El Monte became an established community late in the 1850s-much earlier than most cities in what later became Los Angeles County-as the western terminus of the Santa Fe Trail. Its situation between the watersheds of the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel River made it one of early California's most fertile farming areas, with English walnut trees and dairy farms dotting the countryside. The city incorporated in 1912 and, in the ensuing decades, became the home of Gay's Lion Farm, where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer kept the various big cats that roared on a logo announcing 1,001 movies. Crawford's store became known as the "largest country store in the world," and the car culture that enveloped Southern California in the postwar years went through significant developmental chapters in El Monte, home of such regionally famous stops as El Monte Drive-In Theatre, Legion Stadium, and the circular, iconic Stan's Drive-In diner.

"El Monte, CA It's Where My Story Began This funny, cute and adorable city of El Monte, CA journal notebook for people born in and from El Monte can be used as a daily journal, a school notebook, a place to write your favorite thoughts and sketches! This 6"" x 9"" El Monte, CA hometown journal and notebook journal is lined with journal paper with date line and features 132 pages! Features a soft cover and is bound so pages don't fall out, while it can lay flat for any writing that need more space. Great to take with you to class, school, office, coffee shop or leave on your bed stand! May Your Days be Bright and Inspiring!"

"At first encounter, Orange County can resemble the incoherent sprawl that geographer James Howard Kunstler named The Geography of Nowhere: a car-dependent, seemingly bland space designed most of all for efficient capitalist consumption. But it is somewhere, too, and learning its stories helps it become more than its boosters' slogans. Writers Lisa Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich, residents of Orange County's remote Modjeska Canyon, describe this whole county as "a much-constructed and -contrived locale, a pestered and paved landscape built and borne upon stories of human development... of destruction as well as, happily, of enduring wild places." In a similar vein, essayist D. J. Waldie, chronicler of the bordering suburb of Lakewood, asserts that "becoming Californian ... means locating yourself" in "habitats of memory" that connect ordinary, local areas with broader themes. Moving beyond sentimentality, nostalgia, and so many sales pitches that omit far too much, Waldie echoes Michel de Certeau's call to "awaken the stories that sleep in the streets." That is the goal of this book. Inspired by Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng's A People's Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012), as well as the People's Guides to Boston and San Francisco that have followed it, we offer this guidebook for locals, tourists, students, and everyone who wants to understand where they really are. This book is organized with regional chapters, sorted roughly north to south by community. Within each city, sites are listed alphabetically. After the group of entries for each city, we recommend nearby restaurants as well as other sites of interest for visitors. Readers may explore this book geographically or use the thematic tours in the appendix to consider environmental politics, Cold War legacies, the politics of housing, LGBTQ spaces, or Orange County's carceral state. The appendix also contains suggestions for teachers using this book, engaging students in cognitive mapping, close reading, popular-culture analysis, and creating additional entries of people's history. While many local histories tend to focus on a few white settlers, this book places attention on the people, especially the subaltern ones who are hierarchically under others, including workers, people of color, youth, and LGBTQ individuals. No single book can represent an entire county, so we have chosen to concentrate on the lesser-known power struggles that have happened here and influenced the landscape that we all share. We could not include everyone, of course. We are mindful that other groups are currently creating more people's history on this landscape that we hope our readers will continue to explore. In Orange County, excavating the diverse past can be frowned upon or actively repressed by those invested in selling Orange County in the style of its booster Anglo settlers from 150 years ago. This book tells the diverse political history beyond the bucolic imagery of orange-crate labels. We hope it will inspire readers to further explore Orange County and reflect on even more sites that could be included in the ordinary, extraordinary landscape here"--

Index to a biographical file housed at the El Monte Historical Society Museum. The file contains biographical information about persons living in El Monte between 1851 and approximately 1920.