Amebco Road is a poorly-paved oil road that runs between the wealthy and the poor sections of Long Beach, California. It is only a mile long. It’s now fortified at one end by a closed railroad trestle so that through traffic from the poor section to the rich is no longer allowed. It runs through deserted farmland and played-out oil derricks. It runs beside what was once my grandfather’s dairy farm and alfalfa ranch in the earlier part of the 20th century. Amebco Road also runs through these stories, which are fictional only to some degree, just as it runs through different parts of my life. Many of the stories reflect the contrast and contradictions of Anglo and Hispanic life. I grew up between the influences of wealthy Anglos on one side, and the pull of my Hispanic roots represented by my grandfather’s ranch on the other. The road’s name, Amebco, stands for Amelia M. Bixby Company. She was the daughter of one of the great landholding families that once owned much of southern Los Angeles and Orange County. My grandfather once rented land from the Bixbys, was friendly with them and, in his youth, went on a horseback exploration of California with young Jotham Bixby. That world, a bucolic-seeming utopia as described in the story “Andy Panda and the Great Encinas Ranch Battle,” came crashing down with the death of my grandfather. That story also shows elements of family legend: my grandfather’s water bowl being struck by an Apache arrow, my great aunt being carried off by Indians, and my great uncle being killed by the first street car between Los Angeles and Long Beach. The existence of that world being later doubted and even reviled by the Anglos is also shown in “Andy Panda and the Great Encinas Ranch Battle” as well as in the title story “Amebco Road.” Other stories relate my own childhood and adolescence and all the pains and tiny triumphs that those times involved. Not all the stories are directly autobiographical. Many contain fictionalized versions of experiences of my own, my family and my friends. “The First Love of Mortimer Snerd” sports a non-Hispanic main character who grew up in California Heights, a white sub-division of Long Beach. He discovers his love on one of the hundred-foot oil derricks that towers over Amebco Road. The lead story, “The Haircut,” takes place in a 21st century barber shop, ironically located on land still leased from the Bixby Land company, but the heart of the story carries us to the experiences of a young, unhappily married man in Berkeley, California. Amebco Road still exists. What was once my grandfather’s ranch has been erased by the 405 freeway, yet Amebco Road curves under the freeway’s overpasses, past a golf putting green, and ends at the Los Angeles Metro’s blue line, which replaced the old Pacific Electric railway. But the Amebco Road I knew still runs through my memory.