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.

Queer Mercado started as a monthly pop-up event at the East L.A. Civic Center in the summer of 2021. Now, the community marketplace is launching a new residency at the historic Olvera Street plaza in downtown L.A.

The event will feature local queer-owned businesses, makeup tutorials, live artist paintings, drag performers and a fashion show.

Queer Mercado's founder, Diana Diaz, said the goal is to promote culture and inclusivity, and to empower marginalized communities in the area.

“ You're gonna see a lot of culture, fashion, a wide range of ages and genders, and performers that really reflect the landscape of LA,” she said.

Diaz is a handbag designer and high school counselor based out of East L.A. She’s been vending with her family since she was a young girl and started a community marketplace called the Goddess Mercado in 2021 to reconnect with friends and other local vendors after the pandemic. One of her students gave her the idea to create a similar space for the queer community.

“He told me, 'Miss, this is great that you're doing for the women of East L.A., but what about the queer community? I'm tired of going to the West Side. I don't fit in,'” she said.

Diaz has her own kiosk at Olvera Street and said foot traffic has been down in recent months, in part due to fears of immigration raids. But she said the event is a chance to create a more inclusive space and to reflect more of the diverse, cultural fabric that exists within Los Angeles.

“ It's full of history and love and positivity, and it gave birth to a lot of businesses and movements,” Diaz said. “And it's a site of celebrations and rituals and protests.”

Event details: Queer Mercado will be held 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Olvera Street every Saturday through at least June.

Secret menu: Stop by Juanita's Cafe, and ask for the “queer combo.” It’s not on the menu, but you’ll get a free drink.

For America’s 250th birthday this July 4, the Queen Mary in Long Beach is promising to pull out all the stops: a WW II aircraft flyover, buffet and music, all capped off with an extra-long fireworks display — 20 minutes of pyrotechnics exploding over the bay.

But just a few miles down the coast, the city’s Alamitos Bay will be quiet over the holiday weekend. The July 3 Big Bang on the Bay couldn’t get the OK from state regulators, so longtime organizer John Morris canceled it.

“I’m just fed up with everything,” Morris said in a phone call. “The bureaucracy just sucks.”

Both Morris and the Queen Mary got approval for their shows from the state’s Water Resources Control Board, which found no tangible rise in water pollution after previous shows, water board spokesperson Ailene Voisin said. But, unlike the Queen Mary, Morris also had to convince the Coastal Commission. That process has gotten significantly more difficult.

For years, Coastal Commission staff routinely approved Morris’ permit, but after complaints and a lawsuit alleging the fireworks polluted the water and harmed migratory birds nesting nearby, the statewide board has given him more scrutiny. In 2024, the Coastal Commission gave him an ultimatum: It was time to switch to drones, which they viewed as more environmentally friendly and less disorienting to the birds. They warned in 2025 that it was the last time they would approve fireworks over Alamitos Bay.

So why did the Big Bang need Coastal Commission approval, but the Queen Mary didn’t?

The commission has ceded its authority over the Queen Mary show to the Port of Long Beach, where it’s permanently docked, according to commission spokesperson Joshua Smith. Because the Coastal Commission previously approved a master plan from the port that defines what’s allowed in its boundaries and what isn’t, the commission doesn’t weigh in on individual events. Anything with potential environmental impacts falls under the port’s scope, Smith said.

The port, apparently, is fine with the fireworks. Spokesperson Lee Peterson said he could find no record of the port requiring any permitting or exercising any oversight of the Queen Mary show.

So with another fireworks show happening in Long Beach as well as others up and down the California coast, Morris tried to charge ahead with his show — even with the Coastal Commission’s previous warning. He asked for one more approval.

He told commissioners there was no safe way to launch the drones. Plus, he said, they were prohibitively expensive.

It wasn’t fair, he argued, to force him to abandon fireworks while other shows continued.

John Morris, owner of the Boathouse on the Bay restaurant and longtime Big Bang on the Bay organizer in Long Beach on May 14, 2025.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Commissioners were unmoved. They denied his request for fireworks, saying he’d had ample warning, and Morris canceled his event altogether.

Last week, commission staff sent Morris a letter saying they were “disheartened” that he chose that route. They offered a compromise. They’d be willing to consider a fireworks show at an alternate location — just not over Alamitos Bay and its nesting birds.

In a phone call last week, Morris called their offer “a joke.”

Moving the show would ruin his chances of getting funding from residents whose homes ring the bay. They’ve gotten used to having the fireworks essentially in their backyards and have given generously to support the show in the past. Additional proceeds, nearly $2 million since the Big Bang began in 2011, go to charity, according to Morris.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office took notice of the cancellation, Morris hoped he would intervene. With no progress so far, Morris said he’s holding out hope a state bill — the so-called Fireworks for Freedom Act — will garner enough votes to pass the legislature. It was introduced April 30 by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-41) and would pave the way for any fireworks display “by temporarily suspending Federal and State regulatory restrictions” for this year only.

If it doesn’t pass, he’ll have to find something else to do with his fireworks barges.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Hardly a year after the city of Inglewood’s firework sales ban went into effect, city residents could vote to overturn it.

The initiative that will be in the June 2 special election looks to make firework use and sales legal again in the city.  Mail-in voting has already begun. 

The new ballot initiative comes after the Inglewood City Council voted to ban fireworks outside of permitted shows in February 2025, delighting residents who worried about noise and safety, but frustrating some local nonprofits who rely on annual firework sales as a fundraiser. 

“They had just as much fireworks as they always had,” said D’Joy Robinson, whose family counseling nonprofit, All Families Matter, sold fireworks for several years before the ban.

Inglewood resident Mari Morales Rodriguez said she doesn’t mind small fireworks, but that she’s watched local fireworks get larger and more dangerous over the years. She wants to see the fireworks ban continue.

“They are out of control,” she said. “Nobody can control it.”

Fireworks manufacturers TNT Fireworks and Phantom Fireworks are the ballot initiative’s biggest backers — drafting the initiative and, according to state documents, funding  a campaign in support.

Inglewood Mayor James Butts said the city’s ban last year came after years of public feedback.

“We have received complaints for at least 12 years,” Butts said. “The council took action to outlaw them.”

Roughly two dozen cities in L.A. County permitted the sale and use of designated “safe and sane” fireworks last Fourth of July, according to the L.A. County Fire Department. Firework sales are only permitted June 27 through July 6 in California.

Here’s what would change under the proposed fireworks ordinance

Dennis Revell, a consultant for TNT Fireworks who drafted the initiative, said the new proposed ordinance would not be a return to the fireworks regulations Inglewood had in place before 2025.

“We felt that there were many deficiencies in the prior ordinance,” Revell said. “[This] is much more dynamic and should provide a level of confidence in public safety.”

The new rules would make it easier for the city to issue citations, Revell said, and expand who could be found responsible for violations. It would also put in place a mechanism for the city to recoup some of the costs of enforcement. 

Revell, who said he has drafted hundreds of local fireworks ordinances, said the proposed Inglewood rules are inspired by others put in place across California. 

“The trend is to take this seriously and protect the city but still allow for responsible people to celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks,” Revell said. 

The LA Local reached out to Phantom Fireworks but did not receive a response.

Making fireworks legal again would allow nonprofits like All Families Matter to resume their annual firework sales. Robinson, the administrator of the nonprofit, said without the extra $5,000 boost the fireworks stand could provide each year,  the nonprofit has had to trim the free family counseling services it provides.

Robinson also said the stand helped the nonprofit stay in touch with the neighborhood.

“We had families that came back year after year,” she said. 

Revell argued that legalizing “safe and sane” fireworks would also help keep more dangerous, illegal fireworks off the street. 

Morales Rodriguez, the Inglewood local, said legalizing some fireworks would make it difficult to report and control illegal variants because firework users could simply claim they’d bought their own fireworks at a permitted stand. 

“It looks like a war zone,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like something happy.”

When you're leading the polls, everyone takes their shots. Xavier Becerra found that out Thursday night as six gubernatorial rivals ganged up on him in the final debate before California's primary — attacking everything from his ethics to his ideas to his choice of political consultants.

It was their last chance to make a personal appeal to California voters ahead of the June 2 election to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.

While the San Francisco debate was calmer than the brawls in the last few meet-ups, everyone’s target was the Democratic frontrunner Becerra.

These are five takeaways:

Becerra was the one to beat:

Opponents piled on with anything that might stick, from his acceptance of a campaign contribution from Chevron to his failure to answer questions at a housing forum last week to fraud in the hospice system while Becerra was secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration.

But the Becerra weakness du jour was the guilty plea earlier Thursday of his former political strategist Dana Williamson, who admitted to conspiring with Becerra’s former longtime chief of staff to steal money from his campaign account.

Opponents were unified in their skepticism about Becerra’s repeated claims that he wasn’t involved. Despite the plea deal that did not accuse him, Democratic rival Katie Porter went so far as to say he could still be implicated in the case.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate backed by tech leaders, went out of his way to call Becerra the “embodiment of the status quo” in Sacramento.

Several candidates attacked Becerra over his lack of a funding plan for his ideas, including Porter, who pulled out a makeshift whiteboard in a callback to her signature move in Congress.

“What is Mr. Becerra’s revenue plan?” she pressed.

The former health secretary took a page out of Newsom’s book, pointing to an idea to restrict some corporations’ use of tax credits.

Newsom proposed that earlier in the day as part of his state budget.

Once lagging in polls and fundraising, Becerra has surged since ex-Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out in early April over sexual assault allegations, offering Democratic voters a familiar face who’s held public office for decades and who frequently talks about fighting with Trump.

And he made the most of it:

Becerra appeared pleased with the attention.

“This is what happens when you take the lead in the polls,” he said. “They all come at you.”

Republican frontrunner Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, quickly jumped in to correct him: Hilton is leading, per some polls. (Accounting for margins of error, both candidates are essentially tied.)

But Becerra used the moment to try to shut the door on the Williamson scandal, touting a statement from the prosecutor’s office Thursday saying that “no candidate running for governor has been implicated” in the case.

Former Becerra political strategist Dana Williamson arrives for a hearing in Sacramento on May 14, 2026.

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Fred Greaves

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CalMatters

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Earlier in the week, he refused to answer when a reporter asked if he was sure Williamson couldn’t connect him to the case. Asked Thursday if he could guarantee the case wouldn’t be a “distraction” if he advances to November, he responded, “I can.”

Mahan looks to separate from Republicans:

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has made a name for himself as a moderate Democrat willing to take on his own party. That has included his early support for Prop. 36, the tough-on-crime ballot measure that Newsom and the party opposed in 2024 but which voters passed overwhelmingly, and his campaign proposals to tie pay to performance in the public sector that rankle organized labor.

But on TV in a state where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans and Trump is anathema, he sought to clarify that he’s not a Republican.

“I’m going to offer something different,” he said. “Not MAGA and not more of the same.”

Mahan appeared to relish his spats with Hilton, taking care to point out Hilton’s association with Trump and his former employer, Fox News. Mahan criticized the Republican’s plan to expand California suburbs by building on undeveloped land as likely to drive up carbon emissions, and attacked him over rumors he was pushed out of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government.

“I attacked the extremes on both sides,” Mahan said after the debate.

Mahan was the only Democrat not to say on stage that he would support any of the other Democrats if they advanced to November and he didn’t, instead naming fellow moderate former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, because “mayors get things done.”

Later, he wavered, first saying “it depends” when asked if he would support another Democrat, clarifying, “I would vote for a fellow Democrat against a Republican.”

Everyone but Hilton would restrict chatbots:

When moderators asked a lightning-round “yes or no” question on whether the state should more strictly regulate artificial intelligence chatbots that interact with children, the candidates appeared united across party lines.

Democrats in the state Capitol this year are already pursuing stricter chatbot regulations after advocates decried a law Newsom signed last year as too weak. Steyer promoted his brother’s influential work on the topic.

In contrast, Hilton hesitated, then refused to answer yes or no, saying “it’s not as simple as that” and expressing a desire not to over-regulate the industry.

“It’s not the right way to discuss a very important and serious issue,” he said as opponents and moderators tried to pin him down. “It causes problems that are unintended.”

Hilton moved to California from the United Kingdom to Silicon Valley in 2012 to join his wife Rachel Whetstone, a prominent tech executive.

Republicans boost each other:

Even before the moderators asked the candidates who else they would support if they didn’t make it onto the November ballot, the two Republicans were already practically high-fiving.

In previous debates, interviews and TV ads the two have attacked each other, but by Thursday they were often referencing each other’s points.

“Only two of us actually represent real change,” Hilton said of himself and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

With numerous Democrats competing for liberal support, Hilton has consistently led in the polls. While he and Bianco have previously declined to specifically endorse the other, the only realistic way for a Republican to win in blue California is for both Republicans to come in Nos. 1 and 2 and shut Democrats out of the general election.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.