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Orange County: A Personal History, by Gustavo Arellano
Download PDF Orange County: A Personal History, by Gustavo Arellano
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The story began in 1918, when Gustavo Arellano's great-grandfather and grandfather arrived in the United States, only to be met with flying potatoes. They ran, and hid, and then went to work in Orange County's citrus groves, where, eventually, thousands of fellow Mexican villagers joined them. Gustavo was born sixty years later, the son of a tomato canner who dropped out of school in the ninth grade and an illegal immigrant who snuck into this country in the trunk of a Chevy. Meanwhile, Orange County changed radically, from a bucolic paradise of orange groves to the land where good Republicans go to die, American Christianity blossoms, and way too many bad television shows are green-lit.
Part personal narrative, part cultural history, Orange County is the outrageous and true story of the man behind the wildly popular and controversial column ¡Ask a Mexican! and the locale that spawned him. It is a tale of growing up in an immigrant enclave in a crime-ridden neighborhood, but also in a promised land, a place that has nourished America's soul and Gustavo's family, both in this country and back in Mexico, for a century.
Nationally bestselling author, syndicated columnist, and the spiciest voice of the Mexican-American community, Gustavo Arellano delivers the hilarious and poignant follow-up to ¡Ask a Mexican!, his critically acclaimed debut. Orange County not only weaves Gustavo's family story with the history of Orange County and the modern Mexican-immigrant experience but also offers sharp, caliente insights into a wide range of political, cultural, and social issues.
- Sales Rank: #385313 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Scribner
- Published on: 2008-09-16
- Released on: 2008-09-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 1.00" w x 5.50" l, .98 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Readers get two stories for the price of one in this witty and informative memoir. Journalist Arellano (¡Ask a Mexican!) chronicles the sweet-and-sour story of his family's assimilation into American culture, while also recounting a historical narrative at odds with the bucolic ideal of a place that's been mythologized for decades. We're so American, so Orange County, that we're even prone to romanticize a past that never existed. Arellano's structure keeps the narrative moving along at a snappy pace, alternating the threads of the story so odd chapters constitute the memoir, even chapters tell the history, and one complements the other. Readers get solid background on the beginning of master-planned communities during the 1920s, the little remembered Citrus War, Orange County's embarrassing 1994 bankruptcy and special mix of conservatism coupled with a dollop of big-time religion. A 2005 Harper's article named Orange County the country's second hotbed of evangelical Christianity after Colorado Springs, Arellano writes, and of the 100 megachurches in the U.S. with the largest congregations, four are in Orange County. Arellano explores a place he calls the Petri dish for America's continuing democratic experiment and delivers a prescient view of the new American landscape. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Gustavo Arellano’s ¡Ask a Mexican! column has a circulation of more than two million in thirty-eight markets (and counting). He has received the President’s Award from the Los Angeles Press Club, an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and a 2008 Latino Spirit Award from the California State legislature. Arellano has appeared on the Today show, Nightline, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and The Colbert Report. For more information, visit AskAMexican.net.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
This Is How We Do It in the OC
(Don't Call It That)
I've seen the Mexican future of this country, the coming Reconquista -- and it's absolutely banal.
Our looming takeover is spreading across America and will resemble the neighborhood where my parents live in Anaheim, California, Mexico. The houses here all feature the same basic design: three bedrooms, two baths, a long living room connected to the dining room, divided from the kitchen by a bar. Half of the houses keep pools, the others backyards. Garages jut out from the dining room. Depending on the garage's layout, the driveway either gently curves or rises upward at a dramatic angle, guaranteeing your car's undercarriage a daily scratch. About twenty years ago, this section of Anaheim was mostly white, baby boomers and their parents. Today? All Latino, save for the white man across the street who let his yard turn brown years ago.
Trembling yet? Really, the only way you would know it's a Latino neighborhood is due to a very American phenomenon called conspicuous consumption. Every house has at least four cars parked outside: all nice, mostly large SUVs with a smattering of Toyotas occasionally parked on front lawns. Those lawns feature palm trees or roses -- no cactuses yet -- and the richer households erect ornate fountains and stonework to rival the Alhambra. No Mexican flags flutter above doorways, no roosters crow at dawn -- at least not since Dad gave ours away because the cock kept assaulting dogs.
I moved out a couple of years ago at age twenty-seven, no longer content to share a bunk bed with my teenage brother. But a Mexican mother's breakfast beckons even the most prodigal of sons, so I return every Sunday morning to marvel at how Ozzie and Harriet our lives are -- how absolutely banal. The Mexican conquest of the United States might not get televised, but it comes with a steaming bowl of menudo.
Don't believe me? Consider one Sunday, around November 2007.
I speed in around nine thirty in the morning, and damnit! No one is home.
Start dialing cell phones. Elsa, my school administrator of a sister, is organizing workshops for college-bound students -- most of them Vietnamese, in a school that's majority Latino. Twenty-one-year-old Alejandrina settles in for a Starbucks study session -- she wants to be a nurse, or maybe a teacher. Gabriel, the seventeen-year-old baby of our clan, who already towers over us all, is with Mom at a dentist's appointment. My father? No answer.
Where's the remote? The usual detritus of Householdus americanus clutters the living room -- water bottles, newspapers, backpacks. A Guitar Hero ax stands by the marbled fireplace. Jesus looms over me in the form of a huge oil painting bought at the swap meet -- still don't know why Mami replaced our family portrait in favor of the Savior, considering she shows up at Mass as often as a Jew. To my right in a bookcase are small framed portraits of Elsa in her cap-and-gown from the University of California, Los Angeles, Alejandrina's high school graduation picture, and a younger Gabriel wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap (he's a Los Angeles Dodgers fan now -- ah, front-runners). Ken Burns's Baseball series is on the top shelf, missing episode 7. And smack-dab in the middle is a photo of me grinning, holding a half-eaten tamale. Speaking of tamales, I toss three in the microwave -- one dessert, one pork, one made with cheese, chicken, and jalapeños, all leftovers from our Thanksgiving dinner.
The doorbell rings. It's my father. He's dressed for work -- jeans, cowboy boots, baseball cap -- and his smile bends an increasingly salt-and-pepper mustache.
"Wassappenin', macho man?" Papi booms in heavily accented English. I turn away, embarrassed. "Ven, ven, ven -- gimme a handchake!" We embrace. He beams.
"¿Dónde estaba?" I ask. "Where were you?"
"En la cafeteria," he responds, his inexplicable nickname for a doughnut shop about five minutes away.
As long as I can remember, my father has spent his Sunday mornings at JAX Donuts House, a run-down coffee house across the street from Anaheim City Hall. Gentrification, redevelopment, and changing demographics have yet to kill this eyesore: when Starbucks usurped JAX's original location, the owners moved a couple doors down, and its mostly Mexican clientele followed. The Cambodians who own the small store don't fry the best doughnuts (if you ever stop in, order the cinnamon roll and ask for a hell of a lot more frosting), yet thirty to forty middle-aged Mexican men regularly hang out there every weekend -- not to harass passing pickups for the chance to pound nails, but to live the good life. They're all men from Jerez, a city of about fifty-six thousand in the central-Mexican state of Zacatecas. More specifically, almost all of the men are from El Cargadero, the tiny village where my mother was born and whose migration to Anaheim captures the postmodern Mexican experience as well as anything.
But when these men meet, they don't chatter about politics or immigration reform. They gossip. "¡Chismean como viejas!" my mom has sighed numerous times. "They gossip like old ladies!" It's true: these burly machos, naturally light skin eternally sunburned due to years working outside, chatter almost exclusively about the goings-on in El Cargadero -- who's marrying whom, which son or daughter got in trouble or went off to college, stories of their childhood. That their Mexican hometown is now three-quarters empty doesn't bother anyone.
On this particular Sunday morning, my father discussed an upcoming trip to his native Jomulquillo, a village just south of El Cargadero. He's in charge of the comité Guadalupana, a group of people who live in the United States but raise funds for a celebration in Jomulquillo for the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe on December 12. For the past four years, my father and others have raised thousands of dollars just so a brass band can play for twenty-four continuous hours, a childhood tradition they fondly remember but which died for a time as Jomulquillo hemorrhaged its residents to el Norte.
"¿Quieres dar dinero?" he asked. "Do you want to give money?"
I forked over a $20 bill.
"¿Se acuerda lo que le dije?" I responded. "Do you remember what I told you?"
He agreed earlier in the week to answer questions for this book (gracias for reading it, by the way), but Papi's clothes suggested other plans. Of course he remembered, but there was grass to mow, palm trees to trim, roses to prune.
"Ven durante la semana pa' comer lonche -- entonces platicamos," he said while walking out the door toward the toolshed in our backyard. "Come by during the week to eat lunch -- then, we'll talk."
About a half hour later, my mom and brother arrived from the dentist. Gabriel -- showing off his immaculate 2006 Air Jordans -- is upset. "Where's my music?" he bellowed. I promised him hip-hop and oldies songs from my iTunes months ago, but the memory stick that allows me to bootleg went kaput, and I haven't been able to steal a new one from my friend.
"And where's my game?!" I borrowed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas about a year ago, but killing cops to Hank Williams's "Hey, Good Lookin'" is too much fun so I always conveniently forget to return it. Gabriel pushes me away and plops onto the couch, immersing himself in the Los Angeles Times sports section as the Oakland Raiders are losing another close one. "Oh, did you see that one-handed catch by Jerry Porter?" he yells at one point. My brother, the man-child, never removes his sunglasses.
My mom sits next to us and begins darning socks. "You work too hard," she teases, her English better than my father's but still lacking considering she has spent the past forty-five years in los Estados Unidos.
"¿Dale una limpiesita a tu computadora, no?" she says, pointing at my ink-smeared MacBook. "Don't you want to clean your computer?" Even for a Sunday morning, Mami dresses like a businesswoman on Casual Friday -- sweater, dress pants, an earth-toned outfit nicely contrasting with her porcelain skin and coiffed hair.
My father barges in from outside. "Luz, hasme de comer," he commands. "Make me food to eat."
"Sí, Lorenzo," she says, in a tone that any casual observer could immediately deduce she has repeated thousands of times over a thirty-year marriage.
Mami grabs my copy of the New York Times Magazine and skims through it.
"Te 'sta dolienda tu mano," she says. "Your hand's hurting." Unconsciously, I was massaging a finger.
"Nomás the tip de mi dedo."
"Aver." She motions, grabbing my right index finger and examining its frayed cuticle. She tells me I'm cutting my nails too short, which means that the skin underneath the nail chafes against the keyboard.
"Baby," Gabriel snorts.
"¿Se acuerda lo que le dije?" I ask Mami.
Mom tries to beg off the interview, claiming she needs to travel to Costco and load up on groceries. Actually, she does: a Mexican family is a hungry family.
"Pues, okay," I reply. I check my e-mail. "FUCK YOU ILLEGAL ALIEN WETBACK SCUM BITCH," it rants. The Raiders score a touchdown. Alejandrina returns with a double soy latte, no foam, for my dad. Canaries chirp in the background.
Just another day for the Arellanos in America. Our heaven. Your hell?
Do me a favor, folks fretting about whether Mexicans will ever become Americanized -- fume about something else. Worthy choices: Al Qaeda. John McCain as president. The choking ways of the Chicago Cubs.
There's no real reason why what you just read and anything that follows relating to my personal life should ever have been published (reviewers: there's a pull quote for ustedes if ever there was one!). The immigrant saga, the coming-of-age rebel yell, the portrait of the artist as a young hombre -- the memoir portion of this book uses those clichés of American letters to tell its tale. But the...
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Complex History
By Simon Burrow
While most writing and almost all journalism is attempting to make their subjects less complex Gustavo Arellano is accepting the complexity and relishing it. His book "Orange County' is a wonderfully complex story of his family, its migration, the towns where they settled, the history of the towns and the strange paradox that is Orange County, California. There are very funny repetitions of lists of Aunts (I think he's mocking Leviticus) the story of his being a nerd among the macho and constant jibes at the gabachos. My favorite part was the restaurant recommendations , one for each town except Leisure World.
This is the perfect book to give as a Christmas gift to anyone with a sense of humor who lives in Orange County. It is a quick read, it has new data and will make you think again about the place you live.
Well done!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Re-membering the Erased Dimensions of a Mexican California with Gustavo Arellano
By W. A. Nericcio
As a native born South Texan, I never gave California much thought till I came out to teach here in the early 90s. Since then I have been blown away by the beauty and horrors of a magnificent state--staggered by its resources and its peoples, floored by its violent and surprising history. Gustavo Arellano's ORANGE COUNTY is one of those delicious, honest tomes that tells the various ugly, outrageous, AND beautiful stories of southern California with wit, vision, pace, and style. A unique book--one part memoir, one part history, one part investigative journalism--Arellano's volume explores the backstory of the Southlands, uncovering skeletons, crazies, and, of course, oranges along the way. Any student of contemporary writing will find much to learn from and ponder in this volume; Californiana aficionados will find that and more, as the all-too-often white-washed contours of the Californias are reborn in the electric writings of the man better known as Ask a Mexican.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Very Enjoyable
By Mary Bookhounds
This is a great story combining the history of Orange County with a memoir of the author. Arellano is pretty well know in "the OC" for his weekly column "Ask a Mexican" and this book reflects his wit and wisdom as well. I really enjoyed it.
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