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The rambling metropolis of Car Hire Los Angeles
spreads out across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, held together
by an involved network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snow-capped
mountains. Its colourful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools
is both mildly surreal and astoundingly recognizable, thanks to the celluloid self-image
that it has spread all over the world.
Car Hire Los Angeles is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century
it was a community of white American immigrants, poor Chinese labourers and wealthy
Mexican ranchers, with a population of no more than 50,000. Only on the close of
the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s did it really begin to grow, as a national
Mecca for good health, clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres of citrus
crops. The main group of transplants were refugees from the Midwest, who created
a new political judgment class to replace the old leading Mexican’s.
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