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· 1 ·· INTRODUCTION · Theorizing Regional Racial Formation Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. “I feel good here”: the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice. —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life The SGV is a region of America where a lot of Chinese and Mexicans have learned to live together, most of the time in harmony. —SGV brand “Chimexica Flag T-shirt” description Laura Aguilar, a forty-seven-year-old1 Chicana artist living in Los Angeles’s West San Gabriel Valley (SGV), can trace her family back five generations in the area, since before the U.S. conquest of Alta California . In 2007, when I interviewed her for the research that would eventually become this book, she recounted family stories of bandit-hidden treasure , recalled memories of her grandfather working as a caretaker for Texaco among oil wells in the hills, and described patches of land along the Rio Hondo that used to be all strawberry fields. She fondly recalled picnicking with her mother and siblings at the San Gabriel Mission as a child and described the cemetery there as “comforting,” since her greatgrandmother and great-great-grandmother were buried there and it reminded her of her family’s long history in the area.2 Attending junior high in the early 1970s, Aguilar met and befriended Lisa Beppu, a thirdgeneration Japanese American whose family had taken advantage of the lack of racial restrictions in unincorporated South San Gabriel to buy a house there in the 1960s. As adults, both women lived not far from where they had grown up and maintained a close friendship. 2 INTRODUCTION In nearby Monterey Park in the 1970s, young Japanese Americans Karen and Ed Toguchi were persuaded by a Japanese American realtor to purchase a home, following in the footsteps of earlier Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Mexican Americans who had heard that Monterey Park— unlikethevastmajorityofsuburbsduringthattime—wasopentononwhite homebuyers. In the same neighborhood, multiple generations of Bill Gin’s Chinese American family purchased homes within a mile of one another, as longtime white residents moved out in droves around them. A stone’s throw away in South San Gabriel, in the late 1980s, teenager Anita Martinez, a fourth-generation Mexican American whose parents had been activists in the Chicano movement, was best friends with Tina, whose Vietnamese parents had fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. The two girls were so close they shared clothes, fought over a boy, and even occasionally experimented with passing as each other’s ethnic backgrounds—Anita as Vietnamese and her friend Tina as Mexican. Around the same time, a young, Monterey Parkraised , Chinese Mexican American man named Russell Lee-Sung started a teaching career that would eventually lead him to become principal of nearby Alhambra High School, which by 2000 would be made up of over 90 percent Asian and Latina/o students. By the mid-2000s, the particular ethnic and racial mix of the West SGV had given rise to polyglot cultural representations such as the “SGV” street wear brand, the brainchild of West SGV locals Paul Chan, the son of well-heeled professionals originally from Hong Kong, and Eladio Wu, a self-described “Asian paisa” (a Spanish term referring to a fellow countryman), whose ethnically Chinese family hailed from Costa Rica and Mexico. The SGV brand featured slogans such as “SGV; not just an area east of Los Angeles, but a state of mind” and designs featured a mix of Chicano and Asian immigrant references.3 In mid-2012, the SGV brand released a “Chimexica Flag” T-shirt design, featuring an altered American flag with the Mexican flag’s eagle and People’s Republic of China’s arc of four stars in place of the usual rectangle of stars representing the fifty states.4 Paul Chan, who designed the shirts and managed the website, thought the SGV area had finally come into its own. Living there “used to be something to be ashamed of,” he said, but now he and the rest of the SGV “crew” were proud to claim it.5 The SGVers’ public claim to a prevalent Latina/o and Asian world, whether or not it was widely shared, was certainly of a specific historical moment in which...

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