Weekend Open Thread: Meet Your Northern Neighbor, the San Gabriel Valley!

When I testified three times in 2011 before the Citizens Redistricting Commission, which did a pretty good job of district-making that year, I made one plea to them three times: respect the Puente Hills as an inviolate border.  I wanted to put more of Orange County with cities like Cerritos, Artesia, Whittier, and Downey, which seemed to have some cultural affinity to where I saw northern and western Orange County heading.

By and large, the CRC’s final maps looked as much like my own as those of anyone else’s, with one exception: they treated the Puente Hills — which you now know as a fine place for a spring earthquake or two … hundred — as if it were flat and easily traversed, like La Palma, Lincoln, Ball, and Katella, and Orangethorpe, scooting westward with changes of name but hardly of character.  I told them that the Puente Hills were as long and hard to traverse as Camp Pendleton; unfortunately for me, they looked at a map and did some measurements.

And so I — as an activist, and a party leader, and then later as a State Senate candidate — have spent a lot of time since then traversing the Puente Hills — where it turns out that, on the other side, you find not only the 60 and the 10 and the 210 and Mt. Baldy, but an entire civilization called “the San Gabriel Valley.”  I had known while growing up in Huntington Beach, where even people from Garden Grove and Tustin were considered “inlanders,” that logically there must be human life north of those hills, but it didn’t really occur to me that the place might have a name.

(All right, I exaggerate there a bit — but not as much as I wish I were.  I was sort of a sheltered kid; up the 405, down the 405, and occasionally up the 5 to downtown.  Are teenagers from Huntington Beach still like that?  Write in and let us know!)

Anyway, it’s called the “San Gabriel Valley” — yes, many of you probably already knew that — and as I have traveled it while campaigning in the three (!) legislative districts that North Orange County shares with it, I have found that — it’s interesting!  And it’s sort of cool.

I know, I know, you don’t believe me.  Well, I can prove it — check out this link!  It’s to a story called “A Brief History (and Geography) of the San Gabriel Valley,“ written by the South El Monte Arts Posse, and it starts out with a quote that ought to pique your attention:

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 streetwear brand “Chimexica Flag T-shirt” description, 2012

That’s interesting not only because … it’s interesting, like the “Cuban-Chinese” restaurants in New York are interesting because new ideas come from such mixes, but because it’s where North Orange County (and more beyond that) is headed.   Consider the race between Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva and Young “The Bigoted Buttkicker” Kim in AD-65, where last year Young notoriously said that she’d win because she had Asian-Americans, “the minority group that is hugely popular” — oh yes she said that! — on her side.  True, Sharon’s not totally Mexican and Kim’s Korean rather than Chinese, but the basic “melding of Latino and Asian cultures” dynamic that we’re seeing in North Orange County has been playing out to our north more extensively and — though it’s not been unknown here — as a more prominent texture in the social fabric.

Let me give you some snips from the article — and then you can go read the whole thing.  We can start with this one …

 Spatially, the SGV has historically been divided by race and class from north to south (though with exceptions such as long established African American communities in East Pasadena, Altadena, and Monrovia). Wealthy, racially exclusive areas like San Marino – the site of railroad scion Henry Huntington’s lush estate – and leisure towns like Pasadena shaped the north, while poorer, browner communities, like El Monte and South El Monte, developed in the south. In the nineteenth century, Huntington Drive constituted the dividing line in the western SGV, north of which people of color could not live, except as servants. In many parts of the SGV, this racialized class divide is still salient into the twenty-first century: for example, in 2010, within the city of San Gabriel, a resident of the northern zipcode was nearly four times more likely to be white, and earned a per capita income nearly two-and-a-half times higher than her southern zipcode counterpart.  Today, residents of San Marino, which is the wealthiest city in the SGV, enjoy a median household income more than three times as much as residents of El Monte, the poorest city; and a per capita income more than five times as much.

Yes, San Gabriel Valley, we Orange Countians know what you’re talking about there!  And let’s just add one more:

In the early twenty-first century, the SGV stands as a significant site for multiracial, regional, and transnational history. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a shift in the regional economy from manufacturing and technology to logistics as well as banking, real estate, insurance, and legal firms. The region’s population increases have raised concerns about housing, resource allocation, economic development, and the environment, leading to the formation of more unified regional governance bodies – particularly economic and environmental. The region’s particular demographic mix has also led to unique, place-based cultural expressions, such as the Monterey Park-based streetwear brand “SGV” – standing for San Gabriel Valley. In mid-2012, SGV 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.  In addition to the Chimexica T-shirt, the SGV brand produced many other designs featuring a mix of Chicano and Asian immigrant references: a Sriracha hot sauce bottle with the letters “SGV” on it; a brand of hair cream favored by cholos; and a T-shirt with curse words in Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. They referenced the lower-middle to middle-class demographics of the area: a T-shirt boasted an ivy pattern that officials had painted on walls as a deterrent to graffiti; a hoodie was embossed on the sleeve with gold stitching proclaiming, “Keepin’ it middle-classy.” The SGV brand, the brainchild of local Paul Chan and the “motley crew” of mostly Asian American and Latino skater friends with whom he had grown up, claimed the SGV as an Asian and Latina/o space and proclaimed it to be “not just an area east of Los Angeles, but a state of mind.”

If you haven’t gone to Rowland Heights, to experience a Chinatown more Chinese than the Los Angeles Chinatown — you’ve been missing out.  (Go protest Ed Royce at his office in Diamond Plaza before having a nice meal there — tell them I sent you!)  Walnut has a strong Filipino community like that of Cerritos, well beyond what OC can muster in Central Anaheim, where you can find many many restaurants redolent of Manila and Cebu.  Diamond Bar has a strong South Asian community; Covina and West Covina have a wonderful cultural mix; and each of these mix with the dominant European culture in ways that might give us some interesting ideas.  It’s the sort of place that you could imagine the Black-Eyed Peas coming from — and, of course, they did.

I couldn’t find the “Chimexican” flag described in the article online, but I did go to the Facebook page of the South El Monte Arts Posse and I found this photo among many other nice ones:

I got a feel from their page that I’ve gotten from watching the now-beleaguered Santa Ana artists.  It’s nice to know that that spirit is still out there.  We need to keep more of it going on here; maybe they can help.  After all, if cross-cultural pollenization is good, there’s got to be something worthwhile in forging bonds across the Puente Hills, right?

This is your Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about that, or anything else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decorum and discretion.