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A People's Guide Series
A People's Guide to Orange County
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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryTravel
457 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 25, 2022
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66 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 13, 2024
In Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Perspectives, Rose-Redwood et al. argue that decolonizing the map needs to move beyond "anti-colonial map" -- characterized by its resistance to colonialism -- and towards a "decolonial spatial practice" that is an "affirmative refusal of white supremacy, anti-blackness, the settler colonial state, and a racialised political economy of containment, displacement and violence" (154). They try to move beyond the colonial-anti-colonial bifurcation and towards a decolonial mapping project which (re)affirms Indigenous ontologies and world-making practices of space. Here, anti-colonial "counter mapping" is seen as an insufficient (often accidentally legitimizing the colonial state), if necessary first step towards decolonial practice.
This new bifurcation between anti-colonial and decolonial is somewhat confusing to me; it seems, at least as we experienced in the past few weeks, that a decolonial practice can only be nurtured iteratively through anti-colonial militancy and struggle. The encampment as a decolonized space was constantly forced by UCLA, LAPD, LASD, CHP, and other white supremacist groups into an explicitly anti-colonial struggle. While Rose-Redwood et al. recognize that anti-colonialism usually proceeds decolonialism, I would argue that the two are intricately linked/dependent and severing them into two distinct categories potentially depoliticizes decolonialization by removing the necessity of struggle. In this way, I also pause at their assumption that anticolonial practice perhaps innately "re-centers the colonial" (152).
The People's Guide to Orange County is decolonial AND anticolonial in both the form it adopts and the places/stories it describes and pays homage too. The Guide reads almost explicitly history of struggle: of lynchings, union activism, police violence, gay conversion camps and environmental disasters. Even moments of pure expression and liberation (for instance) are framed in reference to the anticommunist frontier fantasies of Walter Knott.
The historical markers Lewinnek et al point to (besides, interestingly, the public spaces like University High or CSU Fullerton) have disappeared into a depressing mush of capitalist development i.e. the gated community, theme park, industrial park, freeway, or big box store. Strawberry fields turn into parking lots, kitschy Japanese-themed "Deer Parks" into freeway onramps, and murals into blank walls. Almost every section ends with a quick sentence about how what we're reading about is long gone. I got this overwhelming feeling that the Guide, more than anything, was a littered graveyard of spatial idiosyncrasies that were paved over.
This new bifurcation between anti-colonial and decolonial is somewhat confusing to me; it seems, at least as we experienced in the past few weeks, that a decolonial practice can only be nurtured iteratively through anti-colonial militancy and struggle. The encampment as a decolonized space was constantly forced by UCLA, LAPD, LASD, CHP, and other white supremacist groups into an explicitly anti-colonial struggle. While Rose-Redwood et al. recognize that anti-colonialism usually proceeds decolonialism, I would argue that the two are intricately linked/dependent and severing them into two distinct categories potentially depoliticizes decolonialization by removing the necessity of struggle. In this way, I also pause at their assumption that anticolonial practice perhaps innately "re-centers the colonial" (152).
The People's Guide to Orange County is decolonial AND anticolonial in both the form it adopts and the places/stories it describes and pays homage too. The Guide reads almost explicitly history of struggle: of lynchings, union activism, police violence, gay conversion camps and environmental disasters. Even moments of pure expression and liberation (for instance) are framed in reference to the anticommunist frontier fantasies of Walter Knott.
The historical markers Lewinnek et al point to (besides, interestingly, the public spaces like University High or CSU Fullerton) have disappeared into a depressing mush of capitalist development i.e. the gated community, theme park, industrial park, freeway, or big box store. Strawberry fields turn into parking lots, kitschy Japanese-themed "Deer Parks" into freeway onramps, and murals into blank walls. Almost every section ends with a quick sentence about how what we're reading about is long gone. I got this overwhelming feeling that the Guide, more than anything, was a littered graveyard of spatial idiosyncrasies that were paved over.
May 19, 2022
A superb teaching tool. I plan to use it with my high school students.
March 27, 2023
A guide more than a guide book as many of its descriptions are limited in exploring due to real estate development of previously historic sites. Under that premise, the book walks the reader on Orange County history subdivided by its vast regions, making the book approachable. Great places to start a reading journey about Orange County’s known landmarks.
April 29, 2022
This was a real eye-opener. Gives the racist/sexist/homophobic history of Orange County in guidebook form. I learned a lot about my birthplace.
February 22, 2023
This is clearly a well-intentioned book replete with valuable and interesting insights into Orange County history, however, this is not a guide book. I cannot fathom how an author or publisher from outside the ivory tower would describe it as such. It is risible to think anyone would use this as a visitor's guide. This work is probably best utilized as a teaching tool for high school students. It is written at that academic level (no foot notes; unattributed quotes & etc). It is monotonous, dull and entries are written in an unimaginative and virtually interchangeable style. It is poorly edited and filled with numerous typos. I found that surprising and disappointing. It seems that no independent review of the content, style or fitness for use took place, or, this review was entirely insufficient because the conclusions seem to be of a prefabricated sort, which, after reading the entire book, I was convinced represented the views of the authors far more than that of the supposed "people" whose history is being elucidated.
I do not want to go into specific excerpts here but there are numerous examples which will leap out to an aware reader. If you are curious, read the book. However, if you want a proper education in these matters look elsewhere as there are far more serious works to consult than this.
In my opinion, this book does not live up to the standards of University of California Press and it is definitely not a guide book to anything other than the sometimes valid but often misguided points of view of the authors.
I do not want to go into specific excerpts here but there are numerous examples which will leap out to an aware reader. If you are curious, read the book. However, if you want a proper education in these matters look elsewhere as there are far more serious works to consult than this.
In my opinion, this book does not live up to the standards of University of California Press and it is definitely not a guide book to anything other than the sometimes valid but often misguided points of view of the authors.
August 6, 2023
Very interesting history for someone who has lived most their life in the OC and San Diego. Definitely any agenda here by the authors, but it doesn’t get in the way of this history too much.
October 8, 2023
An interesting guide to history of Orange County that you do not normally read about.
June 4, 2025
Interesting book about the history of OC.
October 7, 2023
Gathers together marginalized histories from around a county widely perceived as bland suburbia. There are lynching and police shooting sites; a former salon whose owner fought a fair housing battle; the Cambodian-owned birthplace of the pink doughnut box. My favorite entry is about the Japanese American strawberry farmers who held out against Disneyland until retiring with a big payday. However, the writing is generally dry, and nobody to the right of Zack de la Rocha is likely to drive around to the mapped sites. Valuable, but more of a chore to read than I'd expected.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews