## The San Fernando Valley He Came From
The San Fernando Valley — the broad, flat basin north of the Santa Monica Mountains that makes up roughly half of the geographic area of the City of Los Angeles — has a specific place in the cultural geography of Southern California that is different from the Hollywood Hills or the Westside or downtown. It is, historically, the part of Los Angeles that was built for working families: the postwar suburban expansion that turned orange groves and farms into tract housing and strip malls in the 1940s and 1950s, providing affordable home ownership for the people who built and maintained the industry and infrastructure of the larger city.
Pacoima, in the northeastern corner of the Valley, was one of the communities shaped by the postwar expansion and by the specific demographic patterns of Southern California in that era. The restrictive covenants and informal segregation that characterized much of the postwar suburban housing market directed Mexican-American and Black families toward specific neighborhoods, and Pacoima became one of the communities where Mexican-American families concentrated — not by choice, primarily, but because of where they were permitted to settle.
Danny Trejo grew up in this community. The neighborhood’s specific character — working-class, Mexican-American, shaped by both the legitimate economy and the underground economies that existed alongside it — was the world he was raised in. His uncle Gilbert was a product of it. His father was a product of it. The specific combination of hard work and hardship and periodic violence that characterized Pacoima in the postwar decades was the context in which Trejo’s childhood and adolescence unfolded.