"Gathering at the River" collects stories about the Los Angeles River from the people who have interacted with it from the 1930s to the present. The stories of community members who share the Los Angeles River and its tributaries represent a hitherto untold folk history of the symbolic and physical significance of the river for Southern California.

From elderly folks who fished in the wild river 70 years ago, to Chicano and white laborers who from the late 1930s through the 50s built the concrete channel that still encases the river, to Chinese American youth who have now joined the effort to restore riparian habitat and create riverside parks, the project traces a history of exploitation and revitalization, of disaster and adventure, of daily use and imagined possibilities.

Jennifer Price, a freelance writer and environmental historian, writes about and leads tours of the L.A. River. Author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999), she has also published in the anthologies Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and The Nature of Nature: New Essays from America's Finest Writers on Nature, and in the L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times. She has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and is currently living on Venice Beach and writing a new book about nature in Los Angeles.

Edgar Garcia, 25, was born and raised in one of the last homes near the L.A. River, in the historic community of Lincoln Heights. As an urban planner and preservationist, he has worked for the Los Angeles Conservancy and community projects such as Arroyo Fest. He is currently at work on The Wall-Las Memorias Project, the first publicly funded AIDS memorial in the nation. A graduate of Yale University, Edgar is completing an Urban Planning M.A. at UCLA.

Phillip 'Sonny' Mendoza grew up in East Los Angeles, and often escaped from the neighborhood to his “sugar shack” in the L.A. River. He got his start as a visual artist at age 11, drawing portraits and custom cars, and over the next 30 years he created graffitti, tattoos, pinto art (prison art), and community murals. Sonny has worked as a drug counselor for youth with the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO). He is now studying computers and Braille at the East L.A. Occupational Center, and training to be a counselor to blind youth.

Alicia V. Brown has watched the waters of the L.A. River from the Broadway Bridge since 1939. She and her husband raised four children in Solano Canyon, while the children raised frogs caught in the river. A former teacher, she is now a member of the Cornfield Advisory Committee. Her current project is to re-introduce the water wheel, built at the intersection of Solano Ave. and North Broadway in the late 1800s, that delivered water from the L.A. River to city residents.

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