It’s the only thoroughfare in Los Angeles County that starts with X. Given its perplexing pronunciation, you can see why there aren’t more. For while a Spanish speaker would pronounce Ximeno “hee-MAY-no”, it’s a Long Beach tradition to say “ex-IM-in-o”. Why such an unusual street name? The story begins in 1886 when the Alamitos Beach townsite was laid out with twenty alphabetically-arranged avenues, most of which had Spanish nombres, starting with Alamitos as the “A” and ending with Termino as the “T”. Ximeno wasn’t part of that, obviously, but it had come into existence by 1902. Thirty-two years later, a Long Beach journalist wrote that it was explicitly designed as the “X” in an eastward expansion of those A-B-C streets and that its companions – Union, Valencia, Willamette, Ysabel, and Zingara – never materialized. (I haven’t found any record of those other five myself.) As for the inspiration for Ximeno, some say it’s Jimena Díaz de Vivar (c. 1046 – c. 1116), wife of the great Spanish hero El Cid. In her era, “Jimena” would have indeed been spelled “Ximena” – so why not Ximena Avenue? A more plausible namesake is Manuel Jimeno Casarín (1815-1853), occasional acting governor of Alta California during Mexican rule. Old records show that he sometimes went by “Ximeno”. Perhaps a developer discovered this bit of trivia while brainstorming Spanish names for this street.
Find it on the map:
