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While the two presidential candidates get ready for their final debate tonight, you may recall their first meeting on a national forum was at Saddleback Church in Orange County. Barack Obama was criticized for accepting the invitation in America’s most Republican county. Today we’ll spend the hour looking at the significance of Orange County and it’s place in the national political discourse with life long OC resident and columnist of Ask a Mexican, Gustavo Arellano. Gustavo is a staff writer with OC Weekly, and his first book was based on his column, “¡Ask a Mexican!” His second book, which was just published is called Orange County: A Personal History. In it, he chronicles the story of his family’s assimilation into American culture, while also recounting a historical narrative of OC.

GUEST: Gustavo Arellano, author of “Orange County: A Personal History” and “Ask a Mexican,” columnist with the OC Weekly

Rough Transcript

Kolhatkar: Gustavo is a frequent guest here on Uprising and KPFK. I’m very pleased to have him in studio for me this hour. Welcome back to Uprising, Gustavo.

Arellano: Gracias, as always for having me.

Kolhatkar: Let’s talk a little bit about how Orange County figures into the national dialog, particularly around the elections. As I mentioned, Saddleback Church was the first national forum where the two candidates met, and Barack Obama was criticized for accepting this invitation.

Arellano: The reason why we have the modern-day Republican Party—the party of war, the party of corruption, the party of just absolute sleaze—is because of Orange County. The Reagan Revolution was really of [inaudible word] who came from Orange County, and its roots are in Orange County. In the book I devote an entire chapter, actually, to the way conservative politics in Orange County has influenced the United States.

The start of this really goes all the way back to the founding of the Lincoln Club in 1963. The Lincoln Club, nowadays, is probably the most influential political group in the United States. They say it themselves, too, that they’re the most influential group. But they’re the reason why McCain was able to win because of the millions of dollars that he was able to raise in Orange County, and also because the folks at the Lincoln Club in Orange Club were able to put the kibosh on some of the candidates that were going to be McCain’s opposition.

Kolhatkar: So the Lincoln Club has this interesting story, but John McCain himself, who’s come to Orange County, he’s raised money in Orange County—is this a place in which he is embraced? I mean we look at the state of California, which is generally a blue state, but there’s lots of little red regions, and we don’t think about that when we see it broken up by district. Is Orange County the reddest of the red regions?

Arellano: The Republican Party of Orange County calls Orange County the most Republican county in the country with an exclamation point, and it is. California very much is a blue state, and it does have its red regions. For national politics, California is always going to swing Democrat, but that doesn’t stop GOP candidates—whether they be small elections in other places or even small elections in California—to come to Orange County, to come specifically to raise money, to go before the Lincoln Club and try to establish their conservative credentials .

The reason Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California is because the Lincoln Club got behind him. Well first of all, they funded the recall, and then they picked on Arnold Schwarzenegger to do it. And actually—I mention this in the book—the conspiracy theory with Schwarzenegger is that he was picked to be governor of California years before. I think it was, it might have been 2001, I can’t remember, but Chapman University, my alma mater, gave Schwarzenegger an honorary doctorate, and a lot of the main donors and people who sit on the board at Chapman also happen to be members of the Lincoln Club. So for Schwarzenegger, who has no academic credentials whatsoever, to get an honorary doctorate, that wasn’t just a way to get themselves into the news. I really think it was a way to start putting Schwarzenegger up as somebody who’s little bit more serious than coming out and pumping iron in the Terminator movies.

Kolhatkar: [Laughs.] So how did Orange County get to be so Republican? What are the socio-economic factors? You trace this in your book quite well, a lot of it having to do with real estate.

Arellano: From the very beginning Orange County has been a place almost like the old Californios, where they had people who owned big farms having to exploit workers. And of course, in Orange County that has always been Californios versus Mexicans. So up until the 1950s, most of the money was coming from these orange farmers, but after the 1950s, once real estate starts coming into play, you start getting people with a lot of money, a lot of influence, and them not afraid to start spreading the influence.

Walter Knott, the name behind Knott’s Berry Farm and Halloween Haunt, that’s a big thing right now… Well Walter Knott started off as a farmer but got all his millions and started publishing these small little tracts talking about getting the United States out of the United Nations and so forth. But him and other business leaders in Orange County in the 1960s started the Lincoln Club because they felt that the Republican Party in Orange County was too fractured, and the Democrats were able to win. Actually, that happened after the ’62 gubernatorial race, where Richard Nixon came out of nowhere, stole the Republican nomination from a much harder conservative named Joe Shell, and all the party stalwarts didn’t want Nixon to win.

After that in 1963, the Lincoln Club came up and decided to never again allow the GOP to fracture. And ever since then, the Republican Party has always been relatively united in conservative causes in California.

Kolhatkar: My guest is Gustavo Arellano, if you’re just tuning in. And of course he’s a familiar voice on radio in Southern California and especially here at KPFK, where we always love having him on. His prolific, encyclopedic, historical knowledge not only of Orange County but of all things Latino and related.

His personal history and that of his family is very much interwoven into the history of Orange County, and it’s all chronicled in his latest book Orange County: A Personal History… The Anaheim Mariachi Festival is itself quite significant in Anaheim?

Arellano: I think it’s amazing that Anaheim is having a mariachi festival at all because Anaheim has always had its own interesting relationship with Mexicans. And I can say that because my family goes back four generations there. In the early 1900s they lived in segregated communities, in the 1960s they were getting beat up all over the place. And what’s most amazing, this is being held at the Heritage Forum, and the Heritage Forum is just couple blocks away from Pearson Park. Pearson Park is this really beautiful place in Southern California that happened to have the largest Klan rally ever in the history of Southern California.

Pearson Park has this little cactus garden—anybody from Anaheim knows about this—that was done by a man named Rudy Boysen. Rudy Boysen is a beloved figure in Anaheim because he was a park superintendent for many, many years. What people don’t say about Rudy Boysen, though, was that he was a segregationist. From the 1930s to the 1950s Mexicans could only swim in the pool at Pearson Park the day before they were going to clean the swimming pool. And not only that, the only place Mexicans could go in Pearson Park was this little fenced-off area.

One time some activists dared go off, way off, the fenced-off area. Rudy Boysen said, “What are you doing out of there?” and the Mexicans said, “Well we don’t want to be fenced in like animals anymore.” And so Rudy Boysen had them arrested.

Kolhatkar: Well that’s sort of a typical thing, I suppose, from the history of Orange County.

Well, the Anaheim Mariachi Festival is being headlined by Los Camperos. They’re apparently apparently best known for the greatest selling mariachi album of all time. I am not, I have to confess, a mariachi expert.

Arellano: Conciones de Mi Padre by Linda Ronstadt. They were the people who backed Linda Ronstadt. Anybody who grew up in Southern California over the last 20 years, you’ve seen her special on KCET where she comes out in these big China Poblana dresses singing these songs from her Mexican heritage, which up until that point she never had really embraced, even though she’s from Tuscon and comes from a German-Mexican family.

Kolhatkar: Gustavo, do you see a lot of McCain-Palin signs on the lawns of OC these days?

Arellano: Everywhere, everywhere. The choice of Palin as a vice-presidential nominee was perfect for people from Orange County, for people like Orange County: the religious right, the Holy Rollers, basically–the people who are just crazily-conservative whack jobs, frankly.

Kolhatkar: [Laughs.] How do you get away with saying this stuff being from Orange County?

Arellano: Because it’s the truth. Those folks even know it. You look at Republican Party in Orange County, the Holy Rollers and what they represent and what they’ve done, their legacy is not really nice. And I talk about it in the book.

It’s funny because my feedback has been very, very positive. The only people who don’t like the book, though, are those who are supposed to not like it. So the reviewer of the Orange County Register said I was very negative about Orange County. Same thing with Orange Coast Magazine, which is one of the lifestyle magazines. “Oh, it seems like Gustavo doesn’t like anybody, and he just bashes again and again.” But the people that I bash in the book are—uh, hello?–people like Richard Nixon; like Bob Dornan; Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel; all these evil, evil people. And the people who are good, well you have to give them praise.

Kolhatkar: So clearly the religious conservatives in Orange County were happy about Palin, who is, quite frankly, a little crazy, right?

Arellano: She’s a lot of fun.

Kolhatkar: Yeah, I mean she went to a Bible Church, there are these videos on You Tube about her being… anointed–is that the right word?–against witchcraft from her pastor. We hear so much about Jeremiah Wright but not about Palin’s pastor, and there’s probably a reason why we’re not hearing much about it. And this fits right into Orange County. I mean she’s from Alaska, but she could be from OC?

Arellano: She’s from the Assemblies of God, that’s a Pentecostal ministry. The one big connection that Assemblies of God has in Orange County is they do have some congregations there, but from that denomination came Paul and Jan Crouch from Trinity Broadcasting Network, which is the largest tele-evangelical network in the world. They’re the charlatans who tell poor listeners, “If you give me one dollar, God will give you back $100.” You want to talk about fund raising, at least fund raising here at KPFK is moral. On TBN, which makes billions of dollars, it’s absolutely amoral. It’s called the Prosperity Gospel.

Kolhatkar: Right, and unfortunately prosperity is something that not many of us are enjoying these days. Now you mentioned homophobia. Proposition 8 on this year’s ballot is a very scary proposition. It would would amend the California Constitution to basically permanently ban same sex marriage in the state. The proposition was losing, but because of some very, very… uh, let’s just say, misguided ads, the proposition now, unfortunately, seems to be winning. So what is Orange County’s connection to Prop. 8?

Arellano: . . . One of the main fund raisers for this—I can’t remember the name of the group, they’re based in Santa Ana. They’re actually a national group that goes around trying to limit marriage as between a man and a woman. Their headquarters for California is actually here in Santa Ana, but the bigger connection is a man named Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. Now he’s not the Ahmanson behind the Ahmanson Theater and so much of the philanthropic things in Southern California. That was his dad, and he was the man behind Home Savings and Loans. Maybe some of the folks out there remember that.

Howard Ahmanson, Jr. is one of the most influential Christians in the country, and no one knows about him. He lives in Newport Beach, suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome, so he really doesn’t try to go out there. But he funds everything. When Time Magazine released a list of the 25 most influential evangelicals in the United States a couple years ago, him and his wife were just listed as the financiers. The creationism movement–funded by Ahmanson; Proposition 8—he, from his his own organization, gave $500,000 towards this; the split in the Episcopal Church when they ordained a gay bishop…

Kolhatkar: …who we had on our program, Gene Robinson.

Arellano: Gene Robinson, yeah. Well that split was funded by Howard Ahmanson.

Kolhatkar: Wow.

Arellano: And it’s funny because he’s actually a fan of Ask a Mexican of all the crazy things in the world. So I call him my pal even though he’s horribly misguided in giving money to all these homophobic organizations.

Kolhatkar: So Gustavo, talking about being pals with somebody like Ahmanson, Sarah Palin who talked about Obama paling around with terrorists, made that infamous statement in Orange County or organized by the Orange County Republican Party. Again, this is the kind of thing that I suppose these folks feel comfortable saying in Orange County because this is home territory for them.

Arellano: Well, Ronald Reagan once said of Orange County, it’s a place where all good Republicans go to die.

Kolhatkar: Right.

Arellano: And the GOP loves to have them come to Orange County. Sarah Palin originally was supposed to speak, actually at the household of I think it was Paul Folino or one of the big fund-raisers for the GOP. Then it just got too popular; then they moved her over to the Segerstrom Performing Arts Center, which is in Costa Mesa right across the street from the South Coast Plaza; then they tried moving her over to the Orange County Fairgrounds. But there was just so much demand that they put her over in Carson at the Home Depot Center, specifically the tennis courts.

That got a lot of attention, but after that she went back down to Segerstrom Hall to fund-raise, and I don’t know how much money she made, but she made a lot.

Actually, her biggest advocate out there right now is conservative talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt Hugh Hewitt was also the man who tried to get Mitt Romney into the White House. There’s actually a curse called the Hewitt Curse that if he gets behind a candidate, they lose. So for him to be behind Palin, she’s probably going to lose, and thank God for that. He was trying to sell a book called How Sarah Palin Won the Election and Saved America. [Laughter.] No publisher has bought that book for obvious reasons.

Kolhatkar: And Orange County, Gustavo, has a real habit of creating myths about itself, and I want to get to that in just a moment, but we’re talking about Sarah Palin feeling comfortable using these terms “Obama palling around with terrorists.” A few years ago, John McCain, right before he went to an OC rally, felt comfortable using an overtly racist epithet against Vietnamese, right before he went to a very infamous Orange County rally. Tell us us that story.

Arellano: What happened was: somebody asked him about his captors in North Vietnam, and John McCain said, “Oh yeah, they’re just gooks, and I call them gooks all the time, and don’t mind saying that word.” And the media of course reported that saying that “He’s using this racist language.” And McCain defended it. And so he came to Orange County, specifically to Little Saigon, which has the largest community of Vietnamese outside Vietnam in the world. You would expect those Vietnamese to be very upset with him. No, no, they cheered him on–except for a small little group of Vietnamese students, most of them coming from UCI. And so they stood silently outside the the rally with shirts that said American Gook. They were trying to get John McCain to apologize. Rather than the Vietnamese community siding with those college students, they spat upon them, they urinated on these students…

Kolhatkar: They urinated on the students?!

Arellano: Yeah, they hurled all these invectives upon these students, and of course the students eventually had to get away from there. Only in Orange County [laughs] can you have minorities having racial slurs used against them by a politician, and the minorities not only [inaudible] and actually justified his racism—only in Orange County.

Kolhatkar: You mentioned UCI. This is considered by many of those right wing conservatives as sort of a hotbed student terrorism, right? [Laughs.]

Arellano: David Horowitz and all these other organizations has called UCI the most anti-Semitic campus in the country. UCI has the Muslim student union there specifically, but they’ve had some pretty crazy guest speakers. But to have some guest speakers then make the leap to say, “Oh, they’re from Hamas,” or “They’re a front for these terrorist organizations.” It’s absolutely insane.

And to “combat hate” so to speak, the conservatives there went so far as to show those offensive cartoons of the prophet Mohammad that got at people in Denmark so much. And they did that specifically. They were like: “We know we’re going to offend you Muslims, but we’re just going to have a debate about free speech. It’s okay if we’re offending your religion and sensibilities because you’re all terrorists anyway.”

Kolhatkar: A little bit about your family, Gustavo. You’ve told the story of your father and how he came to this country many times in public forums. Explain how you your family’s story is so typical of the stories of so many immigrant families and Latino families in Orange County. And this is a history that Orange County conservatives don’t really want to hear. We get this impression of OC being a very white county, but of course it’s not, it’s extremely brown.

Arellano: Well basically my family were both newbies and old-timers to Orange County. And Mexicans will always be that. Mexicans, of course, have been in Orange County since the very foundation. They’re the ones who have always been the very backbone of the Orange County economy. Back when we had agriculture, it was Mexicans who picked all the crops. Then, of course, now when it comes to office parks and suburban communities it’s Mexicans mowing the lawns, cleaning up the offices. You see that again and again and again. But we’re always invisible, and there’s never been any effort whatsoever by the chroniclers of Orange County’s past to tell that story. It’s sad. The very first book I could think of to chronicle Orange County’s Mexican past was one written by a professor from UC Irvine, Gilbert Gonzales, an amazing book called Labor and Community, a critical view of the citrus industry. He actually talks about them. This is the first in hundreds and hundreds of books in over a century of Orange County’s history that Latinos were ever really told.

Mendez versus Westminster, the landmark desegregation case that served as a precursor to Brown versus Board of Education. One of the daughters of the Mendez family only found out that history when she went to UC Riverside in the 1970s and read a book by Carey McWilliams called North from Mexico. She mentioned it there. It took a chronicler outside of Orange County to tell story of Mendez versus Westminster to the Mendez children. It’s just so amazing and so typical of the narratives of Orange County and how those narratives are zealously guarded by a certain segment of the community. And if you try to tell them otherwise, they get upset with you. They say: “We don’t talk about that because, well, it’s never really been there. We never really knew about it.”

Kolhatkar: Gustavo, in your book you have a whole chapter called My Mexican Awakening. What was this awakening? Was this this epiphany moment for you?

Arellano: It was when I finally realized that to be Mexican in Orange County was a bad thing, was looked down upon. Growing up I basically lived in a Mexican village in the United States. As I talk about it in the book, my mom and dad’s villages in Zacatecas Mexico, they hemorrhaged all their residents to the United States, especially in my mom’s village, who all came to Anaheim. So growing up, my school was about 90% Mexican–the elementary school and the junior high and high school. So I just grew up thinking, “ah, Mexican’s perfectly fine.”

Kolhatkar: And there were kids whose parent were from the same village.

Arellano: A lot of them, hundreds of them were kids from the same village. So we just assumed being Mexican, being bilingual, having immigrant parents, “okay that’s perfectly fine,” or “that’s acceptable.” But starting in 1994 with Proposition 187, a whole basket full of ant-immigrant resolutions—which started, of course, in Orange County—that’s when I was walking through Anaheim High School, and somebody yelled out at me, “187!!!” It was these typical Huntington Beach-style bros with the glasses and the shaved heads driving the huge pickup truck. I wondered, “ What’s 187?” That’s when I found out about it.

But I didn’t really get radicalized until 1999, when there was a school board trustee of the Anaheim [Union] High School District who proposed suing Mexico $50 million for educating illegal immigrants. Of course now you see that tried all across the country, but again, it all started in Orange County.1

Kolhatkar: It all started in Orange County. So much starts in Orange County much of that Orange County doesn’t want credit for and some that it does… That’s not to say that OC is the only place that crazy things come out of.

Arellano: No, we just have the craziest things.

Kolhatkar: Perhaps one end of the spectrum…

Arellano: Yeah, if you’re from Orange County, you get the truth. If you hate Orange County, this book just gives you more reasons to hate Orange County. But of course not every thing’s bad about Orange County. The very fact that this county seat now is the most Mexican city in the United States to me the most wonderful, uh—I can’t say that curse word—against the establishment of Orange County, against everything that is wrong with this country, with this state, with this region.

Kolhatkar: So let’s talk about immigration in general and why you think it hasn’t really made much of a dent in this year’s presidential election campaign. We often expect it to be a major focus, and with the economy tanking so badly, I expected it to be a bigger focus than it is.

Arellano: Here in Southern California we are just overwhelmed by the last gasps of our racist past saying, “Oh my gosh, the Mexico invasion’s taking over, just really choking us.” That might win local elections, but on a national level it’s just not going to win. The Democratic and Republican part[ies] realize that if you try to do that scorched-earth campaign against immigrants, Latinos, who make up a significant minority in a lot of swing states [aren’t] going to stand with it. There are a lot of racist Latinos, not all of them live in Orange County, although a big chunk do. It’s not a campaign issue that will win.

Two-thousand and six I think was the height of the modern know-nothing movement. Now people are realizing: “Well look, Latinos, immigrants, undocumented workers, they’re a part of this economy. You try to deport them, and if you think the economy is tanking now, oh it’ll tank more. It really will tank more.”

Kolhatkar: So Gustavo, we’re talking about the economy, we’re talking about immigrants, and it seems as though the Latino vote is finally being taken seriously. The Latino vote is swaying in which direction these days?

Arellano: Democrat, Democrat, of course. Again this goes back to Orange County. The Orange County Republicans, they’ve always viewed immigration as a wedge issue, and it’s something that always wins them. But it’s just not something that translates onto the national levels.

So you could have people like my cousins—my cousins are actually kind of scary. They would not be listening to KPFK. In fact they like KFI and the other conservative whack-job talk stations. And they’re very Republican—and this happens happens with a lot of Latinos—except when it comes to the issue of immigration. For a lot of Latinos, even if they might be conservative, their parents are immigrants. So to hear Republicans bash on immigrants, they say: “Wait, wait, wait. You’re bashing my family, you’re bashing the people who have come to this country…“

Kolhatkar: “…my neighbors…”

Arellano: “…my neighbors, you’ve bashed these people who are the backbone of the economy.” So they’ll vote Democrat by default, even if they’re not too thrilled with the Democratic Party. With the two-party system being how it is in this country the only place they really can go, at least in their mind, is Democrat.

Kolhatkar: And of course Orange County is home to the Minuteman Project. . . .

Arellano: We started the Minuteman Project, California Coalition for Immigration Reform, a hate watch group. They created Proposition 187. Just so much fun in Orange County.

Kolhatkar: Amazing! When you start reading Gustavo’s and hear him speak, [it’s] amazing how Orange County’s connected to the national political scene, including the subprime mortgage aspect of the economic crisis. What’s the OC connection there?

Arellano: Really subprime loans were created by a man named Roland Arnall, who was based out of Los Angeles, but he created a company called Long Beach Savings & Loan. There he trained a lot of the people who would then go on and create a lot of subprime mortgage lenders. Long Beach Savings & Loan got so big that it split up in two parts. Ameriquest, which no longer exists, was the largest subprime mortgage lender. That was based in the City of Orange. And Washington Mutual’s subprime mortgage lending arm. And of course Washington Mutual, which happens to be my bank, is the largest failure in American history. And Roland Arnall eventually became the ambassador to the Netherlands. He’s no longer with us, and thank God for that.

Kolhatkar: So in the end all paths lead to Orange County, it seems.

Arellano: All the evil paths at least, and some of the good.

Kolhatkar: Gustavo, could you read a little bit from the opening of your book, Orange County: A Personal History, for our listeners?

Arellano: Sure. This is from the introduction [Some of this reading differs from the introduction printed in the book.]: “My family has witnessed the transformation of Orange County from a place where segregation forced my great-grandfather and grandfather to flee for their lives from flying potatoes, to my mother dropping out of school in ninth grade to pick strawberries for a living, to me getting paid much dinero by a New York publishing company to present a life experience in county history. I know it’s crucial to understanding America to a country that might not want to believe it. Believe it.

“Families like mine are integral to this equation in that we qualify as old-timers while at the same time as the county’s perpetual outsiders and the country’s new-found menace. We are natives, we are the ruin, we are the Zeligs, participating in or weathering many of the county’s crucial moments, partners in the forging of this Brave New America, one that extends all the way to two tiny mountain villages in Central Mexico.

“The structure of Orange County is simple: odd chapters constitute my family’s history and my memoir, even chapters tell the county’s history, and one compliments the other. Sprinkled throughout are blurbs that point out Orange County’s cities and major points. Consider them the jalapeños on the nachos. [Laughter.] Read this book as a guide to the past and a manual for the future. As Orange County goes, so goes my family, and as my family has traversed through a century of assimilation and resistance, so will the United States–not always the easiest of transitions but nevertheless always moving forward. Toward the fruit of knowledge—not an apple but an orange. Picked by a Mexican, of course.”

Kolhatkar: “Picked by a Mexican” [laughs]. Gustavo Arellano, my guest for the hour, reading from his brand new book Orange County: A Personal History. And if you want to learn about the history of Orange County, but even broader than that, if you want to learn about the origins of the conservative movements and many, many aspects of the conservative movement—including religious conservatism, including immigrant bashing, all of these various aspects of politics that we read about in the national scene–you’ll learn about it in this fascinating book that is so entertaining to read. What Gustavo read is just a taste of it, but that’s how the book reads.

This is not the kind of history book that you were made to read in high school. This is a wonderfully-written personal history. It’s in the tradition of An Oral History or A People’s History, and it is very fascinating.

And there’s also restaurant reviews, Gustavo?

Arellano: Well, I’m the food editor of the OC Weekly, and I could never do a book without talking about restaurants. This is specific for the people in Orange County. For every city in Orange County I give what I think is the best restaurant. I tell you the address, why it’s so good, and so forth. That’s actually proven to be really popular. People say, “I love the history, I love your family’s history, but I love the restaurant recommendations even better.”

Kolhatkar: And you can do a Gustavo Arellano restaurant tour of Orange County [laughs], with this book in hand and go to all the restaurants that Gustavo recommends. I want to ask you, Gustavo, in terms of what we’re going to be seeing between now and this election. People are talking about the October Surprise, “when is the October Surprise going to come?” What do you think is going to happen between now and October? And what should we be expecting from Orange County, if anything?

Arellano: Millions upon millions of dollars in donations to the McCain camp. You’ll probably see McCain come to Orange County. The Republicans always have to come to Orange County at one point. Palin tried to do it, but now it’s going to be McCain—even though California obviously is going to vote for Obama or going to go toward Obama’s way.

In terms of an October Surprise, I really don’t think McCain has one. They’ve tried everything, they’ve thrown everything against Obama: connection to terrorists, everything from terrorist fist pound, to Jeremiah Wright, to Barack Hussein Obama—is he really a Muslim? As if being a Muslim is somehow the worst thing possible. They’ve tried everything, and nothing has seemed to stick. I really don’t see anything worse than what they’ve already tried to do because they’ve already gone through the dregs of the dregs.

…

Kolhatkar: Gustavo, I want to, in the last few minutes of this program, ask you to talk a little bit more about some of the other immigrant communities that you do mention in your book. Orange County is very brown, but there are lots of other immigrant communities. Interestingly enough, in terms of people of color, there’s not too many African Americans in Orange County, but there are other people of color from various countries.

Arellano: We have the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam in the world; we have the largest community of Koreans in the west coast outside of Korea Town here; we have the largest community of Arabs outside of the Detroit area in the United States; we have significant populations of Muslims, of Somalis, of Romanians even—we even have Romanians. Nobody ever thinks of white people as immigrants anymore, but we have Romanian, most of them living in Anaheim. Samoans.

Orange County now is majority-minority. The white folks make up of less than 50% of the community. And I would even say that number is skewed because Persians and Arabs [are] considered to be white by the American Census, but they’re definitely not white.

The only time I ever see a majority white people is if I’m in Newport Beach or South County. Even in Irvine I mostly see Persians and Koreans and Vietnamese. In Santa Ana and Anaheim I could go days without seeing a white person, not that I’m celebrating that, but it’s just the truth.

Kolhatkar: You in your book calling Orange County “this Eden by the coast, Gomorrah by the sea–my Paradise, my Hell, home.” Is your book something that is going to attract tourists into Orange County or scare them away?

Arellano: I think it’s going to be an illuminating light. My book is definitely not approved by the Orange County Travel Bureau, or the Tourism Council, or whatever, but it’s the necessary narrative to counteract all the shameless propaganda that Orange County has hoisted on the rest of the country for over a century—whether it be through orange crate labels in the 1920s, to the television shows of today, to the statue of John Wayne. In fact to me the modern-day Orange County is so depraved—at least, the bad parts are so bad—that John Wayne Airport…I actually have pity for John Wayne.

You go through college, and you hate him because he stands for everything that’s wrong with White Republican America. But John Wayne ultimately is a sympathetic figure in Orange County’s narrative. So John Wayne always pops up again and again in the book in a sympathetic light.

Kolhatkar: Hm. Now you say they’re trying to kill John Wayne again in your chapter entitled The Real, Real Orange County. Real or About Those Stupid Television Shows, Why Orange County is Hip, And What’s Really Real, and What’s Somewhat Real for Real. Oh my goodness.

Arellano: What a tongue-twister.

Kolhatkar: Yeah, what’s that all about?

Arellano: John Wayne Airport. There’s been a couple of efforts over the years to rename John [Wayne] Airport either the OC Airport or Orange County Airport, and it’s usually done by people who say, “Well, John Wayne isn’t hip anymore.“ The funny thing with that airport, it used to be called the Orange County Airport, but after Wayne’s death, the supervisor Tom Riley at the time, he [re]named it John Wayne without telling anybody else. So I think it was great because to have an airport called John Wayne in Orange County tells you a lot of what you need to know about Orange County. So the fact that there’s newbies, really they’re [inaudible word] , people who are trying to change the name of John Wayne. They’re selling Orange County’s heritage, good and bad, down the river just to be more popular. Ultimately, though, that’s the other competing faction for Orange County’s soul, which is the tourism industry, the propaganda industry, saying: “Oh, Orange County’s beautiful, beautiful. We don’t need John Wayne anymore because he no longer has any hip quota.” If you’re going to sell part of your heritage, whether it’s good or bad, for trying to be hip, it’s horrible.

Same thing when it comes to our Orange Groves. Over the summer the city of San Juan Capistrano kicked off an 85-year-old man named Ignacio Lujano from one of the last orange grove in Orange County, 40 acres. He had taken care of this orange grove for the past 40 years. The city owned the grove, and they kicked him out because they wanted to create a maintenance yard on that orange grove so they could take care of the rest of the open space in San Juan Capistrano. So they were basically sacrificing their heritage so they could make it more touristy and more nice for the rest of the city. It’s horrible, it’s so Orange County.

Special Thanks to Ross Plesset for transcribing this interview