LOW-INCOME GROWING El Monte, Calif.

TIME Los Angeles Bureau Chief Don Neff has worked in Southern California off and on since 1956. He made his way out the San Bernardino Freeway for this report:

EVEN its defenders admit that El Monte is an eyesore, a blur of suburban sprawl 14 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Its boundaries meander without obvious aim or purpose. Tiny houses, usually stucco and rarely worth more than $30,000, are jumbled together with tacky businesses along its dismal streets. Some 70,000 people call it home, but only a city father could love it. "This is a lower-middle-class workingman's community," says City Administrator Kenneth Bolts. Unnecessarily, he adds: "We will never be a Beverly Hills."

Within its 15 sq. mi., there is no college, no symphony orchestra, no art gallery, no country club, no good bookstore. There is one cinema. The bars run to beer, the churches to fundamentalism: there was a synagogue once, but it closed about ten years ago. Western music flourishes in popular nightspots like Nashville West. The stores are mainly cut-rate ("Crawford's: The Biggest Country Store in the World"). The citizens for the most part are unskilled or semiskilled workers from the South and the Midwest. They find jobs in places ranging from the Clayton Manufacturing Co., a valve-making concern with more than 1,000 employees, to hundreds of small, ten-to twelve-man machine shops.

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There are no blacks in El Monte: in fact, blacks call it "whitey's town." The prejudice against blacks is unspoken, but it is well understood. During a public meeting, a former city employee spoke of their absence in the community; he was ignored by city officials and later privately chewed out by them. El Monte calls itself the first "all-American" community in Los Angeles County. Ironically, it is now fast becoming a Mexican-American stronghold, with a Chicano population estimated at between 35% and 50%. There are increasing strains. An El Monte policeman was shot and left paralyzed from the waist down in what many of the local old guard believe was a Mexican-American ambush.

For the Mexican-Americans, El Monte is a step up out of the East Los Angeles barrio. Explains Richard Mendez, 31: "We moved here from East Los Angeles because it is a better neighborhood. Life is better here. The schools are cleaner. There is not so much trouble." For others, El Monte is a way station en route to something else. "We get them coming both ways," says Dick Naumann, 56, who runs a women's clothing store. "Those who are coming from other parts of the country and those who are leaving. Those who are going up in life and those who are going down." The transients move into cheap clapboard weekly rentals around gloomy Garvey Avenue, then land a job in one of the little machine shops. They stay a month or a year: some schools report a 100% annual student turnover. "I don't live here, I exist," says Earl Vetter, 43, a machinist recently arrived from the East. "As soon as I find something I can afford, I'm getting out."

For those who grew up in El Monte, the present scene is all a bit unreal. Police Chief Orval Davis, a member of the force since 1938, remembers that there were only 3,600 residents and six policemen in El Monte when he was a rookie. (There are 77 cops today.) "Those are the people I identify with," he says. "Those are the people I know. We've grown so fast, I hardly know any of the new ones." Ray ("Tex") Rickerd, an oldtimer who owns the weekly Mid Valley News, does not think much of the newcomers. "To be honest, I wish most of them would go back where they came from," he says.

Despite its staggering growth, El Monte oddly manages to retain a small-town atmosphere. It could be a relic from a blue-collar edition of Norman Rockwell's America. The pace in El Monte is just a bit slower than in Los Angeles, the people are just a bit friendlier. Hands dirtied by honest work are still a badge of honor. Few people drink at lunch: television is the usual evening entertainment. The merchants run their own stores, and when they talk, city hall listens.

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Much of the Rockwellian ambience is deceptive, however. The downtown mall area contains the local headquarters of the Office of Economic Opportunity's neighborhood action program, which is pressing for low-cost housing over old-line opposition. On the 1st and 15th of every month, long sad queues of weary mothers and scraggly children stand on the street all day to collect food stamps. The young are displaced persons in El Monte. "There is nothing to do here," says good-looking Tina Chassi, 25. "If I go out on a date, we go out of town."

Some El Monte residents moved in to stay, and they look at it as a place to put down roots. Joseph Hermes, 50, an insurance salesman, found in the late 1950s that a house that would cost $20,000 in the San Fernando Valley went for $5,000 less in El Monte. "I like the people here," he says. "I think they are good. They work hard." He has only one complaint: "They are used to being kicked around a little bit, so they don't take as much interest in the city as they should."

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