A People's Guide to Orange County - by Elaine Lewinnek & Gustavo Arellano & Thuy Vo Dang (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

One of the Top Urban Planning Books of 2022, Planetizen

The full and fascinating guidebook that Orange County deserves.

A People's Guide to Orange County is an alternative tour guide that documents sites of oppression, resistance, struggle, and transformation in Orange County, California. Orange County is more than the well-known images on orange crate labels, the high-profile amusement parks of Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, or the beaches. It is also a unique site of agricultural and suburban history, political conservatism in a liberal state, and more diversity and discordance than its pop-cultural images show. It is a space of important agricultural labor disputes, segregation and resistance to segregation, privatization and the struggle for public space, politicized religions, Cold War global migrations, vibrant youth cultures, and efforts for environmental justice. Memorably, Ronald Reagan called Orange County the place "where all the good Republicans go to die," but it is also the place where many working-class immigrants have come to live and work in its agricultural, military-industrial, and tourist service economies.

Orange County is the fifth-most populous county in America. If it were a city, it would be the nation's third-largest city; if it were a state, its population would make it larger than twenty-one other states. It attracts 42 million tourists annually. Yet Orange County tends to be a chapter or two squeezed into guidebooks to Los Angeles or Disneyland. Mainstream guidebooks focus on Orange County's amusement parks and wealthy coastal communities, with side trips to palatial shopping malls. These guides skip over Orange County's most heterogeneous half--the inland space, where most of its oranges were grown alongside oil derricks that kept the orange groves heated. Existing guidebooks render invisible the diverse people who have labored there. A People's Guide to Orange County questions who gets to claim Orange County's image, exposing the extraordinary stories embedded in the ordinary landscape.

From the Back Cover

"This is a remarkable book. It not only tells one of the richest, most inclusive histories of Orange County out there, but it pulls you along for the ride, taking you to the places and hearing the voices of the people long ignored who made that history."--Becky Nicolaides, author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965

"Dismiss clichés of what's behind the Orange Curtain. This People's Guide layers Orange County's troubled history onto today's uneasy present to reveal, in dozens of smart vignettes, the character of a place and its people. Intensely local yet expansive in their critical insight, the authors rouse true stories of desire and loss, of conflict and resistance, from Orange County's suburban dreamscape."--D. J. Waldie, author of Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place

"This book showed me that history is not just in my textbooks. It's in my backyard."--Joyce Jogwe, eleventh grade student and Santa Ana resident

"This engaging guide to Orange County offers a critical counterpoint to the 'happiest place on earth.' It pulls back the stucco curtain to highlight diverse histories of struggle, resistance, and place-making. A fascinating read that will be an important resource for teachers, scholars, and lovers of history."--Genevieve Carpio, author of Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race

"For many, Orange County is synonymous with a host of fictional and real characters ranging from Mickey Mouse to Richard Nixon. By centering overlooked and marginalized communities, places, and people, this book challenges us to see Orange County anew. Required reading for students interested in the past and future of Southern California."--Romeo Guzmán, coeditor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte

Review Quotes

"In the public imagination Orange County either has no history at all, or it consists of tract homes, Disneyland, and Republicans. All of those things are true. But, A People's Guide masterfully, and accessibly, demonstrates that Orange County's history runs far deeper--and that it matters."-- "Planetizen"

"Their project applies political acumen to a practical regional guidebook featuring wayback machine-style micro-histories that reveal the county's depth and breadth. . . . Meticulously, almost giddily cross-referenced, A People's Guide to Orange County offers sources for every one of its 122 listings: scholars, journalists, poets, and activists. Entries include photographs, maps, archival materials, song lyrics, and protest chants. The idea is to uncover, piece by piece and location by location, the story of--forgive me--the real OC."

-- "Alta Journal"

About the Author

Elaine Lewinnek is professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and author of The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, former editor of OC Weekly, and author of the books Orange County: A Personal History, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and ¡Ask A Mexican!

Thuy Vo Dang is curator for the Southeast Asian Archive at University of California, Irvine, and coauthor of Vietnamese in Orange County.