The Alisal: East Salinas

East of downtown Salinas, across the highway and into the flatlands toward the fields, is the neighborhood called Alisal. The name comes from the Spanish word for a grove of sycamore trees. It is a neighborhood shaped almost entirely by agricultural labor migration, and its history is inseparable from the history of who built the Salad Bowl.

Alisal existed as an unincorporated community outside the Salinas city limits for most of the early twentieth century. Farmworkers, many of them Mexican-born or Mexican American, settled here because the cost of land was lower, because the city proper had not welcomed them, and because this was where the labor camps and the packing sheds were. The East Salinas post office opened in nineteen forty, reflecting a population base that had been building for decades. The community was renamed Alisal in nineteen forty-seven, then East Salinas again in nineteen forty-nine, then Alisal in nineteen fifty, as official nomenclature tried and failed to settle on something stable.

In nineteen sixty-three, the unincorporated community of Alisal was annexed to the city of Salinas. The annexation brought a large community inside the city limits in a single administrative act. One day Alisal was outside the city; the next day it was one of the city's largest neighborhoods.

Today Alisal is Salinas's Mexican American cultural center, a neighborhood with Spanish-language businesses, community events, and cultural institutions that reflect several generations of settlement. The Alisal community built the labor force that grew the lettuce, the broccoli, the strawberries. The Mexican muralists and community organizations that operate here now are direct descendants of the workers who came north during the Bracero Program years and stayed.

The annexation of nineteen sixty-three was administrative. The community itself had been here, doing the work that made the Salad Bowl possible, for decades before the city decided to include it within its limits. The sycamore grove that gave the neighborhood its name is long gone. The community that grew up in its place is not going anywhere.