Be There Or Be Footnoted. Comida Chicana

Review: East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. isbn: 9781978805484 

Michael Sedano

I wanted to take a test, get an MA, and go get a job for the rest of my life. “Don’t get the terminal degree, you can’t do anything with a terminal degree.” And just like that, the first minute of my post-Baccalaureate schooling, and I’m mired in upper degree prejudice, a version--without the ugliness—of what the Wall Street Journal spit upon Dr. Jill Biden. 

Dr. Biden’s supporters pounded the caviling critic into a quivering pile of misogynistic shame. For raza scholars, some of what hit Dr. Biden stuck in ways unique to gente making a cultura’s initial forays into academia.

I’m sure Dr. Biden easily shakes off that op-ed columnist’s effort to impugn her degree. For one thing, Dr. Biden’s surrounded by women with doctorates and is friends with families who’ve held higher degrees for generations. Dr. Biden would feel entitled to her title, she’d feel like she belongs. 

Attacks like those upon Dr. Biden would devastate many a raza scholar, particularly when they’re the only, or first, Chicanx in a professional setting. It shouldn’t be like this, but many a scholar’s nightmares start with “You’re not a real…you don’t belong.” When you’re not surrounded by raza, feelings of illegitimacy can compel fear. 

I hope that experience retreats into the catalog of ancient fears. It should, with raza scholarship moving Chicanx Studies into maturity. A fine example of maturing scholarship is the four-editor compilation, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte. With diverse subject matter and approach, offering heavily footnoted scholarship as well as popular reporting, from a line-up of writers representing a cross-section of academic specialties, several with Doctorates (other authors don’t tell), as well as artists, East of East is one of those hybrid books that can as readily be assigned in a college course as be a gift for friends who enjoy good non-fiction. Scholarship needs to serve a wide audience.

Published by New Jersey’s Rutgers University, East of East is one title in the press’ 29-volume series, Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States, whose website says, “the series is committed to publishing scholarship in history, film and media, literary and cultural studies, public policy, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired by interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories developed out of the study of transborder lives, cultures, and experiences, titles enrich our understanding of transnational dynamics.”

This Saturday night at El Monte Legion Stadium! Little Shirley Ellis…Be there or be square! No Levi’s or Capris, Please. 

For legions of Southern California music followers, El Monte Legion Stadium was the Hollywood Bowl of contemporary (now “oldies”) concerts. So much fun to be had if you met the dress code, none of it to be located within the sober mien of scholar Jude P. Webre, evocatively titled essay, “Memories Of El Monte Art Laboe’s Charmed Life On The Air.” Not that Dr. Webre wouldn’t know a good time when he sees one, he’s a musician who writes darned interesting stuff, doing serious historiography here. I didn't know that. The Editors supply bios of each of the book's 31 authors.

East of East fits this diverse table of contents perfectly. The words are poetry, at the same time, east of east makes pointed reference to “east LA” or Mexicans, and where Asian people come from, that East. East of East invites readers to remember “A Community Erased. Japanese Americans in El Monte and the Greater San Gabriel Valley.” That historical perspective of extinction gets balanced out in East of East’s final essay, Wendy Cheng’s “Epilog: Suburban Cosmopolitanism in The San Gabriel Valley.

Before there was a San Gabriel Valley there was just the land. Indian People lived there, Tongva People. Aurelie Roy and Maria John open East of East with two essays on the gente—Roy—and one woman leader, “Toypurina: A Legend Etched in the Landscape.”

I have a personal interest in page 64 of East of East. A few weeks after I returned from overseas, I read there were Nazis living openly in El Monte, brazenly displaying their semiotics of hatred. I took the photograph editors Romeo Guzmán and Carribean Fragoza, along with Alex Saye Cummings and Ryan Reft are using to illustrate Dan Cady’s essay, “Rise, Fall, Repeat: El Monte’s White Supremacy Movements.“

Scholars and regular people will find something to enjoy in East of East. Tourists and Locals alike will have a refreshingly informed understanding next time they go cruising through the streets of Aztlán and find themselves on Durfee in El Monte, remembering novelist Salvador Plascencia’s description of Durfee Avenue.

The Avenue, named after a walnut tycoon who lost his fortune to a tree fungus, surrenders its clots of traffic and name to a winding thoroughfare. At its northern end, neighborhood lanes and courts chop Durfee Avenue into sleepy cul-de-sacs. For shady stretches, dangling oaks and the sickly progeny of orchards dangle over lawn chairs and barbecues. The rows and rows of almond and walnut trees that once canopied the land have been pruned, felled, and burned into housing tracts.

East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte arrives just in time for holiday gift-giving, or the new semester. I’m excited about the opportunity the book provides a kid wondering what to major in by seeing the diverse approaches. Scholarship about our places and gente has grown richly mature. A person can study history, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, and learn stuff like music, people, the swap meet, write novels and short stories, and do it seriously and interestingly and fun. 

What a great gift, or textbook. East of East is scholarship done right. Órale to the publishers and especially lead editors Romeo Guzmán and Carribean Fragoza.

  The Gluten-free Chicano Cooks
Chile-Potato-Helote Bisque
Michael Sedano

*Continuing our look back at sixteen, here's a reprise of La Bloga-Tuesday's September 15, 2015 Gluten-free feature.

Freshly roasted and peeled Hatch NM chiles pack gallon-size ziplock bags in the Gluten-free Chicano's freezer. The provender will provide a year's worth of tamales, enchiladas, omelettes, quiche, guisados, rellenos, relleno casserole, all the infinite varieties of ways to use roasted green chile. Extra nice, this year's crop came with thick walls and peeled easily.

Aside from eating a raja just by itself fresh out of the costal, the first dish he prepares after the annual Lascano Pelada is chile soup.

It's a process, not a recipe, and incredibly easy: Purée, thin, heat, serve.

This is the essential flavor of green chile. In a blender whiz de-stemmed chiles for a minute or more, adding water, broth, or milk to aid the purée blade. This produces a heavy paste.

Transfer to a saucepan, add milk or broth until the liquid is silky and it's steaming. Serve.

This year The Gluten-free Chicano got fancy and used that green ambrosia as a base in chile-potato-helote bisque. Served hot, fabulous. Served cold, it's chicano vichyssoise.

Ingredients
1 roasted helote
1 baking potato
10 or more peeled roasted chiles
milk and water in equal measure

Peel and cube the papa into 1/2" or smaller pieces.
Cut kernels off the helote.
Cut the stems off the chiles, pull away loose seeds.

In a splash of olive oil and butter, lightly brown the cubed potato.

When fork-tender, add milk and water/broth just to cover the papa. Cover, let simmer.

Use a blender to whiz the chiles into a thick paste.

Add the chile to the simmering potatoes and stir vigorously to blend completely.

Add the corn.

Raise temperature and bring to a near boil. 

Turn off heat, cover, and prepare the bowls or make toasted cheese sandwiches with good gluten-free bread. I used Essential Baking multi-grain; its sweetness went well with the picante of the soup.

I added crab meat to this serving, a fancy and ultimately vainglorious variation. 

The rich flavors of roasted chile and corn, the satisfying picoso of the green chile, the body of the crumbly papa, are more than satisfying without additions. Maybe add a crumble of queso fresco as a garnish, or strips of toasted tortilla de maíz.

The next day, The Gluten-free Chicano made a guisado, browning cubed pork then simmering it in the leftover soup.