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East of East
The Making of Greater El Monte
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Edited by:
Romeo Guzmán
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With contributions by:
Carribean Fragoza
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2020
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
ROMEO GUZMÁN is the co-director of the South El Monte Arts Posse and an assistant professor in US and Public History at Fresno State, where he is the founding director of the Valley Public History Initiative: Preserving our Stories.
CARRIBEAN FRAGOZA is a journalist, fiction writer, and artist from South El Monte. She is the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Arts Posse.
ALEX SAYF CUMMINGS is an associate professor of History at Georgia State University and the author of Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century.
RYAN REFT is a historian of the Modern United States in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.
CARRIBEAN FRAGOZA is a journalist, fiction writer, and artist from South El Monte. She is the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Arts Posse.
ALEX SAYF CUMMINGS is an associate professor of History at Georgia State University and the author of Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century.
RYAN REFT is a historian of the Modern United States in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.
Reviews
"East of East makes several important interventions. First, it is part of an exciting movement to reclaim the histories and geographies of cities from the bottom up. Second, it focuses on a vital but completely overlooked part of LA history - El Monte. Essential reading for all those interested in southern California."
— Laura Pulido, co-Author of, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles"Best of all, East of East is both chronicle and challenge to all of us: Know your local history, document it and spread its gospel to the world, no matter how seemingly small."
— Los Angeles Times
— University Times
"The 10 best California books of 2020: Featuring 32 essays by writers including Alex Espinoza, Salvador Plascencia and Fragoza, this anthology seeks to restore the 'silenced histories' of El Monte, the small working-class city in eastern Los Angeles County, while also re-imagining its future as a community in its own right. 'The future will not happen in the cities or the suburbs,' the editors write, 'but in the middle, and El Monte and South El Monte have always been in the middle.'"
— Los Angeles Times, The 10 best California books of 2020"The editors of East of East see deeper truths. Greater El Monte, it turns out, is the setting for a story as rich and tangled as the flora that still covers the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area, a patch of parkland that lies, relatively unspoiled, in the watershed the El Montes call home."
— Los Angeles Review of Books"Scholars and regular people will find something to enjoy in East of East. Tourists and Locals alike will have a refreshingly informed understanding next time they go cruising through the streets of Aztlán and find themselves on Durfee in El Monte, remembering novelist Salvador Plascencia’s description of Durfee Avenue. What a great gift, or textbook. East of East is scholarship done right. Órale to the publishers and especially lead editors Romeo Guzmán and Carribean Fragoza."
— La Bloga“East of East digs up the dirt of greater El Monte to find what is left of ‘us’ — for the authors and contributors born and raised there, and for the Indigenous, immigrant, multiracial, multicultural and transnational communities brought to vivid life in these pages. It writes ‘us’ back into the narratives that erased us and writes new ones to remind us that white pioneer settlers are just part of the story, not the center of it.”
— KCET.org"It can and should be an inspiration for likeminded collaborative and multi-disciplinary projects seeking to redress the many wrongs of exclusive historical memory. As stated in the epilogue, localized areas like greater El Monte are often active in national and transnational operations of many kinds 'in broader networks of trade, work, kinship, culture and migration.' This book provides a solid grounding in better understanding these interrelationships, even as 'the rest of its stories have yet to be told.'"
— The Public Historian
— Boom California
"Your history-buff friends all want this magical book for Christmas."
— The Press-Enterprise"Richly layered and movingly felt, East of East is a collaborative history of a seemingly ordinary place revealed as a crossroads of the local and the global. A remarkable interleaving of scholarship and the intimacy of memory."
— D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir
— Los Angeles Times
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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Introduction: Finding Silenced Histories, Lost Intersections, and Radical Possibilities in Greater El Monte
1 - Part I. Origins and Departures
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Introduction
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1. The Tongva People
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2. Toypurina: A Legend Etched in the Landscape
25 -
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3. From Alta California to American Statehood: Race, Change, and the Californio Pico Family
37 -
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4. Here Come the El Monte Boys: Vigilante Justice and Lynch Mobs in Nineteenth-Century El Monte
49 - Part II. Social and Political Movements
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Introduction
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5. Rise, Fall, Repeat: El Monte’s White Supremacy Movements
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6. Ricardo Flores Magón and the Anarchist Movement in El Monte
68 -
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7. Bitter Fruit: The El Monte Berry Strike of 1933
74 -
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8. Schools for All: The Desegregation Campaign in El Monte
81 -
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9. “City of Achievement”: The Making of the City of South El Monte, 1955–1976
89 -
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10. ¡La Lucha Continua! Gloria Arellanes and the Women of the Chicano Movement
102 -
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11. Toward a Radical Arts Practice: Theater and Muralism during the Chicano Movement
112 -
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12. American Dreams and Immigrant Realities in a South El Monte Shoe Factory
124 -
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13. Dreams of Escape and Belonging: The Making of Asian El Monte since 1965
135 - Part III. Nature and the Built Environment
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Introductions
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14. Hicks Camp: A Mexican Barrio
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15. Life at Marrano Beach: The Lost Barrio Beach of Los Angeles
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16. From Small Farming to Urban Agriculture: El Monte and Subsistence Homesteading
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17. A Community Erased: Japanese Americans in El Monte and the Greater San Gabriel Valley
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18. Whittier Narrows Park: A Story of Water, Power, and Displacement
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19. Transportational El Monte: From the Red Car to the Freeway
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20. The Starlite Swap Meet
208 - Part IV. Popular Culture
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Introduction
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21. El Monte’s Wild Past: A History of Gay’s Lion Farm
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22. Memories of El Monte: Art Laboe’s Charmed Life on the Air
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23. El Monte’s Wildweed: Biraciality and the Punk Ethos of the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce
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24. Punk and the Seamstress
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25. A Gay Bar, Some Familia, and Latina Butch-Femme: Rounding Out the Eastside Circle at El Monte’s Sugar Shack
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26. All the Zumba Ladies: Reclaiming Bodies and Space through Serious Booty Shaking
261 - Part V. Literary Cartographies
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Introduction
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27. 1181 Durfee Avenue: 1983 to 1986
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28. Train versus Pedestrian on Valley Boulevard
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29. Epiphany Catholic Church
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30. Rush Street
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31. Durfee Avenue
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Epilogue: Suburban Cosmopolitanism in the San Gabriel Valley
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Acknowledgments
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Selected Bibliography
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Notes on Contributors
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Index
329
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
September 7, 2020
eBook ISBN:
9781978805521
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781978805521
Keywords for this book
El Monte; California; traditional historical scholarship; oral history; creative nonfiction; South El Monte; history; eighteenth-century; Spanish colonization; twenty-first century; globalization; historical narratives; white vigilantes; Mexican anarchists; Japanese farmers; labor organizers; civil rights pioneers; punk rockers; civil rights; history of California; United States; San Gabriel Valley; Asian suburbanization; Latino suburbanization; underrepresented communities; culture; ethnicity; public history; Asian-American studies; American studies; Chicano history
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
