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ntroduction Driving westbound along Interstate 10 from Pomona to Los Angeles in Southern California, one cuts through the heart of what once was the richest agricultural land in the United States. On the south side of the freeway lie the grounds formerly occupied by walnut and deciduous fruit orchards and berry farms; to the north lie the interclimatic foothill ‘‘benches’’ and ‘‘fans’’ upon which growers once raised the most productive citrus groves in the nation. Today, however , the landscape is characterized by a seemingly endless string of suburban bedroom communities that become more densely populated and ‘‘urban’’ with each successive mile as one approaches downtown Los Angeles. Growing up in this area during the 1970s and 1980s, I watched the final stages of this transformation as strip malls replaced packinghouses and bulldozers uprooted citrus trees to make way for single-family homes. In 1976, my family moved into a new residential community in Upland where my friends and I played hide-andgo -seek among the wood frames and fiberglass of soon-to-be-built tract houses and staged lemon fights in the few groves that remained. For most residents, the receding line of citrus on the foothills represented progress and the promise of achieving the American dream of owning a home. By the early 1980s, most of the physical markers of the citrus industry had been wiped clean from the land. As a child born of mixed heritage—my mother is Anglo and my father Mexican —I saw these changes from a slightly different perspective than most kids due to my unique relationship with the social and cultural geography that accompanied the development of citrus suburbs. Although both sides of my family have resided in Southern California for three generations and participated at various levels in the citrus economy, their experiences were neither similar nor equivalent in outcome. While my maternal grandfather worked as a data analysis supervisor for Sunkist in Ontario, providing my mother and her family with a middle-class standard of living, my father’s family had a dramatically different experience. Born in a semi-rural colonia (colony) composed primarily of Mexican agricultural laborers, my father grew up in an unincorporated neighborhood that the local Spanish/English bilingual newspaper El Espectador referred to as ‘‘Tierra de Nadie’’ (‘‘land of no one’’).1 This title de- 2 • INTRODUCTION scribed the political situation of the community—the colonia resided at the crossroads of three cities (Claremont, Upland, and Montclair), and two counties (Los Angeles and San Bernardino)—but also captured the discrimination of white city and county officials who refused to provide the most basic city services such as sewer lines, garbage collection, postal delivery, paved roads, street lights, and police and fire protection. Indicative of the prejudice that characterized white attitudes toward Mexicans during the heyday of citrus, this segregation continued throughout my young life and provided evidence of the deep racial and class divisions that agricultural production engendered in the citrus belt prior to the 1970s. As I grew older, understanding the origins and legacies of these divisions became my passion. In the face of industrial and residential development that erased the physical reminders of this world, I sought to uncover the persistent social and cultural fissures still present within this society. In this book I attempt to merge an analysis of community formation with the study of Chicano cultural development by focusing on the cultural history of the segregated citrus-growing area of the San Gabriel Valley from 1900 to 1970. Considered by many to be the key to Los Angeles’s economic ascendancy prior to World War II, today these agricultural ‘‘belts’’ exist as understudied but integrated components in the region’s historiography. Most historians focusing on Southern California emphasize the leadership of downtown magnets such as Harrison Grey Otis and the influence of the powerful Merchants and Manufacturers Association, but neglect the ways in which the expansion of citrus production during the 1920s created extraordinary wealth for predominantly white investors from the Midwest and East.2 Their profits led to the growth of towns such as Pasadena, Glendora, Claremont, Ontario, and Riverside, and contributed to the establishment of a ‘‘polynuclear’’ suburban landscape that became the hallmark of Greater Los Angeles.3 Promoted by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce as ‘‘the perishable fruit and vegetable garden of the United States,’’ the agricultural ‘‘back country’’ of Los Angeles constituted an integral part of the metropolitan economy.4 The entire San...

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