contrast to the art, culture, and affirmation that emanated from places like East Los Angeles as well as from the stories we read in countless books that we devoured as high school students and eventually as undergraduates. Where, we wondered, were all the brown faces?

To evaluate historical narratives and explore the field’s silences and conceptual framings, historians examine the history of historical writing, known within the profession as historiography.¹⁵ From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the children and grandchildren of white pioneers began writing the history of El Monte. These texts, like much scholarship from this era, celebrated American expansion and movement west, portrayed pioneers as rugged innovators, focused exclusively on white men, and adopted a national perspective and framework. In these narratives, Native Americans were either ignored or written in as figures in a larger narrative of American triumphalism. They emerge, the historian Ramón Gutiérrez writes, as nameless, and usually faceless, victims of atrocities.¹⁶

The civil rights movement and the entry of people of color and women into the university since then have had a profound impact on historians and academics in general. New theories and methods provided the room and tools to include marginalized people and communities in larger historical narratives. New scholarship began to show that rugged pioneers did not succeed on their own but were aided by the government, often to the detriment of other ethnic groups. For example, while early works on El Monte describe white migrants as pioneers and settlers, the term squatter more aptly describes their arrival and occupation of the land. Like many newcomers throughout California, they benefited from intermarriage with prominent Californio families and, perhaps more importantly, the application of American property law—notably the Land Act of 1851.¹⁷ Land grants under both Spanish and Mexican rule often lacked geographic specificity, and in some instances documentation was judged to be inadequate by U.S. law—a point that American interlopers exploited. Mexican residents, now subjects of the United States, spent decades trying to defend their claims, and even when they succeeded, it was often at great personal cost.¹⁸

Since the 1990s, historians have increasingly adopted transnational and global perspectives, revealing the connections between California and people and places across the globe rather than viewing the process of American colonization from a purely regional or national perspective. Native Americans and multiethnic communities emerged as active agents rather than passive victims or props in a triumphal narrative. Historians and scholars started to think of space as they think about time: something that is always changing and relational. Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and politics; it has always been political and strategic, as the geographer Edward W. Soja has written. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be ‘purely’ formal, the epitome of rational abstraction, it is precisely because it has been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident on the landscape.¹⁹ Last, and perhaps most important, students of the West started to study different ethnic groups in relationship to each other to explore how one’s ethnic makeup (or citizenship status) affected one’s place in society.

Amid the celebration of greater El Monte’s multiculturalism, an absence exists: the dearth of blackness. Though encountering discrimination as well, Asian and Mexican Americans have been able to suburbanize at much higher rates when compared with their black counterparts. Reasons for this inequality include federal, state, and municipal housing policies such as redlining that over time penalized all nonwhites and immigrants, but at differing levels and with a particularly heavy impact on African Americans.²⁰

Other factors also contributed to the relatively limited presence of African Americans in El Monte. Since the early twentieth century, Mexican and Asian Americans often resided in small colonies within a short distance of their work; though segregated and often lacking services, they established footholds in the region. El Monte Hicks Camp and Medina Court serve as two examples.²¹ Most notably, Asian Americans also benefited from the anxieties of the Cold War, when elected officials promoted the integration of Asian Americans into California suburbs as a way to combat Communism and promote the goals of U.S. foreign policy.²² Urban renewal, highway construction, and other economic development schemes in Los Angeles victimized each group, but Asian Americans and Mexican Americans were able to integrate the working and middle-class suburbs of the SGV. Historians such as Eric Avila, Emily E. Straus, and Andrew Wiese have shown that African Americans did pursue the suburban dream but suburbanized at lower rates in more segregated communities.²³

Still, in the face of this imbalance, one must at least ask: to what extent have today’s SGV residents contributed to this reality? George Lipsitz and other scholars have explored the consuming power of whiteness and how people of color sometimes embraced its implicit ideology as a means to access greater resources, property, and wealth.²⁴ Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African Americans, Toni Morrison wrote in 1993.²⁵ And whatever the answer to this larger question, its exploration extends beyond the scope of this work; even with the multicultural successes of the SGV, let it serve as a reminder that troubling inequities remain across racial lines, even in a landscape as diverse and multifaceted as that of greater El Monte.

Indeed, despite El Monte’s multiethnic past and present, decades of new scholarship on the West, and new theories and methods about the historical process, the pioneer narrative remains intact in the official history of El Monte under the care of the city’s museum and its director and board. To continue to imagine a white past in the face of a multiethnic nation is akin to calls to Make America Great Again: perpetual erasure. We prefer the (admittedly sardonic) call of Langston Hughes, to Let America be America again … America never was America to me.²⁶

The city’s centennial in 2012 encouraged new ways of thinking about its history and new methods of conveying its present and past to its residents and the broader public. SEMAP used this historical date as an opportunity to launch the public history and place-making project called East of East: Mapping Community Narratives in El Monte and South El Monte. The project aspired to build a new, multiethnic, transnational, and radical history of South El Monte and El Monte, one that began before the arrival of white pioneers and continued into the present. To build this new history, we needed to build a new archive. The process of building this new archive and history is central to the entire endeavor.

SEMAP launched the East of East project in collaboration with La Casa de El Hijo del Ahuizote, a cultural space in Mexico City that houses the papers of the Mexican and transnational anarchist Flores Magón brothers.²⁷ La Casa and SEMAP are linked by Carribean Fragoza and Romeo Guzmán’s friendship with Diego Flores Magón, as well as by a shared epistemology and overlapping disciplines. As an arts collective, SEMAP uses the arts to transform how we think about and experience place and to foster a grassroots and collective sense of ownership of space, both public and private. The friendship between SEMAP and La Casa was further cemented by a historic connection: in 1917 Ricardo Flores Magón delivered an important speech in El Monte. It was from here that he wrote letters to his brother, Enrique, who at the time was hiding out in the SGV—most likely in La Puente.

Since 2012, we have worked with archivists, educators, historians, artists, and community members to host discussions, lectures, bike tours, and creative writing workshops with Spanish-speaking migrant women and youth; conducted more than a hundred oral histories; digitized more than 1,500 city and personal archives; created original art about El Monte and its sister city, South El Monte; partnered with Tropics of Meta and KCET to share this content; and built a new digital archive of South El Monte and El Monte. Throughout this process, we have invited scholars to write essays about El Monte and South El Monte’s past and novelists and community members to produce first-person creative nonfiction stories connected to place.

Beyond the Santa Fe Trail: Greater El Monte in the Long View

East of East writes against the pioneer narrative and the myth of the end of the Santa Fe Trail in an effort to view Greater El Monte—El Monte and the city of South El Monte—as a site of contestation. Rather than simply adding a new set of actors, themes, or perspectives, East of East understands history and culture as both an act of governance and resistance. As Edward Said pointed out in his influential 1993 work, Culture and Imperialism, governance and empire remain primarily about land, but it is through culture and the appropriation of history that such contestations are decided.²⁸

Like Southern California in general, El Monte and South El Monte have always existed at the intersection of larger forces—be they Spanish colonialism, distant Mexican rule, or a contemporary federal government at odds with Californian notions about immigration and civil liberties. Together the communities provide a setting in which to examine the history of Spanish California; the rise of the urban West; and the social, cultural, and political transformation of twentieth-century suburbs in a way that studies centered strictly on Los Angeles or its inner suburbs cannot. These communities are part of a much bigger story of colonization and conquest, labor and culture, race and suburbanization at the fringe that has not yet been told.

FIG. 2 Map of Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mountains. Automobile Club of Southern California, 1915. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.)

Fluidity defines the interplay between city center and suburb. The political, cultural, and economic flows between the two cannot be separated or cordoned off into compartmentalized entities. As liminal spaces between both cities and suburbs, points of departure and transition amid the flow of labor, migrants, music, politics, and cultures (in this case, in the vast metropolitan sweep of Greater Los Angeles), El Monte and South El Monte have been points of contact between farmworkers, punks, white supremacists, suburbanites, Zumba dancers, and civil rights activists. This part of the urban fringe—a fringe beyond the fringe, truly east of east—offers a fresh perspective on the cross-cutting currents that nonetheless still flow into the diverse, multiethnic suburbia of the twenty-first century United States.

East of East springs from the intersection of major developments in the field of urban history. First, scholars such as Mike Davis, Michael Dear, Edward Soja, and other members of the Los Angeles school began to frame Los Angeles not as an outlier of U.S. suburbanization but as the model for the nation’s metropolitan areas.²⁹

Second, it draws on the new suburban history, which has ventured beyond central cities to see what was happening in the little boxes on the hillside, and to examine the tension between city and suburbs.³⁰ The growth of the SGV—particularly the demographic change at the heart of this expansion, largely driven by Asians and Latinos—has caught the attention of scholars and students of suburbs and cities. Los Angeles’s sprawl, increasing cost of living, and connection to foreign capital have driven countless individuals and families to the SGV, producing a novel form of suburbanization that promises to be increasingly replicated in California and elsewhere. Charlotte Brooks, Wendy Cheng, Matt Garcia, Becky Nicolaides, James Zarsadiaz, Rudolfo D. Torres, and Victor M. Valle all have provided new insights into the growth of multiethnic suburbs by showing how these new and old migrants are transforming cities and by articulating new ideas about belonging and racial hierarchies. As working-class communities east of East Los Angeles and in the heart of the SGV, El Monte and South El Monte are defined by their majority-minority status and their ambivalent relationship to Greater Los Angeles.³¹

Third, collectively, the cities and suburbs that make up this fringe in the SGV and parts of Southeast Los Angeles—or what Torres, and Valle labeled the Greater Eastside … an interdependent network of newer and maturing near-in cities and suburbs—cast a significant economic shadow, one that the authors argue transformed the region into one of the nation’s most dynamic industrial landscapes. El Monte and South El Monte lie within its central orbit and exist as part of the Greater Eastside.³² El Monte and South El Monte capture this transformation, and in these ways, East of East answers Torres and Valle’s plea for a view of the Los Angeles metropolitan region that better accounts for its Latino and Asian residents—economically, politically, and culturally—and looks past black-white binary racial debates.

East of East carries these developments further by providing a consistent setting for untangling the identities, conflicts, and solidarities over three centuries of American life. Rather than seeing a multiethnic suburb as a novelty, East of East understands it as part of a long and rich trajectory from Spanish to American colonization and from white supremacy to the assertion of power by people of color throughout the twentieth century and today. Racial hierarchies were articulated, enacted, and contested again and again, in public and private space, in ways that became significant not only to Greater El Monte but also to California. Indeed, El Monte’s built environment, political and economic history, and diverse population emerge out of its interaction with Los Angeles—but they also shape the larger metropolis.

This book offers a longer and more enduring view of this urban trajectory than most traditional scholarship has offered. The stories of El Monte and South El Monte’s diverse communities must be told, or they will be lost. Their lives might be erased just as the history of indigenous and Mexican residents was whitewashed by the mythic narrative of the End of the Santa Fe Trail celebrations in 1935 or, even more prosaically, by economic development and sprawl amid metropolitan Los Angeles’s expansion and foreign investment. Such a loss would be especially painful in a century when the United States finds itself again reckoning with a long love affair with whiteness, its exclusionary notions of citizenship and belonging, and the reluctance to include diverse communities as part of the nation’s historical narrative.

Like America itself, El Monte was always already diverse, and the city shows how America’s multiethnic multiplicity is now unfolding in new and different ways. East of East proposes to incorporate these stories in a way that is unconventional, heterogeneous, and disciplinarily promiscuous. It employs a broad American Studies methodology, engaging in issues of memory and myth, oral history and creative nonfiction, and place making and archive building. It is organized both chronologically and thematically, and through our digital archive readers have the opportunity to dig deeper and contribute to an evolving project of community history. It is both a time capsule and a statement of intent—that the activists, artists, farmworkers, musicians, and writers portrayed here not only mattered historically, but that they and their descendants actually represent the vanguard of metropolitan America.

The future will not happen in the cities or the suburbs, but in the middle, and El Monte and South El Monte have always been in the middle. Indeed, this project aims to decenter and recenter our histories of labor, migration, music, race, and urban development in the metropolitan West. What El Monte and South El Monte can teach us is that a borderland, fringe, edge city, and place of transit and departure might be a middle, but that the middle is often also the center of the action—in a real sense that too often goes unrecognized.

Notes

1 William F. King, El Monte, An American Town in Southern California, 1851–1866, Southern California Quarterly 53, no. 4 (December 1971): 317–332.

2 Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 103.

3 King, El Monte, 317. See also Starr, California, 81.

4 Horace Bell, On the Old West Coast: Being the Further Reminiscences of a Ranger-Major Horace Bell (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1930), 310.

5 Hubert Howe Bancroft, Literary Industries: A Memoir (San Francisco: History Company, 1891), 651.

6 Phoebe S. K. Young, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

7 The museum moved from the high school to its current location, the former city library, in 1968. This building, coincidentally, was built through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration program. See Mayerene Barker, El Monte Preserves Past in City Museum, Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1973.

8 James Ellroy, My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 18–21.

9 After Wiggins’s death, the museum appointed Helen Huffing and Mary Schaffer as directors—both of whom died shortly after becoming director. From 1992 to about the mid-2010s, the museum was run by Donna Crippen, the wife of Jack Crippen, a prominent politician. See Donna Crippen, oral history interview, January 15, 2014, South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP), East of East: Mapping Community Narratives in El Monte and South El Monte, http://www.semapeastofeast.com.

10 Barker, El Monte Preserves Past in City Museum.

11 In 1930 the California State Society of the American Revolution erected a plaque in El Monte that read, This tablet commemorates the site of the oldest Protestant Evangelical Church in Southern California, the erection of the first school house and the end of the Santa Fe Trail. See Denise-Maria Santiago, Wagons Ho: El Monte Insists Trail Didn’t End in Santa Fe, Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1987.

12 Elizabeth Caras, Trail’s End? Maybe Not, but El Monte Is Historic, Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1987. For more on the Old Spanish Trail and El Monte, see El Monte, in Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County, ed. Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 136−137.

13 Los Angeles, California State Parks Office of Historic Preservation, accessed February 17, 2018, http://ohp.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=21427.

14 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

15 Ramón Gutiérrez, Contested Eden: An Introduction, California History 76, no. 2/3 (1997). For more on the recent developments in the field, see Stephen Aron, Convergence, California, and the Newest Western History, California History 86 (2009): 4–13 and 79–81.

16 R. Gutiérrez, Contested Eden, 6.

17 Even King, who provides a rather neutral, if not laudatory, portrayal of white settlers, argues that most of the farmers were ‘squatters’ on the land (El Monte, 323).

18 Starr, California, 103–105; Carlos Manuel Salomon, Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 118; Paul Gates, The California Land Act of 1851, Southern California Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1971): 395–430. In his interpretation of the act, Gates argues that it did not affect Californios as unfairly or as extensively as others have since suggested.

19 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 80.

20 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017); Andrea Gibbons, City of Segregation: One Hundred Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018); Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

21 Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

22 Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

23 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), and The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Emily E. Straus, Death of a Suburban Dream: Race and Schools in Compton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

24 George Lipsitz, The Racialization of Space and the Spacialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape, Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10–23.

25 Toni Morrison, On the Backs of Blacks, Time, December 2, 1993, 57. See also Wendy Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 41.

26 Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again: And Other Poems (New York: Vintage, 2004), 3.

27 For a history of La Casa see Romeo Guzmán, Rebel Archive: A History of La Casa de El Hijo Del Ahuizote, in Regeneración: Three Generations of Revolutionary Ideology, ed. Pilar Tompkins Rivas (Mexico City: Vincent Price Art Museum and La Case de El Hijo del Ahuizote, 2018).

28 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 78.

29 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 3.

30 Indeed, as the historian Michelle Nickerson has argued, the new suburban history is hardly new anymore; see Beyond Smog, Sprawl, and Asphalt: Developments in the Not-So-New Suburban History, Journal of Urban History 41 (2015): 171–180.

31 Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends; Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Diazes; Garcia, A World of Its Own; Becky M. Nicolaides and James Zarsadiaz, Design Assimilation in Suburbia: Asian Americans, Built Landscapes, and Suburban Advantage in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley since 1970, Journal of Urban History 43 (2017): 332–371; Rudolfo D. Torres and Victor M. Valle, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

32 Torres and Valle, Latino Metropolis, 21, 24, and 42.

Part I

Origins and Departures

FIG. 3 Phung Huynh, In the Meadow. El Monte Station. (Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.)

Historians make choices, and choices are neither neutral nor apolitical. When a study begins and ends, for example, can produce profound exclusions. For too long historians worked in the service of the nation-state by writing histories that celebrated the rise of the nation and privileged a temporal frame that was aligned with nation building.¹ El Monte’s early historians (much like its official historical museum) began their narratives of El Monte with the conclusion of the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. Their romantic and uncritical perspectives of the so-called pioneers erased conflict, conquest, and the region’s previous inhabitants. The region was not only home to the Tongva but was also part of the Spanish empire and Mexican state and experienced profound social, cultural, and political changes. Far from the sprawling, multiethnic landscape of today, the colonial era witnessed a tumultuous clash between the native Tongva people and the Spanish, who faced fierce resistance from iconic rebels such as Toypurina. Throughout the nineteenth century, indigenous, Mexican, and American interlopers jostled for power. White vigilantes, who supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War, brought rough Southern justice to impose order on a new Anglo-dominated California, which was increasingly connected to the broader United States by markets and railroads. Through force and the law, Californios lost political power, land, and even their social standing in society. Through historical actors like Toypurina and the El Monte Boys, El Monte and Los Angeles residents remember the past and in the process reveal competing historical interpretations.

Note

1 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,