In her article on the superimposition of "Asian" landscapes on rural California by immigrant Japanese and Indian agricultural workers, Leonard provides a vivid demonstration of how the imaginative uses of memory enable people to construct localities and communities. Showing how some of these immigrants remade the geography of California's agricultural regions by faithfully overlaying the image of colonial Punjab on the Sacramento Valley, or that of the three kingdoms of third-century China on the Imperial Valley, paradoxically serves to highlight less the continuity of "community" and more its invention. What is striking about this seemingly wholesale "imposition" of an alien landscape is not its lack of inventiveness but rather the sheer audacity — one might even say, the excessiveness — of its ingenuity. How else could one account for a group of Punjabi men, mostly Sikh and Muslim, who married Catholic Mexican or Mexican American women because both partners could enter "Brown" where the form for obtaining the marriage license asked about "race" and thus not violate California's miscegenation laws; whose descendants spoke Spanish and English, practiced Catholicism, and referred to themselves as "Hindu"; whose ashes, if Sikh, were scattered into either the "holy waters" of the Salton Sea or the Pacific Ocean and who, if Muslim, lie buried in "Hindu plots" in rural California cemeteries; who looked out over the Sacramento Valley and saw a landscape identical to their beloved Punjabi homeland? Prevented from owning land by California's Alien Land Laws of 191 3 and 1920, these men created representations of their locales and communities that were entirely devoid of the powerful Anglos who owned the land on which they farmed as well as the industries that supplied most of the input to and absorbed the output from agriculture. Imagining their new surroundings through the memories of their homelands was not merely a means to wrap a cloak of familiarity around a new landscape and thereby to reattain an aura of mastery over the land but also a means to construct hybridized, rhizomatic identities for their community of Indian—Mexican American families. Whereas earlier authors had destabilized "locality" by drawing attention to the role of farsightedness, or transnational and global forces, Leonard does so by focusing on the artful instabilities of memory and invention (see also essays in Bovarin 1994) .