It has been said that you can learn a lot about a person in discovering where they grew up. Recently, I’ve returned to my hometown, El Monte. I’ve found myself enchanted with these tough streets that seemingly attempt to welcome outsiders with the city's sarcastic slogan, "Welcome to Friendly El Monte." I began doing a little research about this sleepy town, hoping that if I understood more about this tumultuous landscape I could possibly learn more about myself. This in turn provoked a series of other questions about writing and more specifically the impact of the writer’s environment. But first, a little background information.
According to Wikipedia, El Monte, translates from Spanish to 'the wooded place.' It has been described as an idyllic plot of fertile land that stood between two rivers. From its earliest days it had a troubled and violent reputation. The Monte rangers were a group of militia men that assembled in the 1850's in reaction to the bandit gangs of Juan Flores and Daniel Pancho. Once they disbanded, the "El Monte boys," a group of vigilante locals, kept the town in order primarily through the use of lynching. Now I don't know, and in fact I doubt, that Wikipedia’s hyper focus on El Monte's violent roots is a historically well-rounded depiction, but I find it fascinating that the author, much like many El Monte natives, conveys a sense of pride about such a troubled past. In addition to the turbulence depicted in the origins of my hometown, Wikipedia references the whimsical aspects of Gay’s lion farm and El Monte’s ties to the musical performers of the 1950’s and 60’s.
So what does any of this mean? How does a place and time shape or change a writer’s work? And after all, what does it mean to the writer to return home? Thomas Wolfe argued in You Can’t Go Home Again:
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
Certainly there is a loss of idealism throughout Wolfe’s novel that speaks, not only to the troubled landscape of American society in the 1930’s, but also to the adult naively longing for the simplicity of what once was. I used to wholeheartedly embrace Wolfe’s disillusioned interpretation of the tragedy of change that occurs within an individual, distorting their false romanticized recollections of a former home. I am beginning to relate more with Maya Angelou’s experience of home as depicted in Letter to my Daughter, in which Angelou argues, “I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
Perhaps my desire to sentimentalize my hometown lies in the identification of these shadows that have always existed. Accompanying the shadows are always bursts of unexpected light. In the morning I hear a cacophony of birds chirping and people arguing. These invasive and dissonant sounds signal that while El Monte may be steeped in violence, tumultuous, intimidating, and at times crude, nature has never given up on her. With that being said, I welcome the fellow members of my Few Lines family and all of our lovely readers. Welcome to Friendly El Monte.
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