Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City by Carol Lynn McKibben

In this community history of Salinas, an agricultural powerhouse in Central California, McKibben outlines the city’s changing ethnic and racial composition since it emerged in the 1860s, eventually to be incorporated as the seat of Monterey County in 1874. The author focuses primarily on Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, as well as on Dust Bowl migrants, to explore the complicated and nuanced ways by which the lettuce capital of California took shape as a “multiracial, gendered community with a shared belief in American ideals of democracy and equality, even when that belief system proved naïve or misplaced” (5). In that passage lies the crux of McKibben’s argument: Although the city’s residents recognized that all groups were necessary to the endeavor of city-building, not until recent decades did whites begin to acknowledge the contributions of minority groups to any extent. Race relations in Salinas involved “complex mixtures of inclusiveness and...