Parts Unknown

A Mexican walks into a bar in Orange County… 

No, this isn’t the beginning of the sort of a softly racist joke, or a prelude to a tragedy, that you might have heard around these parts not that long ago. It’s what happened on a sunny weekday afternoon in February when I met up with Gustavo Arellano, the Los Angeles Times columnist, at the Alta Baja Market located in the Downtown Historic District of Santa Ana. 

Most outside of Orange County don’t think about Santa Ana very much, even though it has thirty thousand more residents than a well-known, similarly sized city such as Pittsburgh. It also has three fewer major-league teams and about one-tenth the number of higher education institutions as Pittsburgh.

Though scrappy like my former hometown, Santa Ana never had the industrial, robber-baron money to build institutions upon that Pittsburgh did. But it is where Arellano lives, one of a triad of mid-size cities in the heart of Orange County that accounts for almost a third of the county’s population. But, aside from the reflected Disneyland sheen, they hold little of the glamor and gloss associated with the county’s coastal zip codes — the places where TV shows about real housewives and privileged teens are filmed. The relative anonymity of Santa Ana, the county seat, isn’t due to its size or importance, but is a function of where we turn our gaze. 

Mine is taking in the Alta Baja Market, a bright, homey spot on the historic district’s main drag that is owned and operated by Arellano’s wife, Delilah Snell. The airy market has spacious seating and well-dressed displays of wine, beer, dry goods, crafts and specialty items curated to represent traditional Mexican, Californian, and Southwestern heritages. Its restaurant menu serves fresh-made food from authentic traditions and recipes. More than that, it’s the lynchpin of a vibrant community walking the tightrope of building an economy based on destination dining and day-trip shopping without surrendering its deep roots and historical identity to the imperatives of gentrification.

The Alta Baja Market is a “grocery store, cafe and educational space” dedicated to celebrating the cultures and communities of Mexico and the Americano Southwest. Photo courtesy of Alta Baja Market

For a taste of the culture jamming, walk across Fourth Street, which is no easy task because most of it is being dug out to accommodate a half-billion-dollar, four-mile, ten-stop light rail connecting Santa Ana to Garden Grove (a project that doesn’t seem to be of much interest to either end of the line). There is Stussy Archive, where the aspirational, beach-spawned brand recycles leftovers as upscale vintage. A block or two in any direction offers an array of ethnic food, colorful murals, and thrift stores, as well as the hipster coffee joints, artisanal hotdog stands, and beer gardens that mark the comforts and discomforts of gentrification.

In some ways, Snell and the Market offer a symbol of Orange County at its best — a place and a person with a grasp of the past and a toehold in a hopeful future. 

“I call her the golden child because she was born half-white, half-Mexican on May 5th (Cinco de Mayo), 1976. You can’t get more integrated than that,” says Arellano of his partner. “It’s interesting because you have two different sides of the Orange County dream. She grew up in Irvine… Her dream was to have a market, and it’s great that we’re able to do it here.”

In a way, integration, which is different than assimilation, is what drives Arellano. Integration is about being whole, not leaving parts of yourself behind, unspoken or unaccounted for.  This became his mission, whether stated overtly or not, when he took over as Editor-in-Chief of the OC Weekly in 2011. He was the right person at a critical juncture for the paper and for the county which, in its maturing process (if there was to be one), needed to face both its troubled legacy and the realities of its changing demographics, politics and power. No one stuck it in the face of the reactionary, and often violent, status-quo keepers like Arellano’s OC Weekly. During his tenure, the paper provided an essential alternative read, covering the inconvenient truths and people that didn’t readily comply with Orange County’s postcard-ready, public persona.

He’s still at it with the Los Angeles Times — which recently nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize — the larger platform he moved onto seamlessly without surrendering his sharp edges. The years since I got to know and befriend Arellano when he was at the OC Weekly have worn well on him. In his mid-40s now, his latent, rugged handsomeness is in full bloom, and the crow’s feet around his eyes help soften their fire. He’s quick to laugh, easy to engage, and comfortable with a life of purpose, if one that offers little downtime.

Courtesy of Los Angeles Times. 

We sat down to discuss A People’s Guide to Orange County (University of California Press), the just-released book Arellano co-wrote with Thuy Vo Dang, co-author of Vietnamese in Orange County, and Elaine Lewinnek, professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. The book is organized around the geographies, political fault lines, and under-served histories of a county that occupies an outsized portion of the nation’s imagination, but which few comprehend beyond the dichotomies of golden dreamers and paleo-conservative caricatures. 

Coming on like Lonely Planet mixed with Parts Unknown and a good deal of Howard Zinn thrown in the mix, A People’s Guide gives Orange County its due — a place that spawned both the acid-washed hippie pirates known as The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the blow-dried brand of anti-immigration politics en vogue today. 

It’s entertaining and enraging and leaves open the question of whether or not we will ever be integrated. But, Orange County is a great place to put that question to the test. As someone once said, as goes Orange County, so goes the country. 

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. 

So, you’re on the radio with Orange County Line, you have a podcast and write a column for the Los Angeles Times, you’re a lecturer at Orange County College, and now this book. I think I have to start with, I don’t know how you do it, honestly.

Gustavo Arellano: It has to be fun.

Why was this book fun?

Because it’s Orange County; it’s the funnest place on the planet. It’s being able to do something that I really don’t write about anymore. I still tell Orange County stories… But getting into that minutia, and, more importantly, just pissing off the people who need to be pissed off and giving voice to the people who need their voices elevated. Look, I never wanted to leave Orange County, I never wanted to leave OC Weekly, but once you’re no longer in the garden, well, you have to go off into the rest of the world. But you’ll always look back on the garden and try to think: what could be there? 

It’s a unique person who would think of Orange County as the garden, although that was actually how the boosters sold it. But why was it the garden for you?

Well, it’s home. My family’s here, going back to my great-grandpa, obviously with back-and-forth migration to Mexico. But this is where I was born. This is where my mom basically grew up when she finally ended up in Orange County when she was nine years old. So, even though we always had our ties to Mexico, it’s who we were. It’s where I got my political awakening once I realized all the anti-immigration bullshit that comes out of here. It’s where I became a journalist. 

As a reporter, as a writer, I got taught early on that you want to tell the stories that no one else is telling. Number one, it’s easier for you. You make a name for yourself. But a lot of times those stories aren’t being told for a particular reason and as I started getting into it in my career I realized, oh shit, it’s a whole conspiracy; it’s a whole hiding of these subaltern histories. No one’s ever told it and then on top of that, once I had my political awakening about how evil so much of Orange County is, was, and will be, when you would tell those stories, they get pissed off. So, I wasn’t really a brat as a kid but I’m definitely a brat as an adult. The more I can antagonize alt-losers, as I call them now, the better it is for me.

Alt-losers, meaning the so-called alt-right?

Alt-losers, that’s my term for them. 

But it’s deeper than that though, right, because your concerns precede what we think of as the alt-right? They go back, as you discovered during your political awakening, to the very formations of a certain bedrock, almost evangelical conservatism that grew out of here.

Oh, yeah, yeah, but going back to this idea of the garden, I can’t complain about my life here and I think this is why I stayed, because my entire political awakening happened at the very beginning of my junior year in college. But before that it was fine. I was not part of that brain-drain generation where if you were weird — quote/unquote, weird — or liberal, the minute you turned 18 you got the fuck out of town, went to LA, Austin… Portland. I was not part of that. Once I got awakened, then my mission in life was okay, now that I know it’s a bad place, how can I change it so it’s not as much of a bad place?

Do you think you’ve changed it?

I was part of a newspaper that did change Orange County, which is OC Weekly. I am not so presumptuous as to take credit for anything. If people want to say that that’s very kind of them… but in terms of thinking about Orange County, I hope so in this sense that writing books like this one, that I know are going to be taught in colleges, and someone reads something about Orange County and says, “Oh, I didn’t know about this,” and they start thinking about Orange County in a different way.

Well, when you took over the OC Weekly, Orange County needed a new narrative? Did you have a sense of that? 

When I joined OC Weekly, we go into the office and [then-editor Will Swaim] introduces me to someone and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t realize they allowed our delivery drivers to write for us now.” He was trying to be sarcastic, but I’m like, “No.” And I told him flat out, “Mexicans write, too, you know.” 

Again, I did not grow up with any dismissal of who I was because of my Mexican identity. I went to Orange County College, I went to Chapman University, I never had any of that. But now all of a sudden I have it here, at a place I want to be. I’m like, “No, I’m not into this.”

So, I just started to write … I’m like just get to work. I realized again, oh shit, there’s a bunch of Mexicans in Orange County. The OC Weekly’s not writing about this. As far as they know, Orange County is only Costa Mesa, Irvine and Huntington Beach and, every once in a while, Anaheim. Well, I’m going to write about everything else. 

Yeah, the paper under you didn’t just speak to your presumed constituency, it also spoke to those who were watching things change. Some were aware and some were interested in those changes and some were fearful of those changes. Your Ask a Mexican column was brilliant at getting right in the face of all that.

For me, it’s just about the stories. What are the stories that are out there that we’re not telling? Go out and tell them… And then, also, just being the champion that the real Orange County, as I call it, never knew it needed. To this day I still get people sending me emails. “Oh, I used to read OC Weekly all the time. You taught me to be proud of being Mexican in high school.”

But, do I take credit at the OC Weekly for turning Orange County blue? Not really, because we always [took on] the Democratic party, too. But I will take credit for people having pride in Orange County in the sense that they wanted to change it to make it blue. Yeah, we did that, 1,000 percent.

One of the interesting things about A People’s Guide to Orange County is that we get a sense for just how tenuous whatever progress there has been in Orange County is, of how deep the supremacy goes, how deep the whitewashing goes, how deep the history of it all goes. Is that one of the reasons that you wanted to write this book?

This was not my idea. It was originally Elaine Lewinnek who then looped me in, then looped in Thuy Vo Dang. And we all added our own sense of how we see Orange County… For me, it’s more this is a statement, again, against the lords of Orange County—comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. And by just publishing it, we are excavating these stories that have long been hidden and we’re making it public through a small press… and it will circulate to where it needs to be circulated in the hope that this brings solace to people, that this inspires people.

The book in some ways is an almost noir-ish counter-narrative to the idea that history has only been around since Disneyland started. There was history before Europeans got here and the history since Europeans got here is brutal, just like it has been everywhere in America. 

The Orange County narrative historically has been there was nothing before the mission and then after the mission came orange groves. Then, the orange groves were torn up to create Disneyland and here we are today. That was always the narrative of Orange County. Disneyland and boosterism, progress, romanticism, comfort. And you talked earlier about tension and all of this being tenuous and this how I’ve always lived life—all the good stuff that you could possibly create, it could be gone like that. 

Sadly, the past couple of years, I’ve learned it really well. I lost my dream job of editing OC Weekly. I lost my mom. It could be gone. So appreciate the good, celebrate the good, fight for the good because, though Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” it doesn’t always. 

Or it bends and it bends back.

It bends and it bends back and then it twirls. But that should not stop you from trying to fight for that justice. I always get in problems with people about this idea of truth. I believe there is a truth. There is a truth out there. We don’t know what the truth is, but there’s truth with a capital T and I will always live my life trying to reach that truth, whatever it may be. And so, in Orange County, I do think there are some fundamental truths of the place that are not going to change. And my job, when I write about Orange County, is to talk about those truths, as inconvenient as they can be, and to get people to start thinking about that as well. And that’s what I did at OC Weekly. Yeah, I’d go against Latino politicians because they were wrong. They were wrong. I’m not going to subscribe to any narrative that I’m supposed to subscribe to. I’m always going to be pushing for what I see the truth to be.

Well, I think we’re seeing the resistance to inconvenient truths writ large over the last couple years, right? And it’s like we’re at a real turning point about our ability as a country to integrate the inconvenient aspects of truth. That kind of denial is coming to a head and really this book seems to me to be about integrating the truth so it’s a more whole truth. It’s inconvenient because it runs up against the booster narrative.

Nostalgia is very dangerous. It’s very powerful. It’s very insidious. That’s why I never indulge in nostalgia because it’s a bunch of fakery. Most people are going to try to paint the narrative in their favor. It’s like what I always tell people. Everyone has a narrative about themselves and their life is telling that narrative to other people. But for me, I’m like no, no, no, no, no. I need to get to the bottom of the truth, no matter how nasty or inconvenient it may be. 

People want to go with their narrative and I think Orange County can never truly get ahead and become a better place until we let go of our respective narratives and go for the truth. And this book is our attempt to offer people truth.

Why is it so threatening to people?

Because our narratives comfort us. Our narratives shield us from seeing into the gaping maw of who we are. I always liked that term, gaping maw. Just seeing that reflection of who we are. We do not want to see that.

But what is the big ask, for rich people to understand this history? What’s the big ask for them?

To consider their sins.

Is it their sins or is it their—

It is very much their sins because it’s their society that they created and that hoists them up and that created and maintains them. 

So, they feel threatened that what got them to where they are will be taken away if they acknowledge how they got there? 

That to me has always been the only possible explanation and really what they fear. What’s all this fear— the great replacement? What’s all this fear of changing demographics? 

It’s the culture. It is the society that props them up, that they live in, that they are willing participants in and they do not want to reckon with that. And part of that is once people that are not like them start moving to other positions of power, they really do fear. 

This whole issue about critical race theory, ethnic studies, I tell people, “What’s so wrong about learning about ethnic studies?” “Oh, it teaches them victimhood. It teaches them this.” I’m like, “Have you taken an ethnic studies course?” “No.” “I have. I’ve taught ethnic studies courses. You know what it is? You know what ethnic studies are, at its definition? It’s American history because you’re talking about minorities in the United States and you talk about all of that history. So, tell me, why don’t you want to learn about American history, if you love it so much?”

Again, going back to narratives, and especially here in getting back to Orange County boosterism — here is where we created a paradise that is not Los Angeles. Are you seeing the commercials that Todd Spitzer is putting out with this whole #NoLAinOC? Have you heard any of that? Todd Spitzer, the district attorney of Orange County, his full campaign slogan this year is #NoLAinOC… He does not want the liberalism. 

So, we’re not going to import LA liberalism? We’re not even going to inconvenience our paradise by acknowledging a deadly pandemic.

We have to deny it because the truth is so disruptive to our sense of security and sense of narrative and sense of exceptionalism. We have to deny it. It’s Orange County… and this book does a great job of just [challenging] that train of thought. When we had the 1936 Citrus War, where you had over 3,000 Mexican orange pickers wanting to strike to form a union, of course everyone got together and ruthlessly crushed it because you can’t have this. You are inconveniencing us! You’re asking for a union and more money. No, you’re Mexicans, you don’t deserve it. 

In Orange County, you are not seen. It’s the whole erasure. It’s my big critique of Orange County histography and I’ve gotten in fights with historians about this. It’s like, if you read the Santa Ana history books that there are, I want to say up until 2010 (again, you have now more and really good scholarship coming out) if you read all the specifically Santa Ana history books, they would all tell you the story of this large gentleman who used to go to the movie theater here at the Yost and that he had a very distinctive laugh. Literally, multiple Santa Ana history books would tell you that story. Okay, it’s cute, whatever, but where is the story of any Mexicans? None. 

And what was he meant to represent, that big garrulous personification of friendly Orange County?

Ye olden days of wholesome, clean, Santa Ana. Santa Ana: the golden city. But in one of the books by Adeline Pleasants, she wrote proudly about how Orange County had a vigilante committee that would go around lynching. She didn’t say Mexicans, but we know it was the Mexicans, and she said, “We know who these men are but we’re not going to document their names for here.” And said, at some point, someone should do a history about this. 

We know this was a place that was very adamant about not celebrating anything that didn’t fit into the booster narrative, but, more, didn’t conform to the delusions of grandeur that was here.

Well, Orange County despite its reputation for being a bland, monoculture, has also been such an incubator in other ways like music, style — whether it’s punk, surf or skate culture — it has been massively influential in that way. Do you have any hope that Orange County will have any culture influence in the way this book is getting at — a reckoning between the buried past and the demographic future?

That’s the hope. That’s the hope that this younger generation, that people, especially in minority communities, see what happened in Orange County and think it can happen there.

But, I think we still need to solve the problem of Orange County before we start seeing a migration of our ideas in other places, but it’s happening. Look at what happened with SB 1070 [2010 Arizona legislation that harshly criminalized illegal immigration] and then there was a counterattack against SB 1070. Now, Arizona’s becoming a little bit more blue, slowly but surely. And they obviously, on both sides, took the lessons of Prop. 187, which happened here. But, we’re still in that infancy of, okay, if old Orange County could be Prop. 187, what is this new Orange County? We’re still in that infancy.

Do you think old Orange County is defeated?

Oh, no, but despite my pessimistic thoughts on Orange County’s essence, you have to remain an optimist because if you don’t have optimism then what do you have? If you don’t have hope then what do you have?

But you’re not just clinging to optimism. You love this place.

Of course. Again, this is home. This is my wife’s store. She, in her own way, is fighting against the encroaching gentrification of this place… It’s what being a lifer’s about, and that’s what I hope to be — a lifer, here. 

A People’s Guide to Orange County by Elaine Lewinnek, Gustavo Arellano and Thuy Vo Dang is available here.