The Brief

Nothing says summertime like children selling lemonade outside their homes. A paper cup of the sweetly tart concoction can be so refreshing on a sweltering summer day. And in Los Angeles, there is often an added bonus — the lemons are most likely local, picked from trees in the children’s own yards.

Lemons are so plentiful today that it's not uncommon to see baskets full of Lisbons, Meyers and Eurekas being offered for free in front of houses.

People unload them on their neighbors, having used as many as they can in lemon curd, lemon bars, lemon pies, homemade limoncello, and of course, lemonade.

But the lemon, and its big sister the orange, are much more than just fun fruits for home gardeners. The course of the citrus industry in California has dramatically shaped the state's economic fortunes and brought it worldwide acclaim as a bountiful Eden of health and happiness.

Mediterranean climate

A family picking lemons in 1928

Orange and lemon seeds were first brought to California by Spanish missionaries colonizing the area in the late 18th century.

The Spanish soon discovered that the area’s Mediterranean climate, its mild winters and plentiful sunshine (most California lemons are harvested in winter and early spring), made it the ideal place to grow citrus. The Mission San Gabriel and Mission San Fernando had the most luscious groves, and its fruits were used to feed acolytes and keep illnesses like scurvy at bay.

However, from the start, the growth of citrus in California had an exploitative underbelly. “The Spanish may have brought the seeds and whatnot, but they made the Native Americans, whom they press-ganged into doing labor, actually plant and harvest and tend to the crops,” says Benjamin Jenkins, associate professor at the University of La Verne and author of Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California.

 The commercialization of citrus began in 1831, when an enterprising French immigrant named Jean-Louis Vignes bought 104 acres of land just outside the original Pueblo de Los Angeles (now the Arts District) on the Los Angeles River. On his sprawling ranch, named El Aliso, he grew grapes to make his famed wines, as well as orange and lemon trees.

He soon had competition in the form of his neighbor, a former Kentucky fur trapper and cowboy named William Wolfskill. On his equally sprawling ranch, he grew grapes, oranges (he helped develop the famed Valencia orange) and lemons, and by the 1840s he had the largest citrus grove in North America.

Horse-drawn float of the Cahuenga Valley Lemon Association in a parade in Hollywood

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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The enormous volume and consistent quality of California citrus, and the fortune that could be made growing the fruits, soon caught the attention of visitors.

In much of the country lemons and oranges were a rare luxury, but here they were so plentiful their unmistakable scent filled the air. In 1870, an Eastern visitor to Los Angeles wrote an essay extolling the city in the Los Angeles Daily News:

Its climate cool, from the sea breezes, it is the most agreeable in the world, its soil productions beyond parallel. Immense vineyards, orange and lemon groves, give beauty to the landscape; and I can only say that if I had my life to begin, and had the talent… I should not hesitate to place myself there at once.

A lemon grove in Altadena

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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New varieties

Southern Californians also began to experiment with citrus, creating their own unique varieties. While the Lisbon lemon, a variety originally from Portugal, continued to grow in abundance, it was soon matched in popularity by the Eureka lemon, a thornless, everbearing and hearty variant propagated by Los Angeles nurseryman Thomas Garey in 1877.

So profitable was the citrus industry, according to Jenkins, that its produce was one of the main reasons that the major rail companies began to extend their lines to Los Angeles in the late 1800s.

And when they did, they chose to build their terminals and rail yards directly around the Wolfskill and Vignes’ properties, a logistics’ gold mine in terms of exporting citrus across the country. Soon, the area was swallowed up by the railroads, and citrus moved into open land elsewhere.

“California didn't invent the citrus industry in the United States,” Jenkins says. “But it definitely dominated by the time the railroads came in about the 1880s and 1890s.”

Women working in a lemon packing house, part of the California Fruit Growers Exchange

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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Boosters in Southern California saw the orange and lemon as powerful PR tools to entice sickly, wealthy Midwesterners and Eastern settlers in search of health and rejuvenation. Sanitariums, where you could recover from tuberculosis and other ailments in the sunshine and clear California air, began to open, and many of the patients, once healed, never left the state.

“If you were to look at newspaper accounts from Victorian California, from the Gilded Age advertisements, and correspondence people are sending back east, they’re absolutely thinking of California as a paradise, where in particular a lot of invalids come to try to heal themselves of consumption or tuberculosis or other lung problems,” Jenkins says.

“And part of the prescription that many of their doctors would tell them is that you spend some time in your sanitarium, but then you buy a little plot of land in California, you plant some oranges, and you get hopped up on vitamin C from maybe the lemonade that you're growing as well.”

The Cahuenga Suburban newspaper from 1896

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank collection

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The rise of Sunkist

In 1893, the Southern California Fruit Exchange, which is now known as Sunkist, was formed by a co-op of growers to help protect their assets and to lobby for California grown citrus. The powerful group (now based in Valencia) became a powerhouse in PR, placing advertising in paper and magazines across the country, promoting orange juice and lemonade as all-American staples.

“They promoted the idea that you should not only drink lemonade, but make sure that it's Sunkist made from lemons in California,” Jenkins says. “In The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal they would have lavish illustrations showing a huge pitcher of lemonade with maybe a couple of lemons sitting next to it, touting the benefits of vitamin C and how it's like drinking a little bit of California sunshine.”

The campaigns were a brilliant success, and the consumption of lemonade across America spiked dramatically. The number of lemon trees also grew from 62,000 lemon bearing trees in 1882 to 800,000 trees by 1901.

The same year Sunkist formed, Limoneria, one of the first agribusinesses to tout the lemon as its primary crop, was founded in the Ventura town of Santa Paula. By 1908, it was known as “the greatest lemon ranch in the world.” That year, the Ventura Free Press reported:

A further increase in the size of the largest lemon plantation in the world...will be the result of planting this season at the Limoneira Ranch. There are now...27,000 bearing lemon trees on the property, and this year trees will be on 300 acres more. The crop last year was the largest since the planting has begun. Bigness is not the chief end kept in view by the management of the ranch. The growth of the enterprise, in fact, has come from never flagging efforts to maintain and improve the quality of the product.

But while many were making their fortune in the citrus business, the people who did the actual work in the groves were primarily poorly paid immigrants.

“The people who worked in these fields were primarily Chinese immigrants who had formerly worked for the railroads,” Jenkins says. “The Chinese were often made to live in railroad box cars because those were the houses that were available.”

As restrictions on Chinese immigration were passed, Korean, Japanese and European immigrants increasingly worked backbreaking days in the blazing sun, cultivating California’s dream fruits for the masses.

Photograph from the Valley Times dated December 22, 1962 shows Mrs. Ernest Ortega, from Reseda, holding a large lemon from her tree

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Los Angeles Public Library (Valley Times collection)

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Hollywood lemon groves

Citrus soon found a new booster when a director named Cecil B. DeMille came west in 1913 and leased a lemon grove in the small hamlet of Hollywood. There, his company shot The Squaw Man, the first feature-length movie filmed in Los Angeles, amongst the lemon trees.

According to Taschen’s beautiful new book The Gourmand’s Lemon: A Collection of Stories and Recipes, DeMille was not the only Hollywood pioneer to stake his claims on a citrus ranch.

In 1918, Charlie Chaplin opened his first studio in a lemon grove on Sunset and La Brea. “The silent star kept a few of the trees on his lot,” The Gourmand notes, “as evidenced by a goofy snippet of footage that shows him picking a lemon and pulling faces as he tries to eat it, skin and all.”

Even the lemon industry would be fodder for on screen hijinks. According to The Gourmand’s Lemon, in a 1923 short, entitled Oranges and Lemons, comedian Stan Laurel played a citrus worker trying to pack a citrus crate, while constantly being foiled by a wayward conveyer belt.

By the 1930s, California’s two most famous exports were films and citrus. They collided at the San Bernardino National Orange Show in 1939. According to Douglas Cazaux Sackman, author of the fascinating Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, visitors to the expo were greeted by “manikins of Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich lolling in the lawn chairs among garden paths laid out with lemons and lolling in orange chairs among garden paths laid out with lemons and grapefruit, and pretty-boy Clark Gable in neat white flannels and open throat shirt under a fake orange tree glistening with two large golden globes.”

Movie stars also found that lemons, still plentiful though the major groves were long gone, aided them in their strict beauty regimens. “Tinseltown’s Golden Age sirens enjoyed their lemons off screen,” The Gourmand’s Lemon notes. “Rita Hayworth rinsed her hair with lemon juice, Joan Crawford rubbed elbows with it, Katharine Hepburn scrubbed her face with sugar and lemon, and Marlene Dietrich sucked on lemon wedges between takes, believing it would keep her facial muscles perfectly taut for the camera.”

Workers rights

In 1942, the Bracero agreement was reached, which permitted Mexican citizens to come to America as temporary workers in agriculture, and they began to dominate the citrus groves. “For a majority of these men working in the grove, they had to leave their families behind to live and work here,” says Jose Cabello, state interpreter at the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside. “Their homes were pretty dismal, hastily made and set up in fairgrounds, old warehouses, prison barracks, and sometimes even along the Santa Ana River.”

After WWII, urban sprawl, industrialization and a decline in the citrus industry pushed most of the remaining commercial groves out of Los Angeles and Orange County and into the Central Valley, where they remain to this day. But Sunkist would not be daunted and continued to promote California citrus products across the world, increasingly encouraging people to use lemons in new and novel ways.

“A lemon is not one product but a group of totally different products,” said Don Francisco, the marketing genius of Sunkist. “A lemon may be classed as a pie, a hair rinse, a cool drink, a hot drink, a garnish, a mouthwash, a vinegar or a skin bleach. The toilet and medicinal value of the lemon are alone sufficient to bring it fame.”

By the 1960s, the fight for farm workers’ rights spearheaded by the Agriculture Workers Association had begun to open Californian’s eyes to the inequity of Big-Ag. The lemon, once a symbol of youth and promise, began to be seen in a more sour, cynical light. In her 1966 essay Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, Joan Didion wrote of a lemon grove that was “too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare.”

Today, the history of citrus in California can be best experienced at the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside. The lush, fragrant living museum is home to thousands of citrus trees and offers tours and educational programs documenting the history of citrus in the state, and the memories of those who worked in the field.

“We grow about 70 different types of citrus,” Cabello says. “And among those 70, about 12 of those are lemons.”

His favorite lemon in the park is the variegated pink Eureka lemon, created right here in California. “It's a very unique kind of lemon because as its name suggests, the fruity flesh on the inside is a pink color,” he says. “The lemons, as they're forming, theylook like little watermelons because the fruit has green stripes on it that you would expect a normal watermelon to have. So, this specific lemon is pretty sour. You would expect it to be. But I find them really delicious.”

Although most Angelenos now only see lemon trees in backyards and parks, California produced a 50-year high of 1.06 million tons in 2022-2023. So, next time you squeeze a lemon into your iced tea or over your hair for some natural summer highlights, remember — you are holding a bit of California history in your hands.

The Senate is poised to pass a sweeping bipartisan bill on Monday that would regulate college sports, an attempt to end “chaos” in an industry that has been upended by skyrocketing athlete payments and near-unrestricted transfers between schools.

Passage of the legislation would be the strongest effort yet by Congress to set national regulations governing payments to college athletes for their name, image and likeness and how often they can transfer. It would give the NCAA new authority over those rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them.

The bill is the product of years of Senate negotiations that intensified as some in the industry pleaded with Congress to step in after a 2025 lawsuit settlement uprooted the college sports landscape by allowing colleges to pay their players. The legislation, which would still have to pass the House, would codify the settlement into law but also establish new guardrails around the system in an attempt to rein in the runaway costs for colleges.

“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who negotiated the bill with the top Democrat on the panel, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.

The bill’s backers — more than 70 senators from both parties — say it aims to curtail constant litigation and uncertainty across college sports for athletes, schools and fans. It would also give hundreds of thousands of student athletes new health and labor protections.

Critics say the bill doesn’t do enough to protect athletes or curtail the enormous sums of money flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.

“This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights groups to rally opposition to the bill.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed an interest in the legislation, and the White House formally endorsed the bill last month. But it could face an uphill battle in the House, which failed repeatedly over the last year to get a different version to the floor and is in recess until after the November elections.

Lawmakers will have to start over in the next Congress if the bill doesn’t pass both chambers by the end of the year.

Bill addresses skyrocketing spending, unlimited transfers

College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million.

The bill codifies the court settlement, including a revenue cap that allows schools to share up to $21.5 million in revenue with their players. The legislation would more than double that amount for some schools, allowing up to an additional $27.5 million in payments through a retention fund, and would give schools and conferences the option of pooling their TV media rights to potentially raise more revenue.

The legislation also aims to stabilize the NCAA transfer portal that has led to players constantly switching teams. It would restrict player transfers to one “free” move over five years without sitting out a year, with some exceptions, and also restricts players to five years of total eligibility.

The proposed eligibility limit comes amid backlash to schools that have increasingly pushed boundaries, including LSU’s now-canceled plans to place players on the roster who had participated in NFL training camps.

“That was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, ‘Oh my God, this is so out of control,’” Cantwell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “You can see how out-of-hand the situation was getting.”

The bill also would restrict coaches from leaving their schools during the season and prevent conferences from growing larger than 19 programs, an effort to prevent so-called “superleagues” from taking over sports. It would force schools that want to switch conferences to spend three years as an independent — down from five years in the original bill. That change brought new supporters on board, including Florida State and Clemson of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Critics say it wouldn’t do enough to help athletes

The legislation includes new protections for athletes, including caps on agent fees and guarantees for health insurance and certain scholarships. It would also require schools to maintain a minimum number of sports and roster spots — an effort to ensure that women’s and Olympic sports are not cut in favor of football, basketball and other sports that generate more revenue.

Still, some Democrats say it wouldn’t do enough to limit the big money in college sports.

The legislation “places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,” Murphy said last week.

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said that the new antitrust protections would make it harder for athletes to sue universities, and “taking away their legal rights strikes me as a bridge too far.”

Groups like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and AFL-CIO have also opposed the bill, in part, because it leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with the ability to collectively bargain.

All four Black Democrats in the Senate — Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — have opposed the bill.

Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, said in a Senate floor speech earlier this month that he was “afforded opportunities I never would have had if it wasn’t for college athletics” but that he also “saw how unjust the NCAA is.”

He said it wasn’t until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, “and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers” to exempt antitrust laws.

Some Republicans also said it is overreach.

The legislation “goes way too far inserting the federal government into collegiate athletics,” said Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who is opposing it.

House passage is uncertain

Despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill faces a murky path in the House.

House lawmakers won’t return to Washington until mid-November, after the elections. And it’s unclear what will be on Republican leaders’ agenda in the chaotic last few weeks of the session.

Pressure from Trump could help push the bill to passage. But some House Republicans have insisted on language explicitly stating that athletes are not employees, which the Senate bill does not have — a key concession to Cantwell to win enough Democratic support.

House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., said in a statement in May that “any lasting framework must confront the central issue that continues to cast uncertainty over the future of college sports: whether student-athletes will ultimately be treated as employees.”

“Congress cannot deliver real stability, consistency, or certainty to schools, conferences, and student-athletes while leaving that question unresolved,” the two Republicans said.

Each year, Congress passes laws which allocate money to the federal government's various programs and agencies. Trump, for the second year in a row, is refusing to send some of that money to the places that Congress says it has to go, setting off a fresh battle with lawmakers over who controls federal spending.

Of the $810 million being withheld, $567 million comes from programs that "provided services to refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens," according to a memo from the White House.

The move, called a pocket rescission, is illegal, according to the Government Accountability Office, an independent, non-partisan watchdog agency charged with providing federal agencies fact-based information.

Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes and decide how federal funds are spent — known as power of the purse. If the president disagrees, he or she can send a request to Congress to cancel the fund, but that is supposed to happen with 45 days notice in order to let Congress agree or disagree.

A pocket rescission happens when the president decides to cancel funds without ample time for Congress to weigh in or reallocate the money. With the end of the fiscal year less than a week away, the announcement means the funds will go unspent and Congress can't respond.

"This is the most recent attempt by this Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to undermine Congress's Constitutional power of the purse," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations committee, wrote in a statement posted to X. "OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding."

The canceled funds are fueling anger from Democrats who say OMB director Russell Vought is violating the separation of powers and undermining Congressional authority.

"This is theft from the American people, plain and simple," wrote Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee on X. "Every Republican who voted for these bills should be furious, because Vought is saying their votes don't count."

"Donald Trump knows he can't get these cuts through Congress, so he is illegally making them through the back door," Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House Budget committee, said in a statement. "Trump's actions are a blatant attack on Congress's constitutional power of the purse."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The administration also says it withheld $15 million to a Justice Department team tasked with "preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony," $70 million to "programs provide grants and fellowships to support institutions bringing foreign students and faculty to the United States to study or teach language," and tens of millions to various research and non-profit grant programs that target climate change or racial and gender minority work.

A detailed accounting provided by the administration can be found here.
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Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday signed two pieces of legislation aimed at increasing accountability and protections for communities in the aftermath of the Lineage warehouse fire.

One bill by Assemblymember Mark González, AB 817, prevents the city and county of Los Angeles from issuing new building permits to cold storage facilities like Lineage unless the company maintains a contingency fund, or insurance, that can support residents in states of emergency.

The other bill by state Sen. María Elena Durazo, SB 716, increases fines for violations of local ordinances when companies pose a risk to health and safety. If the violation results from a state or federal disaster declaration, fines can reach up to $50,000 per violation.

The fire on June 17 blanketed the LA region with thick smoke for days and led to a monthslong cleanup of 88 million pounds of rotting food. Residents dealt with putrid odors, toxins in the air, an infestation of flies and rats.

“Boyle Heights showed us the lasting impact a major facility emergency can have on a community. These laws strengthen the tools, resources and accountability needed to protect residents and help communities respond when emergencies happen,” Newsom said in a statement.

The laws will be in effect locally and will expand statewide until July 1, 2028.

Earlier this month, Lineage Chief Executive Officer Greg Lehmkuhl told Boyle Heights Beat and The LA Local that the company has not decided whether to rebuild its Boyle Heights warehouse.

“We haven’t even come close to making a decision or determination there,” Lehmkuhl said. “We’re still focused on holding the right people accountable here and making sure that we’re continuing to support the community.”

The CEO’s comments about the uncertainty surrounding a rebuild come after permit applications were filed in late July to restore the warehouse in Boyle Heights. Lineage described it as a repair permit that’s typical when a building is significantly damaged, adding it was filed by the building’s owner via a contractor.

The post Newsom signs new safety laws aimed at accountability after the Lineage fire appeared first on LA Local.

California officials say they will not use a federal database pushed by the Trump administration to check voter eligibility. That’s after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way last week for states to use it.

The Trump administration wants states to use its controversial data system, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — or SAVE — to check citizenship status on voter rolls.

The system has faced criticism for mistakenly flagging some eligible voters as noncitizens.

California says nothing is changing despite the SCOTUS ruling. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told LAist’s AirTalk that the system has had “a number of errors.”

“We did not find the list valid for us and as a result decided some while ago we would not use it,” Weber said. “And as a result, Californians can feel secure that they're not going to be run through some other list in terms of trying to determine who will vote and who will not.”