Multiculturalism Aborning: The View from the San Gabriel Valley

Matt García. 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. xvii + 330 pp. Figures, maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); 19.95 (paper).

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to visit a pizza parlor in the eastern suburb of Monterey Park that my parents used to take me to as a kid. I hadn't been to the place in years, and when I sat down, I had to smile at the memories it brought back. The place was still dark and dingy but smelled great, the tables and chairs were the same heavy, dark, beat-up wood, and the restaurant still had the knee-high step-stools set up at a picture window facing the kitchen so children could watch the pizzas being made. As I waited for my pizza, though, I became increasingly aware of the many things that hadchanged over the years. The most apparent was the site of the restaurant itself. Whereas the restaurant in my youth was set off by itself at the foot of an empty hillside that was covered with wild mustard in the spring, now, some forty years later, the place stood in the center of a garishly-lit strip mall of small businesses that was itself part of a small constellation of similarly illuminated store-front clusters, that, based on the signs, were now serving a largely Korean and Chinese clientele. I was aware of how much Monterey Park and environs had become Asian and Asian-American enclaves since the 1970s, but what was more interesting to me that evening was how much the restaurant's customers had changed since I had last visited the area. Four decades ago, the restaurant was filled mainly by young, white, working-class and lower-middle-class families who probably came from the immediate Monterey Park neighborhood or from the similar, adjacent San Gabriel Valley bedroom community of Alhambra. On this night, though, the pizza joint was hopping with a cross-section of what Los Angeles' bustling eastern suburbs had long since become. As I sipped a beer and took in the scene, I realized I was having a typical (maybe even stereotypical) southern California postmodern moment. Young Chicanos garbed in urban hip-hop and silver and black Oakland Raiders regalia stood waiting their turn at the salad bar; student athletes in lettermen's jackets from nearby Garfield High School and East L.A. Community College laughed loudly in the back room; a table of ten or twelve Asians held an impromptu birthday party in a corner; and nearest me, a very young Latino couple with a toddler sat quietly eating pizza and sipping soft drinks, seemingly transfixed by the muted Los Angeles Kings hockey game that flickered in front of them on the big screen television.

I begin with this vignette not so much to wax nostalgic about that December evening, but because the social and cultural themes explored in Matt García's fine first book brought back vivid memories of that experience. Indeed, in some ways, the best parts of García's insightful social history of the Mexican barrios in El Monte, Pomona, Ontario, Claremont, and the other "citrus communities" located in the central and eastern sections of the San Gabriel Valley focus precisely on such prosaic social interactions. While on one level A World of Its Own is a chronological recounting of the evolution of the Valley's ethnic Mexican enclaves over the course of the twentieth century, on another, deeper level, García's analysis is a meditation on the ways southern California became a multicultural society, and how that society worked (or did not work) on a daily basis. Indeed, García's work is an excellent example of an important more...