In Pasadena before the Roses: Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890, Yvette J. Saavedra traces the formation of racial identity and shifting ideas about land use in southern California over the span of more than a hundred years. She reveals how, aside from historians' objectives in helping us understand our pasts, their work can also better help us understand our places in the present. Saavedra's book centers on Pasadena, California, a place we now associate with the Tournament of Roses Parade, held every summer to acknowledge the birth of the city originally established as the San Gabriel Mission. However, as Saavedra reminds us, the region's history should also be characterized by the ways shifting spatiotemporal boundaries, vexed race relations, and economic growth contributed to a multilayered history of Pasadena in which the original peoples of the land, the Tongva, and later, Spanish and Mexicano landowners were displaced physically, socially, and politically. Considered from this vantage point, Pasadena before the Roses decenters Euro-American pioneer history and recognizes how "competing visions" and "dynamic continuities" of land-use philosophies and attempts to maintain social and political power manifested themselves through differing ideologies influenced by the mission, rancho, and homestead periods (4).