Go ahead, call us a bunch of culture-less, lily-white suburbanites with a partiality to flip-flops and right-wing politics. Those kind of labels never cease to amuse us. Because one thing that ...

The caravan of Klansmen crept to a stop around midnight in front of the home of David and Lizzie Milder on Nov. 17, 1932. Their quaint bungalow in the Carroll Park neighborhood of Long Beach had just ...

Trying to explain what música ranchera is to non-Mexicans reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to–take your pick–Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, when someone asked what jazz is. Ranchera ...

In 1952 or 1954 (depending on who’s telling the tale), Bert Grimm bought a business located at 22 Chestnut Place in Long Beach, on the corner of Chestnut and Ocean Boulevard. The small square space on ...

It’s no secret that heavy metal music can be a bit morbid and macabre. Heavy metal artists have never been afraid to musically confront mortality, pain, suffering and other grim topics by creating ...

Dwight Manley: The Brea King? Illustration by Paul Nagel. Photo by Federico Medina. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, once a young apprentice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who later ran “Rainbow ...

For the past five years, I’ve made multiple trips to Texas, from El Paso to Houston, Shamrock to Laredo, all in the search for and praising of Tex-Mex food (hell, I even wrote a book about it). One ...

No one gave Maxwell Chorak a second thought as he got off at one of the bus stops near UC Irvine and walked across campus on June 10, 2014. He resembled a disheveled grad student checking in for an ...

Yesterday, the Anaheim Police Department—which was nowhere to be seen when counter-protestors fought Ku Klux Klan members at Pearson Park, in a melee that’s making international headlines—put the ...

Jeff Hakman and Bob McKnight were worried—they couldn’t get the trunks quite right. For weeks during the latter half of 1976, the twentysomethings had fumbled with sewing machines in a Spartan shed ...

For years, the sons and daughters of Alex Bernal smiled and sighed and nodded their heads in weary agreement whenever their elderly father uttered the same clichés he had shared with them since ...

The El Torito Grill in Anaheim is nearly empty. It’s around 3 in the afternoon—the late-December rains ended just hours earlier, and dinnertime’s first brave diners trickle in. Most hit the bar; ...