Novelist Alex Espinoza examines ways in which memory and place are tied to specific geographic sites of knowledge throughout his life as a Californian. His journey from the factory-lined streets and avenues of the San Gabriel Valley and the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area to the fields and farms of the Central Valley provide the author a change to examine what is lost and gained when patters of migration and movement give rise to new opportunities that both challenge and affirm our vast and complex identities as Californians

While Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley is best known for being the “first suburban Chinatown,” it is actually a lively, multiethnic, and multiracial community with a complex past, and an emerging arts scene that celebrates that complexity. Today, the “SGV” constitutes the largest, majority-Asian American and Latino community in the United States. Its social and cultural mix make it a vibrant example of suburban cosmopolitanism, in which diverse residents live in relative harmony, with mutual respect for difference. Local groups such as the South El Monte Arts Posse have begun to make work that reflects this ethos, and could reshape normative ideas of what it means to be American.