Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City

Historians familiar with Salinas are likely to think of it as either the setting for several novels by John Steinbeck or as a site where the United Farm Workers merged civil and labor rights in agricultural fields during the 1970s. As I grew up in the Bay Area during the 1980s, Salinas came up in conversations when talking about crime and gang activity. In her recent book on the history of Salinas, Carol Lynn McKibben engages each of these subjects while asking us to rethink what we know of this central California city.