Beach Mexican: Assimilation & Identity in Redondo Beach

Alex Moreno Areyan's odyssey of growing up Latino in white upper-middle-class Redondo Beach in the 1950s presents a story of assimilation different from that experienced by Mexican Americans in larger barrios. His annual white lie to classmates was that his father got a job up north and the family was moving. They moved, all right—in a 1941 Plymouth with the harvest. In Marysville, Meridian and Mendota, they lived in tents and cars, under trucks and in corrugated tin hovels while picking co...