Memories of El Monte in the groundbreaking history ‘East of East’

Why wasn’t there a deep-diving cultural, economic and political history of the city at the heart of the San Gabriel Valley before the just-published “East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte”?

Perhaps the need for such a volume is only apparent when it finally is in hand. Like a work of art, which this book is, if partly in a scholarly way, rather than the mostly rah-rah photo-heavy annals of local worthies many of the cities in the SGV and Whittier areas are treated to by volunteer historical societies.

Not that there’s anything wrong with those, as such. The olde tymes in many local burgs have been covered by sepia-toned volumes filled with well-reproduced pictures marketed by Arcadia Publishing, the nationally prominent history company that ironically has nothing to do with our Arcadia but is HQed out of South Carolina. But those aren’t real books that deal with serious and complex issues.

They’re fun to flip through, but don’t go into any more depth than the randomness that is “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” being set in San Dimas or “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” in West Covina. They don’t go anywhere but the surface of those towns.

Whereas “East of East,” yowza, the things that you will learn! Or be reminded of from long ago.

As in, to start with the worst first, I had almost entirely forgotten that the freak-show racist Ralph Forbes adorned his El Monte house at 4375 Peck Road with swastikas and “White Power” signs in the mid-1960s as he led a West Coast branch of George Lincoln Rockwell’s Virginia-based American Nazi Party.

And that, in what seem terrifically and indeed terrifyingly odd ways to us today, since our El Monte is an essentially entirely Latino city, the Nazism wasn’t that out of place there during the 20th century. The Ku Klux Klan were a huge presence in the city as late as the 1920s, and this book reports that Klan rallies were then held in the open in El Monte on a monthly basis.

Tensions between the old, White, working-class El Monte and the new, Latino, working-class El Monte — and setting histories straight — are the thread running through each of the 32 essays that make up “East of East.” It’s not one narrative, but rather dozens of takes on common themes, as edited by Romeo Guzman, a professor of history at Cal State Fresno; Carribean Fragoza, a journalist, fiction writer and founder of the South El Monte Arts Posse; Alex Sayf Cummings, a Georgia State history professor, and Ryan Reft, a historian at the Library of Congress.

Not just differences in the stories that might be told and the memories held by variously White and Latino residents. But the ancientness of that dichotomy. Because, as the book describes in great and fascinating detail, of course at first what we call El Monte was the home of the Native Tongva people. And then of the Spanish conquistadores and missionaries. And then of the mestizo culture called Californio. And then, finally, or perhaps penultimately, of the Whites who came in a wagon train.

And even that bit of El Monte history is exposed here as somewhat of a tall tale. You know how the city’s motto is “The End of the Santa Fe Trail” and how the city seal shows the homesteaders arriving to a verdant valley beneath puffy white clouds in America’s pioneer days?

But as the book’s introduction says, while the state’s Historical Resource Commission did conclude that “El Monte was the first place in Southern California to be settled by Americans rather than by Mexicans or Spaniards,” the city marked “the end of some trail, but not the Santa Fe Trail,” as the Los Angeles Times reported when the commission released its report in 1987.

It’s too good a fiction not to live by, of course, and the city has never dropped its claim to be the terminus of the enormously romantic-sounding Santa Fe Trail.

There’s so much more here, and if mere historical disputes are simply broccoli to you, you will love the chapter “Memories of El Monte,” about the huge musical influence the city was in the ‘50s and ‘60s through the dance concerts influential DJ Art Laboe threw at the Legion Stadium and the song of the same name penned — I had forgotten! — in 1962 by, of all people, Frank Zappa.

Your history-buff friends all want this magical book for Christmas, if there is one.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.