East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte

East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars. 
 
 

ROMEO GUZMÁN is the co-director of the South El Monte Arts Posse and an assistant professor in US and Public History at Fresno State, where he is the founding director of the Valley Public History Initiative: Preserving our Stories.

CARRIBEAN FRAGOZA is a journalist, fiction writer, and artist from South El Monte. She is the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Arts Posse.

ALEX SAYF CUMMINGS is an associate professor of History at Georgia State University and the author of Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century.

RYAN REFT is a historian of the Modern United States in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.