Inviting to later agricultural migrants
A visit to El Monte, California, reveals many official signs and markers that harken back to the town's pioneer past. The local history museum is designed to look like an American West frontier town, complete with wagon wheels and mannequins outfitted in long skirts and bonnets. With its fertile location between the San Gabriel River and Rio Hondo, El Monte is often presented as a dream destination for westbound wagon trains, not to mention the indigenous populations and the Spanish before them. Not surprisingly, as had happened throughout the West Coast, the verdant farmland that made the San Gabriel Valley attractive to white settlers in the late-1800s would prove inviting to later agricultural migrants, specifically Japanese and Mexicans, a few decades later.
Being Japanese American in El Monte
Japanese immigrants began arriving in the San Gabriel Valley in the early 1900s. By 1913, enough Japanese had settled in the region to warrant the establishment of the Japanese Farmer's Association of the San Gabriel Valley. 1 That year, the Association hosted a celebration in El Monte to welcome a visiting delegation of the Japanese Navy to Southern California. Just over twenty years later, a 1936 Japanese American Citizens League census found some five hundred first-generation and one thousand second-generation Japanese Americans, also known as Nikkei, living in the San Gabriel Valley.
In El Monte specifically, the vast majority of Japanese lived outside of the main areas of town. They settled on large farms, where they grew produce and flowers to sell at local farm stands or the larger farmers markets in Southern California. Such business relations meant that the Japanese of El Monte interacted on a daily basis with not only local white residents on whom they relied as customers, but also other Japanese from throughout the region. 3 These daily economic interactions at Los Angeles-area produce markets only further engrained a sense of ethnic solidarity across Southern California's Nikkei that local organizations, such as the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles and the Japanese America Society, worked tirelessly to cultivate. Until World War II, Japanese Americans from the San Gabriel Valley routinely participated in Japanese language speech contests and other community celebrations, many of which were held in L.A.'s Little Tokyo.