Victor Valle

“Industry, the "enigmatic municipality, [that] sprawls across the map of the San Gabriel Valley like an underfed dragon”

“A descendent of Basque ranchers, the mayor came from the small circle of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European immigrants who had been his father's oldest customers and friends. Perhaps Malburg told Jim the story of how Vernon got its start in 1905, when John Baptiste Leonis, a French Basque hog rancher, persuaded the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads to extend tracks to his city to attract new factories, their preferred freight-hauling customers.”

“[Preston] Hotchkis had earned his position by representing San Marino, a tiny, rich, Anglo municipality south of Pasadena that had been tellingly named after a European micro-kingdom.”