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-IMM-en-o”. Why such an unusual street name? Well, the Alamitos Beach townsite was laid out in 1886 with twenty alphabetically-arranged avenues, starting with Alamitos as the “A” and ending with Termino as the “T”. Someone later designed Ximeno as the “X” in an eastward expansion of these avenues, but its companions – Union, Valencia, Willamette, Ysabel, and Zingara – never materialized. That was the story told by a Long Beach journalist in 1934, anyway; I haven’t seen any older maps or mentions of those five vanished streets. Back to Ximeno: some say the inspiration for the name is 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”.
Find it on the map:
