Description
Book SynopsisEast 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.
Trade Review"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 *
"
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 *
"Welcoming Boom’s New Editorial Team" mention of
East of East https://boomcalifornia.com/2019/08/07/welcoming-booms-new-editorial-team/ * Boom California *
"Who owns history? New book reconsiders San Gabriel Valley’s pioneer past,"
Greater LA hosted by Steve Chiotakis
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/lausd-police-el-monte/sgv-el-monte-history-book * "Greater LA," KCRW *
“
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 *
"San Gabriel Mission fire provokes deep, conflicting reactions," by Gustavo Arellano
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-13/san-gabriel-mission-fire-morning-mass
* Los Angeles Times *
"For 100 Years, El Monte Has Celebrated a Blatant Historical Falsehood. Why? A Southern California City Has a Rich, Multi-Ethnic Past That Its Foundational Myth Erases," by Romeo Guzmán
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/08/19/el-monte-end-of-the-santa-fe-trail-true-history/ideas/essay/ * Zócalo Public Square *
"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 *
"How Authors Are Reaching Book Lovers in the Age of COVID-19," by Teena Apeles
https://www.kcet.org/shows/southland-sessions/how-authors-are-reaching-book-lovers-in-the-age-of-covid-19 * KCET.org *
"Your history-buff friends all want this magical book for Christmas." * The Press-Enterprise *
"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 *
"Combining creative nonfiction, oral history, and traditional scholarship, the various writings here reclaim the histories and geographies of the urban fringe these writers call 'east of east.' What makes this area so significant is that it’s been a point of 'contact between farmworkers, punks, white supremacists, suburbanites, Zumba dancers, and civil rights activists.'” * L.A. Taco *
"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 *
"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 *
"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 *
"A tale of two cities: El Monte’s battle to preserve its Latinx history," by Erik Adams * University Times *
"Ethnic Studies Comes Into The Classroom And Onto The Streets," by Julia Barajas * LAist *
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Burn the Wagon: Finding Silenced Histories, Lost Intersections, and Radical Possibilities in Greater El Monte
Romeo Guzmán, Carribean Fragoza, Alex Sayf Cummings, and Ryan Reft
Part I Origins and Departures
1 The Tongva People
Aurelie Roy
2 Toypurina: A Legend Etched in the Landscape
Maria John
3 From Alta California to American Statehood: Race, Change, and the Californio Pico Family
Ryan Reft
4 Here Come the El Monte Boys: Vigilante Justice and Lynch Mobs in Nineteenth Century El Monte
Karen Wilson and Dan Lynch
Part II Social and Political Movements
5 Rise, Fall, Repeat: El Monte’s White Supremacy Movements
Daniel Cady
6 Ricardo Flores Magón and Anarchist Movement in El Monte
Yesenia Barragan and Mark Bray
7 Bitter Fruit: The El Monte Berry Strike of 1933
Melquiades Fernandez
8 Schools for All: The Desegregation Campaign in El Monte
Rachel Newman
9 City of Achievement: The Making of the City of South El Monte, 1955-1976
Nick Juravich
10 La Lucha Continua! Gloria Arellanes and the Women of the Chicano Movement
Juan Herrera
11 Toward a Radical Arts Practice: Theater and Muralism during the Chicano Movement
Carribean Fragoza
12 American Dreams and Immigrant Realities in a South El Monte Shoe Factory
Adam Goodman
13 Dreams of Escape and Belonging: The Making of Asian El Monte
Alex Sayf Cummings
Part IIINature and the Built Environment
14 Hicks Camp: A Mexican Barrio
Daniel Morales
15 Life at Marrano Beach: The Lost Barrio Beach of Los Angeles
Daniel Medina
16 From Small Farming to Urban Agriculture: El Monte Subsistence Homesteading
Ryan Reft
17 A Community Erased: Japanese Americans in El Monte and the Greater SGV
Andre Kobayashi Deckrow
18 Whittier Narrows Park: A Story of Water, Power, and Displacement
David Reid
19 Transportational El Monte, From the Red Car to the Freeway
Ryan Reft
20 The Starlite Swap Meet
Jennifer Renteria
Part IVPopular Culture
21 El Monte’s Wild Past: A History of Gay’s Lion Farm
Michael Weller
22 Memories of El Monte: Art Laboe’s Charmed Life on the Air
Jude Webre
23 El Monte’s Wildweed: Biraciality and the Punk Ethos of The Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce
Troy Andreas Araiza Kokinis
24 The Punk and the Seamstress
Apolonio Morales
25 A Gay Bar, Some Familia, and Latina Butch-Femme: Rounding out the Eastside Circle at El Monte’s Sugar Shack
Stacy I. Macías
26 All the Zumba Ladies: Reclaiming Bodies and Space through Serious Booty-Shaking
Carribean Fragoza
Part V Literary Cartographies
27 1181 Durfee Avenue: 1983 to 1986
Michael Jaime-Becerra
28 Train versus Pedestrian on Valley Boulevard
Alex Espinoza
29 Epiphany Catholic Church
Toni Margarita Plummer
30 Rush Street
Carribean Fragoza
31 Durfee Avenue
Salvador Plascencia
Epilogue: East of East: Suburban Cosmopolitanism in the San Gabriel Valley
Wendy Cheng
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
