Gentle cabrones:

Whenever people see my Lalo Alcaraz calendar, they gasp — and not just because of the ever-ruthless jokes crafted by the goateed, bespectacled subject of Canto CCCLVI.

They see how busy I am outside of my columna.

Speeches to various groups. Media appearances. Talks to students. Emcee shifts. Banquets. A LOT.

There hasn’t been one week this year that I haven’t spoken somewhere about my work, my career, or my thoughts on current issues. In June, there was only three weekdays where I didn’t have anything to do and thus could, you know, relax after work and shit.

My boss once asked why I accept so many invites — not because my boss thinks it gets in the way of my work but rather because they assume so much of this takes a toll. My response is I don’t do something unless I want to do it, I like to talk to groups, and that one should accept any and all invites as long as they come — because one day, they just might stop.

And then there’s going to be a self-interrogation like this one.

I usually speak to civic groups, elementary school students — but especially college classes. This year alone, I’ve done in-person and Zoom chats for classes or panels at UCLA, UCI, USC, LMU (twice), Cal State Fullerton, Long Beach St., Whittier College, Santiago Canyon College, Chapman (in addition to teaching), Irvine Valley College, Golden West College and probably a few others I can’t remember right now.

And then there are the gigs where either a school or a student club brings you to campus for a full day or two.

They have you talk to smaller groups and take you out to a private lunch or dinner with an even smaller group, all prelude to a speech open to the public that your hosts promote with posters and flyers and social media campaigns and press releases and that they usually cater to ensure an audience. They bring you on because they feel your mere presence brings them prestige.

Because they think you’re a…Somebody.

Better than the rest. Transformative to anyone who listens or sees you. Worth all the time and resources spent.

A…Somebody.

My first such lecture was at Smith College, of all places, 20 years ago, where I was invited to speak about The Former Columna and I wielded a yardstick for most of the lecture for some bizarre reason and read something from The Former Columna so wild that the young women in the audience gasped (no, I’m not going to repeat it no matter how much you ask, but I can say that I stole it from Art #fuckart).

I eventually won over the audience — and a side hustle was born.

I used to have so many such gigs that I hired a speaking agent to field the offers and seek more. For a good six years, I traversed the country to places I’ll probably never visit again under the guise of me being a…Somebody.

University of Minnesota Morris. Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, which Wikipedia now tells me no longer exists but where I was asked to essentially defend the worth of foreign students to a skeptical faculty in my speech. State University of New York Oswego, which you get to by driving an hour from Syracuse and where not one person showed up to hear me speak because Barack Obama and John McCain were debating that night.

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where I received the coldest reception of my career — the crowd wasn’t hostile, they were just a bunch of polite Midwesterners who didn’t laugh at any of my stock cracks that landed everywhere else but told me afterward what a great job I did.

The invites slowed down once I became editor of the Infernal Rag and became a bit too busy to accept so many, then became a trickle once I joined the Los Angeles Times and no longer wrote the Former Columna. But they never ended completely. Why, I had two great appearances last fall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Chicago, which looks like a Harry Potter movie come to life.

But as I looked at my calendar this afternoon to jot down some more local appearances in the coming weeks, I realized no college invited me for a featured speaker gig so far this year. Nor do I have any scheduled so far for the fall semester — and by this time, colleges have already booked their fall schedule.

So for the first time in 20 years — even during the pandemic — I probably won’t do a professional thing that I used to do all the time.

Turns out I’m not a…Somebody after all.

A small poster board from a long-ago appearance at Cal State Channel Islands. I have mementos of all but about five college appearance I ever did — archives!

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I don’t say this out of bitterness or sadness — but facts are facts.

The Former Columna was a phenomenon that I’m very proud of and that people still complement me for all these years later. It opened up opportunities that I was able to leverage to where I am today.

I could’ve used the Former Columna to grab many, many lucrative professional opportunities — but I rejected almost all of them (really, only pursued a book that was a best-seller, television projects that went nowhere and one hilarious play that did, as seen in Canto XXXII).

All that notoriety was just one part of me, and nowhere near the most important part. As I’d tell people, my first responsibility was that of an editor, then a food critic, then a reporter, and then the idea of being a…Somebody.

Fame is such an interesting thing, most of all because it’s usually fleeting. And I’m seeing it play out with those featured college gigs.

The Former Columna was strong all the way to the end and kept its readership. But its novelty as as a must-hear among young people eventually wore off — partly because college students never really cared for its anti-wokoso stance but really because it was never as big of a deal as some people made it out to be.

The crowds were rarely sparse, let alone big. I rarely received invites to return. But the ultimate proof that I wasn’t a…Somebody that I eventually aged out of the featured college speaker circuit.

If you’re a…Somebody, college students and the community around it will listen to you if you’re Malala when she was a teen or the Dalai Lama right now. If you’re not…well, who wants to listen to a bespectacled rando old enough to be your parent?

All of this can be deflating in the wrong mind, and I’ve seen people go crazy from their growing irrelevancy — people who thought the hype around them would last forever and have no idea what to do next. Art even predicted that one day, I’d be out on a street corner approaching people by proclaiming, “Hey, do you want to Ask a Mexican?” (#fuckart)

Thankfully, that has never been me. From the start of when people started whispering I might be a…Somebody, I made sure to remind myself at all times I’m not.

I’m…Someone, just like everyone else. Take the compliments and chances as they come, but don’t lose sight of what must be done. WERK. Don’t believe your hype (Cantos passim ad nauseum).

The small, local gigs are even better in some ways. People who want to hear me not as a…somebody, but as…someone who knows their stuff because they’ve seen a lot. But one day, the local gigs will shrivel up as well.

And the day people don’t want to hear or read from me anymore? José Alfredo Jiménez sang “Ese día voy a llorar” in his magisterial “El Hijo del Pueblo.”

It’s fun while it lasts — but ain’t no fun like the fun ahead, folks.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Like, I didn’t even BOTHER to focus on the food because I was so fixated on the great drink!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of always incredible lunchtime service at Knife Pleat at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mexico, celebrating seven years of excellence this summer — congrats Tony and Yassmin!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen” — Marcus Aurelius

LISTENING: “Te Quiero,” Los Embajadores Vallenatos. If there’s a culture that does heartbreak more danceable than Colombians, I’ve yet to meet it. Not only that, they slather on the cheese even more than Mexicans — and they land it more often than not! Just check out this weepy vallenato that will make you morose even as you want to grab someone and twirl on the floor to those accordion swirls…where’s my aguardiente, Alicia! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “How Aztecs told history”: Aeon consistently publishes great, thought-provoking essays on the most random of subject, like this treatise on the Nahuas that I read when it originally published and forgot to share…until now.

Gustavo Events  

July 18 aka TODAY 1 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary reporter Sam Quinones about his new tone poem/photo essay about L.A. murals featuring the Virgen of Guadalupe, for which I wrote the forward! At the Edendale branch of the L.A. Public Library, 2011 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Event is FREE; books, BARATO!

Gustavo in the News

“The Odyssey of the Virgin of Guadalupe”: Sam Quinones shouts out our appearance TODAY.

“The American Dream”: Someone at Merriam-Webster really likes me!

“Letters to the Editor: In the face of cruelty, a group of ICE detainees showed kindness”: A Los Angeles Times reader likes what I have to say in one columna…

“Letters to the Editor: San Juan Capistrano isn’t just some ‘MAGA wonderland’“: …while another one does NOT.

“How America’s immigrant communities made this World Cup their own”: Something called Charles M. Sennott's GroundTruth shouts out a video of mine.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Should Dodgers players skip a White House visit?”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary is about the issue at hand.

“Why Latinos Are Abandoning Pres. Trump”: I appear on CNN’s The Story Is…with Elex Michaelson alongside GOP-ish compa Mike Madrid (I THINK this video also has a second segment of me ridiculing efforts to permanently rescind Daylight Savings Time as well).

"Eastsiders enraged as charred, rotting food stinks up Boyle Heights”: My semi-annual appearance on Press Play with Madeleine Brand is about the subject at hand.

“Two Lorenzos from Mexico. One fulfilled his American dream. ICE killed the other”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about my father and one of two immigrants ICE shot dead this month. KEY QUOTE: “Only geography, age and Donald Trump separated the Lorenzos.”

“Trump’s noncitizen voting fraud claims will backfire. Just look at history”: My next latest L.A. Times columna conjures up the ghost of bitter, defeated ex-congress member Bob Dornan to talk about the subject at hand. KEY QUOTE: “I teach this episode in my O.C. history college classes as a case study in what happens when political parties succumb to the spell of a vindictive demagogue who blames everyone for their failures except themselves.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

The most famous passage in food writing is Proust’s Madeleine.

End of the first volume of his magisterial Remembrance of Things Past. The protagonist’s mother gives her son some tea and a madeleine, those French shell-shaped sponge cakes that I’ve always loved for some reason even though they’re not too sweet.

Here’s Proust:

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.

Food writers teach it as a master class of how something so small can evoke memory, of showing and not telling, of how powerful memory is in informing the present. Food does this in a way no other sensation can.

It happened to me a few weeks ago.

Grítale a Guti, the Tuesday night IG free-for-all that I’ve been doing for an incredible six years. An hour and 15 minutes where I’ll take your questions about WHATEVER. Part of the tradition is I drink something — usually alcoholic, but not always. In the latter category, I love to try drinks from across the world, which I pick up from markets or restaurants that I visit.

Lot of good drinks out there! Turks make some of the best fruit punches in the world. My favorite soda has become Tropical banana soda from Honduras. The best coconut water comes from Thailand. And so forth.

A few months ago, my honey and I went to Costa Mexico for ramen. My drink then was Ramune, that bubbly drink where you crack open the top to get to what’s inside via a twist top and a marble stays in the neck of the bottle for some reason. Always loved the bottle more than the drink, but it was refreshing and complemented my super-fatty ramen.

My drink to take home was an orange Calpico.

Had long seen them, had never had one — I’m a sucker for orange-flavored anything since I’m a descendant of naranjeros. When I finally tasted my orange Calpico on GAG, I smiled. Sweet and milky, it was almost like a creamier orange sherbet.

A split-second later, I stopped.

“This is not going to happen,” I paraphrased to GAG viewers. Took one micro-sip. Not going to happen.

I promised my viewers I would write about it here, and here it is:

Proust’s madeleine was in effect.

Delicious, I’m sure, but #neverforget

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Senior year, Anaheim High. Spring semester, a few weeks before graduation. Lunchtime assembly.

I can’t remember what it was for. I do remember there was a lot of food. I do remember there were leftover bottles of Tampico, the poor man’s version of Sunny Delight, which Wikipedia tells me has been known as SunnyD since 2000, which shows how with-it I am.

I’ve never liked to see leftover food — First World guilt. So I grabbed a bottle of Tampico. Found a cup and poured myself a full one. Sweet, milky and with a bit of citrus zest — loved it.

Poured myself another cup…eh, why am I lying. I was drinking straight from the gallon. Again and again. All of it. Between lunchtime and sixth period.

My mami was always very judicious with junk food. She’d buy us tortilla chips and we could go crazy with them and El Pato salsa, which we called Salsa de Pato and eventually shortened to S de P. We always had peanut butter and jelly for sandwiches (Canto CLVII, kinda). But cookies basically didn’t exist in our household, nor did sugary cereals — and she rarely bought us chocolates.

My mami was a good mami — but that meant that whenever I had a chance to eat or drink sugary anything, I’d splurge.

Have you drank a gallon of Tampico within half an hour?

It’s delicious at first. Still delicious after second and third gulp. All the way to the end, really.

Spring semester of senior year, I was ditching what was Mr. Swanson’s sixth-period yearbook class to crash Miss Sinatra’s class or just wander around the campus (Canto CXCIII). The day I drank a gallon of Tampico, I was fine until I was not.

I remember a sensation hitting my sternum. Asco. It translates into “revulsion,” “disgust” and “nausea” but really combines all of those related-but-distinct sentiments and goes even deeper. You feel asco in your very soul. You never want to feel asco.

I felt asco with all that Tampico.

I ran to the restroom. BARF.

It was definitely one of the worst vomits I had experienced in my 18 years then and remains one of the worst vomits of my life. My skin was left clammy, my undershirt was drenched in sweat and I wandered around campus for a while in a daze. I think someone asked me why I looked so weird then scoffed when I told them what happened.

Drinking all that Tampico was an important lesson, because it taught me the dangers of indulgence and the importance of discipline. I’m not going to pretend I stick to that lesson all the time — but willPOWER (Canto XLVI) wins out more often than not.

If you overdo something, you usually rebound back. If you overdo a food, you can usually get back to it. But that Tampico defeated me forever.

Me empachó — another Mexican Spanish word you can’t exactly translate. Google Translate offers “stuffed, overfull, indigestion” but in my world, it means you indulge in something so much that you will never do it again lest asco sweep in. To this day, the smell of Tampico — just looking at its friendly font in the logo! — brings me queasiness and takes me to my memory.

Proust couldn’t have written it better.

O, young Guti — que pendejo eras, but don’t worry:

You’ll get better. A bit.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Not pictured: the consommé and salsa de árbol — SO GOOD

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of INCREDIBLE birria de res at Outside the Masa in Indio, prepared so deliciously that it redeems the modern-day culinary cliche known as birria de res. Takes me back to weddings in the late 1990s at either the UFCW hall in Buena Park or Chava’s Cafe in downtown L.A. haha — it’s THAT legit.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “We put people on the moon, so we can probably put lifts on buses” — Atlantis Community

LISTENING: “Soul Sauce,” Cal Tjader. Absolutely true story: when my honey first let me into her home, she played a CD of this hep cat, and this was the first song — groovy, proto-funky, perfect. Any wonder I immediately fell for her besides her looks, drive, those light eyes and that puppy corazón? Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Our Amish Language”: Always a sucker for etymology, for personal essays that land — so to find both? Wonderful. Side note: One of my glories as a headline writer was reading a feature that the Barbarians from Phoenix wanted its papers to run about the gap year that Amish teens on the cusp of adulthood can take, and immediately coming up with “Rumspringa Break” as its topper. Pretty obvious, but they took it.

Gustavo Events  

July 18, 1 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary reporter Sam Quinones about his new tone poem/photo essay about L.A. murals featuring the Virgen of Guadalupe, for which I wrote the forward! At the Edendale branch of the L.A. Public Library, 2011 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Event is FREE; books, BARATO!

Gustavo in the News

“REVIEW | In Hillman City, a Menu that Spotlights Northern Mexico Includes a Surprise: Hot Dogs”: A Seattle-area paper refers to a New Yorker story of mine.

“Letters to the Editor: Mexicans have achieved elite status in plenty of fields beyond soccer”: Los Angeles Times readers let me have it.

“After a year of ICE raids, Southern California finds joy in Mexico's World Cup run”: A BBC reporter hangs out with my friends and I in SanTana.

“Mexican-American Fans Celebrate Dual Identity Amid World Cup Excitement“: Not sure the provenance of this article, but I’m cited in it!

“Mexico Foreign Press Chatter”: From a publication called Miranda Intelligence, which I don’t think I’m related to…

“Marc Falsetto is reshaping the restaurant scene in Fort Lauderdale”: I’m quoted in this, even though I didn’t talk to anyone for this.

“USMNT World Cup exit reignites debate over soccer’s future in U.S”: A columna of mine is quoted.

“Believe”: My recent use of “accepted” gets a nod from Merrian-Webster!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: A special edition dedicated to Legendary Cosumo.

“Officials crack down on "living room" style beach tents”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary focuses on moves in Newport Beach and Laguna Beach.

“The People’s Game”: I appear on the KPFK quadrennial program to talk about the World Cup while channeling my inner George Carlin.

“Column: Mexico LOST in the World Cup - but MEXICAN AMERICANS Won”: I appear on KTLA to talk about a columna of mine that’s below.

“Mexico lost in the World Cup — but Mexican Americans won”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about what happened in SanTana after El Tri faced off against the Three Lions. KEY QUOTE: “It was yet another early exit for a team that has never even made it to the World Cup semifinals — but no one wanted to dwell on defeat, because no one felt defeated.”

“Mexico lost the World Cup — but Mexican Americans won”: My latest L.A. Times video is a take on the aforementioned columna.

“The Trump ‘curse’ at the World Cup is his latest red card against Americans”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about how the president tried to influence el Mundial. KEY QUOTE: “Everything the man is touching nowadays turns into gold for him and rot for the rest of us, a curse any smart person would avoid.”

“The history of Italian American food runs through L.A., stunning new exhibit shows”: My latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter takes readers to the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles on Olvera Street. KEY QUOTE: “It’s the best type of exhibit: one that’s familiar yet surprising and where you not only leave smarter but also hungrier.”

“The Eastside is fed up. And the politicians aren’t listening”: My still next latest L.A. Times columna tries to capture what happened at a town hall dedicated to the warehouse fire in Boyle Heights. KEY QUOTE: “The Eastside never seems to win at City Hall or the county Hall of Administration.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

Whenever someone complains about getting old or the passage of time, I channel my inner Joni Mitchell and sing the chorus from “The Circle Game.”

I first heard the song on the original The Wonder Years, which I think scored a scene where Kevin and Winnie moved through a carousel, which is a bit too on the nose, you know? I was in my Beatles and KRLA and Power 106 phase so didn’t really have time for folk anything — but the song immediately struck me. The strange guitar tuning and plucking, Joni’s crystalline voice, that unforgettable chorus which I immediately memorized.

But it wasn’t because I was afraid of aging in junior high, although I’ve always considered myself old and always will. I memorized it because, of all things, its rhythm matched up with a diagram about The 12 Steps on the whiteboard of the Alana Club House that my dad used to attend AA meetings at (Canto CLV) and it stuck.

(Quick aside on memory: I was talking to someone in The Game a few weeks ago over drinks, and the subject turned to the Vancouver Canucks of the mid-1990s. I mentioned Pavel Bure, of course — but where the hell did my memory dig up Trevor Linden, who I hadn’t thought about since that era?)

The lyrics of “The Circle Game” didn’t mean anything to me until my friends started fretting about aging, and I would sing it and tell them that’s LYFE: we come, we go and things go on and there’s nothing we can do about it except enjoy but especially love.

What’s most remarkable thematically about the song is that Mitchell isn’t nostalgic — she’s matter-of-fact about telling people to enjoy the now because it’ll never come back (what’s most remarkable about “The Circle Game,” of course, is that Joni wrote it when she was 23 as a response to “Sugar Mountain,” Neil Young’s elegy for getting old, written when he was 19).

There is so much beauty out there, and there will be more beauty — so enjoy it as it comes. The default should be saudade: smiles at something that can never be again and that we should never dwell on lest bitterness at existence reign.

Joni’s chorus went on and on in my head this past week.

It started last Saturday at the quinceañera of the eldest daughter of Adriana and Mateo, friends of mine and fellow Mechistas from Chapman University. They and a few others were a year ahead of me, but somehow I remained friends with them but not with anyone from my year, making them my longest-lasting friends not from Anacrime — 27 years!

The contours of true friendship knows no straight line. Adriana and Mateo and I got closer in the immediate years after we graduated: we went to rock en español shows, worked on projects together, and Adriana watched as Mateo would kick my ass at tennis and we’d go out to dinner and me to their house and they were there when I started to go out with my honey. Adriana’s the type of talent and big heart that when she realized that I had never heard Joni’s Blue, she not only burned a CD for me but did her own original artwork for the cover!

But then we got careers and we drifted apart — or rather, I did because of my WERK. But God bless Adriana: she never stopped kindling our friendship fire.

We got mutual friends outside of our Chapman years that meant we’d be in each other’s orbits more regularly. She regularly invited me to speak to her high school English classes over the years (spoke just a few months ago, actually) and hosts her students at an end-of-year banquet at Alta Baja (had it a few weeks ago, actually) and has ALWAYS forgiven me for not making more time to hang out even as she has.

And over those years, Adriana and Mateo had two wonderful girls, one who turned just 15. I can’t say I was there for their early years — but now we are.

Lalli’s quinceañera was wonderful. Adriana’s dad sang lead with the hired mariachi, and then Lalli played and sang a great cover of Fobia’s “Vivo” on her guitar and then her dad joined her on an English-language cover I can’t remember and then her younger sister did a short video about Lalli AND then Lalli, her sister and their cousins did a cute dance in place of a stuffy waltz AND then Lalli danced with her grandmas AND then Adriana gave a heartfelt speech about how she had no idea how our parents managed to hold festivities so often despite how much they worked — but they did, because they knew how important it was to enjoy and create community and we should follow their example.

(The family that’s creative together stays together)

I saw friends like Adriana I’m regularly talking to, like Lalli’s quince godmother Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble Sara Guerrero (Canto CCCLXXV). Friends I should talk to more. Friends who live far away, and those who are local. People who used to be friends. People who could’ve been. My honey’s dear friend who became Adriana’s dear friend because of work. And we could all look at each other and say, you know what? We did good — y aquí estamos.

Our best days are now — and I’m glad we can be there for the next generation, just as our parents were there for us, a chain of love that extends to our ancestors and we can only be lucky enough to continue.

I left early because I always leave early — but not before my friend Caro insisted I dance with her to “Tren al Sur” by Los Prisioneros — it’s now an oldie, apparently. I obliged, then I returned home to my honey and our dear Cosmo, to spend more time with a pup I knew had little time left.

Sigh…

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As I wrote a couple of weeks ago in Canto CDLX, I knew we’d have to put Cosmo to sleep at some point this summer because of his puppy dementia. We put our Yorkie Cairn on the one surefire medicine that might stop his insomnia and incessant circling — but he showed no signs of improving after a month on it.

Two days after Lalli’s quince, my honey and I decided it was Cosmo’s time to leaves away. He was still eating well and liked his slower and shorter walks — but he was never going to improve and we didn’t want him to further suffer.

We put him to sleep in our living room on Wednesday, where we all spent the night together. Cosmo was such a good boy that he slept the entire night before — the first full sleep for us in months. I took him for one final walk, carrying him for three-quarters of the block to trace the route where he and Brother Hook (Canto CCCLVII) used to proudly roam, standing for a bit at the house whose owner at this point of the season always grows tall, spindly cosmos flowers.

The vet sedated Cosmo while I held him and he looked at me in peace with his one, beautiful puppy eye. He went with his paws lightly kicking, running toward the place we all have to go.

Life comes, life goes — but we have to continue. And life reminds you that its beauty is there when we look and make room for it. In between Lalli’s quince and Cosmo’s eternal sleep, I went to the birthday of another dear friend of my honey and I, saw SanTana erupt in joy over another Mexico World Cup win and played records and soccer with Mateo THA GOD and NELCyn (Canto CDII).

Yesterday, NelCYN and I took out my heartbroken honey to a few restaurants. One of them had a Mexico City Cosmo on its cocktail menu. The other? A cocktail called Cosmo’s Cousin. And when I got home, I planted a cosmos flower that our neighbor across the street gave us. Her small children grew up seeing me walk Cosmo and Hook but only really remember Cosmo, who they always greeted and petted. We took Cosmo the afternoon before his passing to hang out with them and their pups, Poppy and Bosh (Canto CCXXIII), who star in Tails of Legendary Cosumo and Hook-u. The family was so sad about Cosmo’s passing that they made cards for us, and the mom gave us the cosmos flower.

I planted it in the box where the chamomiles that remind me of my mami (Canto CCCXC) now grow every spring on their own. And as I saw Cosmo’s cosmo stand alone but tall, scared but brave and other buds forming, I remembered the closing lyric to the best-ever song about a person and their pet, “El Cantador,” which I shared in Canto CCXCV:

Por eso cuando el sol muere y la luna va a salir

Voy hasta aquel potrero sus recuerdos a vivir

No nostalgia ever for me — but remember where you came from, who and whom made you, and who you’re helping and loving along the way.

Happy 250th, America. VMC.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Pinche mariachis asustados haha

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Virgen de Guadalupe mural in Boyle Heights, which needs all the prayers you can give them in the wake of the Lineage warehouse fire.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as you ever can.” — Supposedly John Wesley

LISTENING: “Hello Stranger,” Carrie Lucas. The Barbara Lewis original, of course, is a masterpiece — but this remake is as bittersweet as the original and survives its 94.7 The Wave-ification. Great vocals, great update. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Music for the Millions: The Wurlitzer Story”: American Business History Center is a nonprofit that publishes articles on American entrepreneurship. It’s of course going to celebrate capitalism and captains of industry BUT they are very clear-eyed that businesses rise and fall, and their case studies on companies known and forgotten lay out unflinching stories in clear prose that always educate — like this one on the story of the mighty organ maker.

Gustavo Events  

July 18, 1 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary reporter Sam Quinones about his new tone poem/photo essay about L.A. murals featuring the Virgen of Guadalupe, for which I wrote the forward! At the Edendale branch of the L.A. Public Library, 2011 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Event is FREE; books, BARATO!

Gustavo in the News

“Rick Caruso”: Forgot to share this from a couple of weeks ago, but former L.A. mayoral candidate/billionaire developer Rick Caruso praised an Essential California newsletter of mine.

“Mexico fans chant gay slur at World Cup game in front of FIFA President Gianni Infantino”: A quote I gave to the New York Times’ sports vertical gets reprinted in Fox News’ sports vertical.

“Alta Wins Best Issue, Literary Criticism, and More at 2026 SoCal Journalism Awards”: Two second-placers for me smh

“Yay America”: My KCRW comadre Evan Kleiman shouts out a columna of mine.

“The book illustrating LA’s love affair with Our Lady of Guadalupe“: Probably the only time the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ official publication will mention me even somewhat positively haha.

“Fall Fiesta 2026 Is Officially in the Works. Get In Now.”: I inspired Bowling Green, which is a REALLY interesting city I need to return to.

“Peril”: The use of “threat” in one of my columnas this week elicits a citation in Merriam-Webster’s entry of examples of the word I link to.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Judge orders Huntington Beach to use ranked-choice voting”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about the latest H.B. tomfoolery.

"Hometown Congressional Race Heats Up: Can Progressives Run The Table In California?”: I appear on Nick Valencia News to talk about random things and stump a guest!

“The People’s Game”: I appear on the June 26 edition of this quadrennial Pacifica Radio podcast.

“The sad inevitability of Justice Alito’s birthright citizenship dissent”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about the most vendido member of the Supreme Court. KEY QUOTE: “History will see Alito’s vote for what it is: a forsaking of the promise his family once fulfilled, to support the people who never wanted them here in the first place.”

“Mission San Juan Capistrano is also turning 250. It has lessons for America”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about the so-called Jewel of the Missions. KEY QUOTE: “The only way to preserve our republic is to strengthen the pillars of our present with the mortar of our past.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

This Tuesday, insha’Allah, I will be watching Mexico play God-knows-who in the first round of the World Cup knockout stage.

And I will wield this:

FUUUUUCK

First time reading this newsletter? Subscribe here for more merriment! Feedback, thoughts, commentary, rants? Send them to mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com

A matraca. Wooden noisemaker. LOUD.

I’ve wanted one my entire life but never got around to buying one until last weekend. I’m sure I asked my parents when I was small for the Mexi ratchet, and they probably said no because I make enough noise as it is — I’ll get back to that.

A matraca is not a polite instrument, so you can’t take it to baseball/football/basketball/hockey games in the United States. Hell, stupid FIFA ain’t allowing them and vuvuzelas during matches, because FIFA is garbage. And that’s why I always wanted one. It’s a working class treasure, a humble Holy Grail for the passionate and a challenge:

If you’re going to cheer, CHEER. None of this polite golf clapping. Yell. Scream. Stomp. Don’t be vulgar, don’t harm others. But be loud.

Make yourself seen. Be an example for others to follow. LOUD.

Can you believe I’ve gotten in trouble for cheering too boisterously? Of Corsica!

At a Los Angeles Press Club Awards dinner probably a decade ago, I kept shouting and screaming every time the Infernal Rag or someone I knew won that the table next to me told me to shut up. When I was at the Orange County Press Club Awards earlier this week, strangers at the table I sat at scrunched their faces when I grabbed cutlery and began pounding the table with it.

I’ve been told to lower my voice at banquets, get weird looks when I throw out a cumbia parrot shriek, and was once told “Dude, chill” during a scholarship banquet at Orange Coast College just because I kept yelling the names of people I knew who were winning some.

All for being happy. Legit cheers, not sarcastic or fake ones. And sober, no less.

Well, this matraca is my revenge on those puritans.

Bought it in Olvera Street. Pure wood. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

When I wield it on Tuesday, people will smile…until they won’t. Or maybe they won’t stop smiling? Or maybe they’ll join in?

I’m excited — and hopeful.

If you’re going to do something, do something. WERK (Canto passim ad nauseum)

And if you’re going to do something, commit yourself to excelling at it. Train. Tírate. Throw down. Get the materials or tools you need, even if it takes you a lifetime to do so.

Why did I delay buying a matraca for so long?

I wasn’t in the place to buy one — literally, and mentally.

Although you can buy anything on Amazon, I don’t. And while I go to Tijuana a lot and Olvera Street a few times a year, they were never visible and thus not on mind.

A matraca is a commitment that you’re going to BRING IT. And while I love to see and follow sports, I really don’t have any teams anymore — definitely not in professional sports, while UCLA and Notre Dame in football became underachieving long ago.

But now comes El Tri. Mexico’s men’s soccer team swept through their World Cup group — and for their reward, they no doubt will get a hell of a third-place team, mostly like. If they advance, they get to face off against the Mbappés and Messis and Haalands of the World Cup.

And yet…

You come in ready to give it all when you have to come in. No half-assing. DO IT DO IT DO IT. You be the Man of la Mancha, and dream impossible dreams. The crowds in downtown SanTana I’ve seen after every match have been like a limpia for the area after the devil that was migra raids at this point last year and some of the most joyous celebrating I’ve ever seen this in my life. How could you not want to join in, damn the world?

No country does that like Mexico — no country should, frankly. But here we are, so here’s my matraca.

Come Tuesday, I’ll be swinging — or is it stirring? Wielding? Shaking? — that matraca. I’ll be doing it until I can’t — because that’s how you’re supposed to do it.

Nothing else for me this week — ustedes deserve a short canto, for once. So I’ll leave you with as obvious a message as I’ll offer: go get the matraca you need, too.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Not pictured: the brisket I took home and turned into sandwiches for DAZE..

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of GREAT brisket taco at Heritage Barbecue in San Juan Capistrano. Columna to come…

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “It actually made me feel really, really good. I actually realized that I felt like somebody important, because I caught the attention of 60,000, plus you guys, plus the whole world, watching a guy that is, you reverse the time back 15 years ago, I was sitting under a mango tree without 50 cents to pay for a bus. And I was the center of attention of the whole city of New York. I thank God for that, and you know what? I don't regret one bit what they do out there.” — Pedro Martínez, on facing the haters at Yankee Stadium

LISTENING: “Es Lupe,” Los Johnny Jets. The raw happiness of Latin American rock bands from the early to mid-1960s — where they were mostly doing Spanish-language covers of English hits — have always called me, and here’s the ultimate proof. It’s a remake of The McCoys’ “Hang on Sloopy,” a song I’ve always not liked — but with this version I can finally appreciate some of the musical tricks the original tried to do but which Los Johnny Jets accomplish, mostly through their messiness. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The joy and wonder of Cabo Verde's unlikely World Cup journey”: A tad overwritten, but a fabulous profile of a people, a diaspora, a place, a team — and now, not just a World Cup qualifier but into the knockout phase.

Gustavo Events  

June 27, 12:30 p.m. aka TODAY: I will be part of "The Untold Stories of Latinos in the IE" with the Inlandia Institute at the Culver Center Theater Room, 3834 Main St, Riverside. Lecture, FREE.

July 18, 1 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary reporter Sam Quinones about his new tone poem/photo essay about L.A. murals featuring the Virgen of Guadalupe, for which I wrote the forward! At the Edendale branch of the L.A. Public Library, 2011 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Event is FREE; books, BARATO! Make your reservation here!

Gustavo in the News

“La Abeja”: My former OCC student, Fresno Bee accountability reporter Melissa Montalvo (subject of a future Random Cool People I Know), writes up our recent lunch for the newspaper’s great Latino-themed newsletter which you should all subscribe to because you otherwise can’t read it!

“‘Hard to believe’: Access is finally coming to one of California’s most glorious and inaccessible waterfalls”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“Latinx Literature of Los Ángeles and Southern California”: THis is from 2022, but I found this mention of me in a good piece about the subject at hand.

“ENE Editor honored with “Dave McQuay Award for Best Columnist” at OCPC Awards”: My turn as co-emcee of the recent Orange County Press Club awards is mentioned.

“🗞️ Riverside News- June 26, 2026“: A mention of my Inlandia Institute appearance.

“The Patron Saint of Lost Causes: Gustavo Arellano’s Hero System”: Luke Ford — someone who was someone in L.A. media in the early 2000s — does a REALLY insightful analysis of my overall mission, even if he gets some facts wrong or wildly overstates them. I need to get him to interview me the way he did Alisa Valdes-Rodríguez back in the day!

“À la Recherche du Taco Bell: One Gabacho’s Run for the Border”: A Substack cites a citation of mine from 2008.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Why LA's East side bears the brunt of environmental damage”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about the eternal environmental racism in Boyle Heights and East L.A., among others.

"The Supreme Court ruled on two major immigration cases in Trump's favor. Here's what this means for immigrants.”: I appear on the “This Week in ICE” podcast to rant against migra.

“The Boyle Heights fire is latest pollution crisis to affect L.A.’s Eastside”: My latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter puts into context a terrible warehouse fire in Boyle Heights. KEY QUOTE: “I drove up the 5 Freeway on Saturday morning and the smoke emerging from the Lineage Logistics building slowed down traffic considerably, with visibility for the stretch similar to a foggy day and drivers snapping photos of the disaster to our west.”

“A close-up look at the damage caused by the Boyle Heights fire”: My latest L.A. Times video offers a dispatch from the Boyle Heights fire.

“Thanks to the World Cup, I’m finally learning the words to the Mexican national anthem”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about the subject at hand. KEY QUOTE: “But I will do it — a little victory in the long battle for freedom that never ends.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

It was the spring of 2006. The Great Schism of the Infernal Rag had left only a quarter of the original staff around. The transition pains were real.

(A quick memory: Things were so bad that I would go into an unused office and play NCAA College Football on Playstation for hours and no one would be asking around for me. Still did my stories, of course).

Those of us who remained vowed we would maintain the paper’s proud legacy in the face of the Barbarians from Phoenix. We did, of course.

But this canto isn’t about that story. It’s about Coker’s Cadillac.

Executive editor Matt Coker was with the Infernal Rag from the start, a refuge of daily journalism after the Daily Pilot fired him for blasting Richard Nixon after his death (oh, how things have changed). Hilarious, laid-back kind guy. His daily driver was a 1974 ivory white Cadillac Eldorado with red leather seats that glided through the streets like a hawk catching a current. Nineteen feet or so long, three tons of American steel, whitewall tires. An American dream machine!

I once told my brother that you’re not a real man until you get a restoration project, so seeing Coker drive his treasure — which only had 45,000 or so miles on it because its previous, original owner had kept it in a Palm Springs garage for a quarter century — was a daily challenge for me to save my money and get to becoming an adult.

Coker steered the Infernal Rag through our worst days during the Great Schism but there was no way he’d be named the new editor in chief even though he so deserved to. So one day during a staff meeting, just after Patty came back, we were all surprised and not when Coker announced he was quitting the Infernal Rag to become the editor of the Sacramento News and Review, a great alt-weekly just like us.

We were happy. We were sad. He deserved it but he would be missed. And then one day, I saw a For Sale sign on Coker’s Cadillac. He didn’t want to sell it but, well, you just can’t tape up a car like that and stack it in a U-Haul, you know?

I now had some money and Coker gave me a great deal, partly because it was me and partly because he knew I would take care of it. I had dreams of making it my daily driver like him, of taking it across the country and taking my honey to the beach and all the things you’re supposed to do with a 1974 Cadillac ivory white convertible (the obvious never crossed my mind, though: no Hunter S. Thompson escapades for me because I don’t do drugs or drive under the influence haha).

I even gave Coker’s Cadillac a name: El Caballo Blanco. The White Horse, named after the José Alfredo Jiménez corrido of the same name that was an ode to his own Cadillac dying in Rosarito after an epic road trip from Guadalajara.

Oh, how prophetic Jiménez was.

Ever own an old car? It’s always something or other. The gas gauge soon stopped working once I took possession of it, and the fix would’ve been too expensive so I was left stranded on the side of freeways at least twice. A few blown tires. A mysterious steam that turned out to be a tiny hole on a water hose. Or the time where I had to take it out of the parking structure of the Infernal Rag’s old offices on 17th and Main in SanTana, which used to also house an ICE office but is now artist lofts (oh, how things have changed). I hadn’t turned on Coker’s Cadillac in a while, so a friend had to start it by spraying ether on the engine…and the engine caught on fire (thank God my friend, a former Marine, had a fire extinguisher in case THAT happened).

That’s what ended up happening the most, though: I barely drove Coker’s Cadillac. It’s seven-or-so miles per gallon wasn’t the reason. I just kept getting busier and busier. The carefree days of my youth…eh, who am I kidding? I’ve never been carefree. But the WERK increased as the years continued — my dream, but my car dream had to idle.

I moved Coker’s Cadillac from one free parking lot to another before I found one where I got a good deal and kept it for years until it was converted into a warehouse. I finally parked it in the driveway of my parent’s house, much to the annoyance of my brother and mami. Sell it, my honey and Dad said — you don’t drive it.

But I couldn’t. Coker’s Cadillac was a beauty I had restored and a dream to drive. And it always reminded me of Coker, who ended up returning to the Infernal Rag after the Sacramento News and Review stupidly fired him after just a year and ended up becoming the Infernal Rag’s last editor. Nothing like something in your life that you occasionally see making you smile because it reminds you of someone and only that someone and your shared moment of nice.

I always got offers to sell it but everyone lowballed me.

Until one day, someone didn’t.

What a hell of a car

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Finale of Season 3 of The White Lotus last year. My honey hosted a tropical-themed party for our friends. My main Los Angeles Times editor even showed up. We dressed in resort wear and drank mock pong pong fruit cocktails and had a great time then settled in to see how Walton Goggins would fuck things up.

Halfway through, my dad called. I almost always ignore his first call because I know if it’s important, he’ll immediately call again. He did.

Someone wanted to buy Coker’s Cadillac. He put the young man on the line.

His job: driving around streets looking for old cars to buy, cash right there. Somehow ended up on our Anacrime cul-de-sac and saw a huge car covered in a heavy tarp, the telltale sign of someone who has a classic car and doesn'’t drive it much.

The guy lowballed me. I gave him my figure and said I wouldn’t budge. Nice talking to you.

An hour later, my dad called twice again. The guy wanted to talk again.

He upped his offer. Still not good enough for me. And then he matched it.

Shit.

I bid farewell to my party and drove to my parent’s house. It was just after sunset. My dad had unfolded the convertible and the guy was examining everything with a flashlight.

“Man, this is really well kept,” he said. “How did you get it?”

I told him the story of Coker’s Cadillac. He liked it. He wanted to drive it. We got on the 91 Freeway from Euclid to State College, then back. We signed the pink slip in the garage, I went down on the price a little bit because the tires were too brittle to drive back to Phoenix, he called a tow truck.

Goodbye, Coker’s Cadillac.

One of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard was from someone I don’t particularly care for. She said as one gets older, people need to start getting rid of things they know they’ll never use. Not doing that is how hoarding starts, but she argued that’s not the real reason. Doing so forces you to have an honest conversation about what’s important in your life, and what’s in the way of your growth.

That advice came to my mind as I drove back home and bubbles up whenever I think of Coker’s Cadillac. It was never an obstacle for me (for others…) — but I refused to be honest with myself for nearly 20 years about it. I was never going to be able to regularly cruise in it, and that was okay. My life had changed, and for the better. It was a sin to just leave a car like that unused, begging the elements to destroy it.

It was never mine to begin with, anyways. It was Coker’s Cadillac. I was its caretaker, I did a great job — and my watch had to end, just like his did.

We eat at Alta Baja about once a year. I think he now drives a Prius. Besides, I still have a 1968 VW Bus that breaks down every time I turn it on. I should sell it, but the allure of manhood continues…YIKES!

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

No room for Chapter One’s pork chop this time!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of EXCELLENT Manhattan and goat cheese empanadas from Chapter One: The Modern Bistro in SanTana, where I’ve basically lived since the start of the Mundial haha. This is my special seat — a shelf at the restaurant’s entrance because most of the big games have been SRO.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Wellington is a bad general and the English are bad troops. The whole affair will not be more serious than swallowing one’s breakfast” — Napoleon on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo

LISTENING: “Burnt Toast And Black Coffee,” Mike Pedicin. Way better than the Shorty Long original, this sounds the like hard-charging ska out of the Skatalites mixed with a rock sax and swing-era vocals — funny lyrics, too! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The Plague That Won’t Die”: New York Review of Books at its best: a book review wrapped around a personal essay that’s not afraid to criticize its ostensible subject and ends right at the beginning. It came out in December 2025 but I only read it this week because I’m way behind on my print editions of EVERYTHING haha.

Gustavo Events  

June 27, 12:30 p.m.: I will be part of "The Untold Stories of Latinos in the IE" with the Inlandia Institute at the Culver Center Theater Room, 3834 Main St, Riverside. Lecture, FREE.

July 18, 1 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary reporter Sam Quinones about his new tone poem/photo essay about L.A. murals featuring the Virgen of Guadalupe, for which I wrote the forward! At the Edendale branch of the L.A. Public Library, 2011 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Event is FREE; books, BARATO! Make your reservation here!

Gustavo in the News

“Announcement of Special Guest”: In which Alta Journal revealed me to be the special guest for its California Book Club conversation with legendary novelist-essayist Susan Straight, the Faulkner of the Inland Empire.

“On and Off the 91 Freeway”: Another tiny Alta Journal plug for the above event.

“David Hockney created an L.A. to lust over. Not all of us could fit into it”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“The L.A. Zoo’s dilapidation crisis was seven decades in the making”: The same Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to, this one written by my Okie sister Hailey Branson-Potts.

“Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America”: The Los Angeles Public Library finally catalogues my book?

“Is Tacos Domingo Ready for Prime Time?“: A great perspective on what awards finalists mean using my Pulitzer placing this year as an example.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“TKTK”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary was about Federico Sayre — but it’s not online!

"Event Recap: Susan Straight’s ‘Mecca’”: I appear around the 26-minute mark in the California Book Club event I mentioned above, and only for about 10 minutes — but see the whole thing!

“A once-gentrifying neighborhood returns to its Latino roots with the World Cup”: My latest L.A. Times live co-blog focuses on how downtown SanTana has changed, soccer-wise, over the past 16 years. KEY QUOTE: “And expect me to be in the middle cheering loudly — not just for El Tri’s triumph, but for the Reconquista of downtown SanTana through soccer. We did it, raza.”

“Saying farewell to O.C.’s fighter for ‘los otros’”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about legendary lawyer Federico Sayre. KEY QUOTE: “But as I talked to mourners at Sayre’s funeral at his home parish of St. Cecilia Church in Tustin, Calif., on Monday, I realized that his fight for justice manifested in many other ways.”

“On the avenue that bears César Chávez’s name, murals honoring him remain — for now”: My next latest L.A. Times columna takes a trip to Avenida Cesar E. Chavez in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles and Monterey Park. KEY QUOTE: “But it serves as an unwitting rebuke to Chávez’s ultimate place in L.A. — a speck in a rich tapestry that was around before him and will exist long after.”

“The joy of Mexico’s World Cup soccer triumph in the Trump era”: My still next latest L.A. Times columna focuses on downtown SanTana a year ago and this week. KEY QUOTE: “Every Mexico victory should give solace to the underdogs of the world and affirm the belief that a communion of nations engaged in friendly rivalries is better than Trump’s proclivity for launching indiscriminate raids and bombings.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

Nericcio is never nervous.

The thought echoed in my mind this January as I saw San Diego St. English professor William Nericcio frantically prepare for the debut of Movimiento en la Sangre, a collection of never-before-published photos of the Chicano movement in San Diego published by Nericcio’s San Diego State University Press and shot by Nick Inzunza, the patriarch of the Chicano Kennedys of San Diego.

Nericcio is never nervous.

I’ve known Nericcio for nearly 20 years at this point, ever since he sent me a fan email complete with a PDF of a page from his then-new Tex[t]-Mex Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America. It was a reproduction of an old New Yorker cartoon that showed a Mexican sleeping — the sleeping Mexican of stereotype infamy — until a bell alarm clock woke him up, upon which he turned it off and went back to sleep. In the excerpt, Nericcio confessed how he laughed at the hackneyed cartoon — and so did I.

Nericcio ended up sending me a copy of Tex[t]-Mex and a beautiful friendship formed. He became an easy quote from me when I needed some academic pizzazz and frequent guest on my late, great KPFK show. A sparring partner at universities across Southern California. I consistently plugged his book, perhaps the funniest academic read ever, something that was as comfortable discussing Derrida as it was praising Speedy Gonzales.

The Anglophile knows he’s brilliant — but Nericcio’s Laredo roots never let that knowledge get to his head. The type of bon vivant who you want to call by his last name instead of first — because Nericcio is so much more debonair than William, Bill or Memo, you know?

If he wasn’t so far away, we’d be even closer compas than we are. So I only get to see him twice a year or so — so when he asked if I could not only give some opening remarks for the debut of Movimiento en la Sangre but also join him in conversation with the photobook’s authors, Nicolás Jorge (Nick’s son) and Ralph Inzunza (Nick’s nephew), I happily accepted.

The location: the Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Art at Balboa Park in January. It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon when I got there. A reception would start in half an hour. People were already waiting outside.

“You sound ronco,” I told Nericcio after we hugged. He seemed to reverberate with his usual rascally profe vibes: grey turtleneck, black pants and shoes, massive green jacket with a diamond fabric that looked like a bed mattress adorned a pin of a particularly beatific Virgen de Guadalupe. Salt and pepper goatee and thick head of hair tapered down into a mini-Mohawk.

Where was the cocksure smile?

“It’s the Santa Anas — they just get in my voice,” Nericcio said, wielding a glass of crisp Atrium Pinot Grigio. Stacks of Movimiento en la Sangre were on a table. He instructed graduate students on which stack was which. Those were already bought. Those were comps. Those were for sale.

“I’m a little nervous,” he continued. “We’ve never had a launch like this.”

He looked around the massive gallery then invited me to the theater where our conversation would happen. Small but gorgeous, with twinkling lights on the ceiling mimicking the heavens.

“This is beautiful,” I exclaimed.

“This is where Chicanos belongs,” Nericcio said. The smile flashed — then quickly disappeared.

“I’m going to fret,” Nericcio confessed as he went back to the lobby to make sure the night would be a success.

Nericcio is nervous.

A selfie I took with Nericcio at the reception in question — that jacket!

First time reading this newsletter? Subscribe here for more merriment! Feedback, thoughts, commentary, rants? Send them to mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com

It’s always awesome to track people in their element from before something starts to the aftermath. Some people have rituals, some people plan meticulously. Some rehearse. You see the real person, for better and worse.

I do it all the time as part of my job — but I had never seen it with Nericcio.

The guy is a goddamn genius — studied under Carlos Fuentes, had Henry Louis Gates Jr. (whom Nericcio calls “Skip”) read his dissertation — and hilarious. Created the influential Master of Arts and Liberal Sciences to mentor the next generation of scholars, and also so he could say he was creating a bunch of MALAS. Tex[t]-Mex remains a masterpiece, as we who know the man await Nericcio’s second book — don’t get all Joseph Mitchell on us, loco.

But even the best of us let doubt creep in before big moments — and the best of us aren’t afraid to show it. What matters is how the big moment ends.

Smooth Chicano classics swirled on the speakers as a capacity crowd walked in — “Suavecito,” “Together,” and the most Chicano song of all time, “Crystal Blue Persuasion.” He paced around as the people streamed in like an expectant first-time father.

Nericcio is nervous.

Nericcio is a people person so the more folks streamed in, the more his lines began to snap with wit and care. By the time he introduced the evening at the starlit theater from a podium on the stage, he was Tony Gwynn ready to lay out the hits.

His prepared remarks were on legal-sized paper — but of course! He started by proclaiming himself a “word nut” as he rhapsodized on the etymology of “movement” and said of Movimiento en la Sangre, “It reminds us to be brave to be fearless also to carry a camera to document.”

Every time Nericcio finished a page, he would toss it behind him. Showoff.

Hell of an origin story for the book. The photos in the book were shot in the 1970s by Nick Inzunza then left undeveloped until he passed away a decade ago. His eye was impeccable, his timing perfect better: Inzunza captured the Chicano movement in San Diego during the 1970s, from a fresh-faced Pete Wilson to the birth of Chicano Park to fucking with la migra and so much more.

Ralph, a former San Diego councilmember turned author turned political consultant introduced the many Chicano pioneers and elected officials in the crowd. Then it was my turn.

I hailed Nericcio and brought out the good-natured boos to rile up the crowd by noting no one cares about Chicanos in San Diego in the bigger Chicano story outside a few precious names and places. That’s why, I argued, Movimiento en la Sangre was so important.

Then the conclusion: “If you don’t buy them out,” I said, pointing to Nericcio and the Inzunza primos, “shame on you.”

Laughter and roars.

“And that,” I proclaimed as I sat down on stage, “is how you sell books, dear Nericcio,”

The subsequent talk was awesome, as was the reception. Not only did Nericcio sell out of Movimiento en la Sangre that night, he sold out of the entire run, necessitating a second edition and the delay of this canto by too many months to count at this point. That NEVER happens with an academic release. He got the latest copies, so go buy one and laugh at Nericcio’s GeoCities-era conception of what a website should look like.

Meanwhile, expect another San Diego St. University Press collaboration between myself and Nericcio by the end of the year.

“You were sweet,” Nericcio said at the reception as people hailed him as the rightful hero he was. An after party loomed. He could finally relax.

“I was truthful,” I responded.

Nericcio was nervous — and he was better than ever.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Perfect for power lunches or romantic dinners

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of GREAT al pastor tacos and Huatulco cocktail at Anepalco’s in Orange kitty korner from UCI Medical Center — ever-delicious, forever heroic portions, always overlooked.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “I'd be glad to be the batboy for such a team as this." — Baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Collins, in his remarks on being part of the inaugural Hall of Fame class which included, oh, you know, Babe Ruth, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb and others — George Sisler!

LISTENING: “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” La Marisoul and Los Texmaniacs. The lead singer of the Texmaniacs has one of the great voices of both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border — as I’ve written before, her a cappella version “Gracias a La Vida” at Gloria Molina’s funeral will always be one of the greatest musical performances I saw in person (even typing this sentence out right now gets me emotional, so powerful her performance was). So how the hell did I not previously hear her version of Freddy Fender’s remake of the country classic? As lovelorn a song as you’ll ever hear, here accentuated by backing music just slightly less morose than the original. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Living in Tracy Chapman’s House”: How did I not share this one when it came out in February? Same reason why I’m just writing about Nericcio haha. Jill Lepore is one of our best public historians and definitely one of the better writers, especially because she’s not afraid to write about herself. I never did the college roommate scene — I would never live with strangers insha’Allah because I’m That Guy — but the camaraderie and wistfulness Lepore paints here is masterful. Still can’t believe I was on a panel with her, fellow Macarthur genius Annette Gordon-Reed AND Sean Wilentz (Canto CXXXI)

Gustavo Events  

June 17, 6 p.m.: I will be co-emcee along with my compa Kedric Francis at the OC Press Club Awards’ annual gala at the Anaheim Hills Golf Course, 6501 Nohl Ranch Rd., Anaheim. Tickets are $75 BUT support scholarships for the next generation of OC reporters, so go support!

June 27, 12:30 p.m.: I will be part of "The Untold Stories of Latinos in the IE" with the Inlandia Institute at the Culver Center Theater Room, 3834 Main St, Riverside. Lecture, FREE.

July 18, 1 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary reporter Sam Quinones about his new tone poem/photo essay about L.A. murals featuring the Virgen of Guadalupe, for which I wrote the forward! At the Edendale branch of the L.A. Public Library, 2011 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Event is FREE; books, BARATO! Make your reservation here!

Gustavo in the News

Confidential To: The two Los Angeles city council candidates who recorded Instagram videos trashing me during the primaries in an attempt to win over voters. How’d that work out for ustedes? See you in Irvine!

“The homophobic chant that hangs over World Cup hosts Mexico and its soccer team”: The Athletic quotes me at length about the chant that never disappears, although I’ve never heard it referred to as el grito — that already exists.

“Where's the line between Tex-Mex and Mexican food? Depends on who you ask”: In which the Houston Chronicle butchers my last name in a way I’ve never seen!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Will O.C. Supervisors lean red or blue in Novemeber?”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about the headline at hand.

"ESPN LA”: I appear on Beto Durán’s show to talk about why it’s ok to root for both the Mexico and U.S. soccer teams but also make sure to ridicule his love of Maná #sehace

“The Best Bars in America in 2026”: Had the honor of contributing to Esquire’s annual roundup with a paean to Kelly’s Korner Tavern in Placentia. KEY QUOTE: “Yeah, we’re lucky if we get to Kelly’s four times a year, but it will forever remain our Avalon.”

“This race shows L.A. is changing forever. And it’s not the mayoral contest”: My latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter talks about the L.A. city council race shaping up in District 9. KEY QUOTE: “The top two vote getters right now in that race are Jose Ugarte and Estuardo Mazariegos, and most of the coverage focused on how District 9 will have its first non-Black council member in 63 years, which will also mean it’ll be the first time since 1963 that L.A. won’t have three Black council members.”

“Spencer Pratt could have been a real contender. His greatest enemy was himself”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about the failed L.A. mayoral candidate. KEY QUOTE: “Angelenos can spot a phony from far away — and Spencer, you’re turning out to be phonier than the fake drama on any of the television shows you ever appeared in.”

“In Orange County, a progressive Latina pol beats back well-funded haters — again”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about SanTana council member and 68th assembly district candidate Jessie Lopez. KEY QUOTE: “As of Wednesday evening, the latest Orange County Registrar of Voters election results had her in second place — less than 1,000 votes away from Penaloza.”

“A Santa Ana city council hopeful learns a SoCal political trick: host a soccer watch party”: My latest L.A. Times co-blog profiles SanTana council candidate Isuri Ramos. KEY QUOTE: ““You always hear in community organizing that you gotta to meet the community where they’re at,” said Ramos, who wore a replica of Mexico’s solid-green 1986 jersey. She reached into her pockets to give arcade tokens to any children she saw.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

 

Gentle cabrones:

More likely than not, we’re going to have to put down our sweet, sassy Cosmo by the end of summer.

He has puppy’s Alzheimer. He spends most of his waking time going around in circles to the point where I had to take him to the doctor because he essentially sanded down parts of his paw pad. We’re getting medicine to try and alleviate his anxiety, but there’s no cure. He still loves to eat and snuggle, but that will probably go away sooner rather than later.

We adopted Cosmo and Hook May 2020, so they’re pandemic pups (Canto CXXV). Cosmo especially became inseparable from me — if I ever came home late or was away because of columna duty, he would refuse to eat and just lay there. He nearly died of pancreatitis two years ago, but we always say that Hook sacrificed himself shortly after to give him a few more years.

Cosmo is 16. He’s lived a good life with us.

He’s lived a legendary life.

Anyone with pets tend to talk to them a certain way, sing them certain songs, and do certain things that others might find strange but are nothing more than expressions of love.

For me, it’s creating backstories for the boys.

How could you not? One was a blond Chihuahua born with a club foot who hated everything but me. Another was a black Yorkie with just one eye who was a sweet guy but got easily spooked. One jumped and ran like the wind; the other was the unstoppable force once he began to rumble.

Greatest puppy tag team of them all.

Now when I walk Cosmo and he tires out and I have to carry him back home, I tell him about all the legendary adventures he and Hook embarked on during their career, many inspired by actual events and involving some of the other neighborhood dogs.

So behold brief synopses (along with real-life asides, if applicable) of Cosmo’s secret life, a saga I call Tails of Legendary Cosumo and Hook-u

Back Story

Cosmo and Hook were both rescue dogs who came to learn their skills at Frosted Face (really exists). They got trained to be puppy mercenaries traveling the world to save other dogs and just in general take down bad guys. They assumed different personas depending on where they were. In the British Empire, it was Lord Hook and Count Cosmo; in Europe, it was Monsieur Hook and Monsieur Cosmo. in Latin America except Mexico, it was Don Hook and Don Cosmo (in Mexico, it was El Cosmo and El Gancho)

First Adventure

They would go to luxury estates around the world (think The White Lotus) and became the talk of the town. “Who’s this Cosmo and Hook I keep hearing about?” evil people would say to themselves with a dismissive air. Then they would see the two from a distance, turn away, then Cosmo and Hook would be right in front of them. Mayhem would ensue, then their refrain for that part of their adventures, based on the leitmotif in the second season of The White Lotus, would play in the movies that followed: pup-pup-puuuup. (although Hook loathed Cosmo, when the two got in their mind they wanted something, they would just stare at you until you complied. And they would pop out of nowhere! Just as I was writing this, I had Cosmo sleeping in our bedroom. I can always hear his claws hit our wooden floor. Not this time)

First Mission

Most of their adventures actually happened in Imperial Japan, where Cosmo went by Cosumo and Hook’s name was Hook-u. The imperious Princess Poppy, clad in a kimono and always barking, asked them if they could rescue her bodyguard Bosch, an old samurai who was his own legendary puppy warrior. This time, he was missing. Cosumo and Hook-u went behind enemy lines and successfully brought Bosh back using Bosh Power (true story: see Canto CCXXIII)

Cosmo Gets Cornered

The first day we adopted Cosmo, he got so scared that he ran into a corner in the kitchen and dug his heels in so he was equidistant from the walls, giving him the best possible advantage in what he thought was a terrible situation. Delilah and I say he was ready to fight for his puppy life, but she gets sad thinking about it because he was so terrified that he was willing to go out in a blaze of furry glory.

That was then. Once Cosmo became a puppy warrior, he was far bolder.

One time, he broke into a fortress, running so fast that the guards trembled in fear because all they could sense was the sound of him whooshing past them But they finally cornered him. This time, Cosmo (dressed in ninja attire) dug in, crouched like that scene with Black Widow in one of the Avengers movies, then leaped so high in the air that the guards strained to see above them.

Big mistake. Hook — also dressed in ninja attire, with ninjatos behind his back — rushed in to knock them down with his charge, tripped those who remained standing with a sweep of his club foot, then issued a mighty roar that made everyone run away.

Cosmo in 2024 — he’s skinnier now but still looks like an Ewok!

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Cosmo and Hook Get Captured

Even Achilles ended up losing, which is why Cosmo and Hook ended up getting captured once. But even though they’re small, they’ve always been mighty.

Hook was captured after he was knocked out unconscious after an explosion. He woke up in a cell — ain’t no thing. Hook went around and around in circles then fell to the floor on purpose, unleashing a huge earthquake that knocked out all the guards and crumbled the walls. He escaped unscathed (based on the fact that Hook liked to swirl in his small bed before finally going to sleep — we called it the Mighty Mighty Hook Swirl and the action of him finally laying down with a thunderous fall him chunking)

When Cosmo got captured, it took three nursed to subdue him in order to administer a shot that knocked him out (when I took Cosmo to get his injured paw pads examined, the doctor ordered his foot be wrapped in a cast. It took three nurses to wrangle him for what’s usually a simple task, so mighty he is).

Cosmodini Faces the Firing Squad

No way an evil power allows someone like Cosmo to function, so the powers that be ordered he be executed. They put him in straight jackets, in handcuffs, in zip ties — nothing (when Cosmo felt like it, he could shake his head and take off his leash. He needs to wear diapers indoors nowadays but easily wriggles out of them. And when I try putting on a shoe for his injured foot, Cosmo keeps kicking it off no matter how tight I strap it)

On a chilly morning, the evil ones lined up Cosmo in front of a wall, his paws tied down, a bandanna around his one eye and a tiny cigarette in his lips.

Ready…aim…

The drums became louder.

FIRE!!!

When the smoke clear, the bandanna and cigarette were on the ground. How the HELL did Cosmo escape???

Rocky to the Rescue

Cosumo and Hook-u went on many adventures, but the two were eventually captured again. This time, their enemies made sure they weren’t going to escape, locking them both down in ways neither of them could escape.

Cosmo howled his haunting howl. Hook shrieked like a baby hawk. Nothing.

But off in the distance, the guards heard a rumble. Cell doors began to tremble.

It was Rocky the Gentle Giant.

The golden retriever clad in a mawashi crashed through the walls, trampled over the guards and shattered the cell doors to rescue his friends Cosumo and Hook-u. Accompanying Rocky on his back were his companions, the cats Lefty and Ariel, each wearing bandannas around their head. (read about Rocky’s own adventures in Canto CCCLXII. Since then, the neighbors brought in two cats who frequently kick Rocky out of his bed to stare out the window. Rocky, always with a smile, never has a problem)

They helped Cosumo and Hook-u escape, and off to the next tail everyone went. May Cosmo have a few more adventures in him…

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Forgive me, Maa, for I have sinned…

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of DELICIOUS lamb al pastor taco at Distrito Catorce in Boyle Heights. Creme fraiche, pickled cucumbers and a sumptuous cut of meat? One of the best tacos I’ve had in a while.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “The only way I know how to get a good show is to practice, sweat, rehearse and worry” — Fred Astaire

LISTENING: “I Need a Lover,” John Cougar Mellencamp. I generally liked this husky-voiced Hoosier but couldn’t say I knew much of his work. Then I heard this extended version of his hit single on SiriusXM — ostentatious instrumental opening (two minutes and 30 seconds!) that slinks back to a simple plea that gets more frenzied with each utterance and is as true a request as ever uttered by personkind. And then! A brash but stumling drum solo with a distorted guitar echo to end — this song is true tour de force and sums up love at its truest. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The WNBA has depth, and its expansion teams are proving it”: The WNBA is celebrating its 30th anniversary, and The Guardian has launched a weekly newsletter about the league that is wonderful. Writer Jordan Robinson knows her game but doesn’t assume the reader does — she reports on trends, throws in a fashion feature of players in their pregame best and ends with a brief bio of WNBA legends like Swin Cash and Tamika Catchings. My Immaculate Grid score is going NUTZ (Canto CCCLXXIV)

Gustavo Events  

June 17, 6 p.m.: I will be co-emcee along with my compa Kedric Francis at the OC Press Club Awards’ annual gala at the Anaheim Hills Golf Course, 6501 Nohl Ranch Rd., Anaheim. Tickets are $75 BUT support scholarships for the next generation of OC reporters, so go support!

Gustavo in the News

“A Multiracial Working-Class Coalition That Wins”: The Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter uses my observations of their long game in an IG reel.

“Confession of A Chicano Schizoid”: Cal State University Channel Islands Profe Frank Barajas credits me as inspiration for his new Beehiiv, which is a continuation and formalization of his years of occasional, insightful newsletters mostly focused on Chicanidad in his native Ventura County — congrats, profe!

"Why Nithya Raman’s Campaign Failed to Catch Fire in the Los Angeles Mayoral Primary”: A publication devoted to covering U.S. Indian and South Asian issues cites a columna of mine.

"The problem with Nithya Raman’s campaign perfectly captured in election night party photos”: The California Post — whose editor never responded to my request to do a profile on him — cites a columna of mine.

"California Sun”: The great daily summation of stories about the Golden State cites a columna of mine.

“Why a Rhode Island lawmaker is backing a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles”: The Boston Globe cites a columna of mine.

“Alta Guide to California Summer Road Trips”: Alta Journal cites a columna of mine.

“Live Blog: LA City Attorney Candidate Leads After Election Night”: A DSA publication shouts out a columna of mine.

“I’m not just a journalist. I’m also an L.A. Council District 1 voter”: Longtime L.A. politics observer Jon Regardie shouts my co-moderating skills.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Most of Stanton evacuated while cameras looked elsewhere”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about O.C.’s chemical near-disaster.

"CNN Newsroom”: I appear at 1 a.m. (!) to talk about Election Day in California.

“The Story is…with Elex Michaelson”: I appear alongside Huntington Beach councilmember and O.C. luxe lonchera pioneer Andrew Gruehl to talk about the political news of the day.

“Inside the Issues: 2026 primary election results“: I appear on Spectrum News to talk about the headline at hand.

“A new genre in L.A.’s literary catalog of doom,” “What a Spencer Pratt billboard tells us about the power of the Latino vote" and “A historic changing of the guard in L.A. Council District 9”: My dispatches from Election Night in Los Angeles, stories that you probably won’t be able to easily access because of pinche gremlins.

“Spencer Pratt says Jesus is his role model. His take on homeless people isn’t Christ-like”: My latest L.A. Times columna analyzes the L.A. mayoral candidate’s words and actions in biblical terms. KEY QUOTE: “Christianity — and good society — calls for us to look to our better angels, not to demonize others, as Pratt regularly does. He knows this too.”

“One thing was clear on election night: Angelenos want change”: My next latest L.A. Times columna sums up the preliminary results of the L.A. mayor’s race. KEY QUOTE: “The city’s political establishment seemed to be on the retreat in favor of populist insurgents from both the left and the right.”

“A year after Trump unleashed his deportation machine in L.A., we can’t let his goons win”: My still next latest L.A. Times columna is about how to remember Trump’s deportation deluge. KEY QUOTE: “That’s why I can’t only think sad thoughts on the one-year anniversary of the raids.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

If you're a reporter like me, who writes nonstop, you're faced with a fascinating calculation every time there’s a holiday:

What can you write that you’ll be proud of but won't be TOO upset that no one's going to read it?

I'm not talking about Stories themed to set holidays or seasons, or year-end lists. Those are expected. I'm talking about standalone stories that could run any time of the year but that you have to publish at a time when not that many people are reading.

The two weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s Day? Forget it. Thanksgiving week? A bomb. Week leading up to Labor Day is when everyone’s burning in the sun — but as a publication, you still have to publish something?

Writing a throwaway piece is a terrible situation, and one I've had to repeatedly deal with my entire career because that’s how LYFE goes, Jack. I’ll never not be proud of something I write — but I also don’t want to unleash the best of the best in a down time, you know?

So I'm not sure why I decided to publish my longform for the Infernal Rag about the intentional burning of Santa Ana's Chinatown in 1906 by city officials as the last story of 2015. I was the editor then, so the choice wasn’t forced on me like other times. 2006 would be the 100th anniversary of that ignominious feat of ethnic cleansing — but the actual anniversary was months away.

What probably happened is that everyone else was on vacation, and we needed something, so I pulled out an idea from the backlog of story ideas I have that makes J.D. Salinger’s archives seem as copious as the known writings of Sappho (someone ask me about the time I did a 4,000-word cover story on Chalino Sanchez’s legacy in four hours on demand — only time I ever closed my office door to get down to WERK)

City officials burnt down Chinatown, which occupied nearly a full block on the southwest corner of what’s now Bush and Third streets in downtown SanTana, after they claimed to have found a man dying of leprosy. It’s a known story in OC history but usually told as inevitable progress. I was able to ridicule that historiography, broke some new stuff, and found enough evidence to lead me to conclude what happened was essentially state-sanctioned murder.

But I also knew my Chinatown story was not gonna have the reach that I hope it would have. But that's the funny thing with stories: You never know which ones hit, and you never know when.

And when I tell this essential journalism lesson in the years to come, I will share my Chinatown story as proof.

One person who did read my SanTana Chinatown story when it published was my good friend, Ben Vasquez (Canto ???) He’s now a SanTana councilmember but at the time, he was a volunteer for the Centro Cultural de Mexico and an ethnic studies teacher at Valley High School. Ben was part of a cohort of instructors who were trying to bring ethnic studies into SanTana Unified School District long before California made a requirement — and boy, was he interested in my piece.

Ben has always been one of my biggest fans. Gregarious, kind guy — and razor sharp. He began teaching about the fate of SanTana’s Chinatown in his class and spread the word around. Other teachers did as well as the years went on, and it had a far longer shelf life that most of what I write. It got to the point where people would ask me if I knew about the case, and I would mention that I wrote a long thing about it some years back, and they’d smile and say that they read it and they loved it and what other hidden OC history did I know?

BRUH…

Another lesson I’ve said in the past: write so that people forget or don’t realize you wrote the story but remember the story. Write for eternity.

In 2022, the SanTana City Council held a ceremony on the southeast corner of Bush and Third streets to dedicate a plaque to the city’s burnt-down Chinatown while also issuing a formal apology (it was their predecessors who officially killed off the neighborhood with a vote). Simple thing — copper plaque telling a version of the history set on a big rock — that was vandalized within a week. I posted the tagging on Instagram, decrying ignorant idiots and it never got tagged again, thank God.

The city also put up banners on lampposts around the actual site of SanTana’s Chinatown, but the commemoration seemed perfunctory, incomplete. What was especially interesting was how the monument was placed looking away from the actual Chinatown site — as if the city still couldn’t bring itself to fully accept what had happened 120 years ago.

But I was nevertheless happy. In a county that loves to forget its unsavory part, SanTana was trying to do the right thing.

A few weeks ago, I noticed the monument was no longer there. Construction crews readied something, so I was worried. I forgot to text Ben about what was going on because of this damn primary season. But someone told me that they were gonna rededicate the monument and that I should go.

I usually don't go to such things unless I'm asked to speak, because I'm always beyond busy. But the ceremony would happen on a Saturday morning and coincide with me helping my honey open up Alta Baja, and it was one street over.

Might as well stop by, you know?

The plaque with the dignitaries who unveiled it — Councilmember Ben is second from right

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About 150 people showed up on a cloudy morning. A youth lion dance troupe prepared to perform. The Asian American Senior Citizens Service Center gave out supplies underneath a tent that had the Mencius quote, “Care for elders and children as if they were our own.” The six SanTana councilmembers were there, including Ben (Mayor Valerie Amezcua wasn’t there — maybe some Brown Act thing?).

"This wouldn’t have happened without you,” he told me, which I immediately brushed off. Then someone else said the same. Another person. And another.

Councilmember David Peñaloza, who’s running for a state assembly seat against councilmember Jessie Lopez, said he nodded his head in recognition when he saw the byline on the Infernal Rag story about the burning of SanTana’s Chinatown years ago. So did Jessie.

And then Dylan Almendral walked up to me.

He’s a local historian who’s criticized my methodology in the past. “He doesn’t like me” I had told someone just minutes before.

“He doesn’t doesn’t like you,” the person responded.

Hoo boy.

The Bowers Museum once canceled a speech he wanted to give on SanTana’s Chinatown because Dylan maintains the circumstances behind its burning were tragic and racist but also not that tragic and racist — and some people didn’t like that approach

There we were, historians together, and he offered a running commentary of what the speech givers were getting wrong and the political show that it all was — and I listened.

Ben publicly acknowledged me, which made people turn toward us. I sheepishly looked down and waved. “They’re only doing that because I’m mainstream now,” I told Dylan. “When I was doing that stuff, no way would they do that. You're now the alternative.”

The council and others unveiled the new SanTana Chinatown memorial. Wow! Gone was the small plaque on a rock. In its place was a massive bronze slab made to look like an extended scroll with dragons on each end wrapped around rods and supported by a lectern of sorts. Engravings showed SanTana’s city seal, a rendering of how SanTana’s Chinatown looked along with lot blueprints.

Ben asked me to take a photo with him — “the one I really want to do.” What a journey for the both of us over the past 11 years.

City planners placed the monument so that visitors would be looking toward the modern-day parking lot and hipster lofts that stand on Chinatown’s ruins instead of looking away from it like the old one. The caption should’ve been more damning against the city and it should’ve named Wong Woh Ye, the Chinese immigrant whose supposed leprosy and subsequent martyr’s death should be known by all OC residents as political racism at its worst. But it was still a sight to see — and to hear that something I wrote as essentially a throwaway helped to spark this was a reminder that you should never write to be read in the first place.

Write for eternity.

“Is it bad?” Dylan asked when I noticed he was in front of the plaque but didn’t dare approach it and ribbed him about it.

“It’s worse,” I joked.

He took a peak.

“Maybe the people who commissioned it cared about remembering a community so it won't be forgotten anymore instead of focusing on the tragedy that destroyed it,” I argued.

Dylan stayed quiet. “They have the map, that's good,” he said. “Man, I need a beer.”

About an hour later, I saw him at Alta Baja. Michelada on me.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Just wait for their Mexican tiki concept!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of GREAT guacamole margarita at Daisy in Sherman Oaks — the type of wonderful drink that’s immediately intriguing and way better than you expect!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Moreover, a supreme destiny was reserved for him: his voice became at one moment that of the conscience of mankind.” — Anatole France, on Émile Zola

LISTENING: “La Charamusca,” Sonido La Conga. Some of that OLD SKOOL Mexican cumbia, the type so slow and muddy yet reedy it sounds like Houston’s chopped and screwed scene! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”: Someone pass along to JD Vance.

Gustavo Events  

June 17, 6 p.m.: I will be co-emcee along with my compa Kedric Francis at the OC Press Club Awards’ annual gala at the Anaheim Hills Golf Course, 6501 Nohl Ranch Rd., Anaheim. Tickets are $75 BUT support scholarships for the next generation of OC reporters, so go support!

Gustavo in the News

“My Two-Year Birthday Wish for The Latino Newsletter”: Julio Ricardo Varela (Canto CCCXXIV) is happy for the future of his wonderful, if terribly named, publication.

“We need to talk about Delaney Hall.”: This Week in ICE says nice things about my Pulitzer finalist work!

“Food history: How America (and the world) developed a taste for hot sauce and ‘spicy’ sweets”: In which my taco work is cited and I’m described as a “humourist” — their spelling, not mine.

“A Becerra-Steyer race in November? It’s possible”: My Los Angeles Times fellow columnista Anita Chabria shouts me out.

“And a Note on Texas...“: AltaPolicyWonk randomly mentions me!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Because of the infinite idiocies of Instagram, this is actually my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all from two weeks ago — UGH…

"How will the Latino vote swing in the California governor and mayoral races?”: De Los asks for my thoughts on the question at hand.

“O.C.’s most overlooked city weathers chemical crisis”: My latest L.A. Times columna gives some love to Stanton. KEY QUOTE: “Neighboring towns looked down on its working-class residents and the beat-up motels along Beach Boulevard, which cleaves the city in half.”

“Spencer Pratt says Jesus is his role model. His take on homeless people isn’t Christ-like”: My next latest L.A. Times columna takes on the Los Angeles mayoral hopeful. KEY QUOTE: “Spencer, what New Testament book says that your crude campaign against the most destitute among us is holy?.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

I have all sorts of readers — but this canto goes out to a graduating high school senior who’s the daughter of a woman with whom I went to Anaheim High.

Yeah, I can’t believe that turn in life, either.

Met the young lady once at Alta Baja. Faithful reader along with her mom. The young lady also thinks I’m cool because my Los Angeles Times columna about loquats made it into her AP English test last year, making me a TikTok sensation for a few days among America’s nerdiest.

Not bad, considering I was in AP English with her mom but I didn’t take the test because I thought it was for the birds.

Recently, the graduating senior asked if I could pen a canto offering specific tips to her and her peers. Like almost any good idea presented to me throughout my LYFE, I initially said no.

I graduated in 1997 — a generation and geological age ago. I’m also the worst person to give high school advice, because I’m me. Any of you tank Algebra II/Trig on principle just because you were angry about the concept of imaginary numbers after a lifetime of being taught that the square root of something could never be a negative?

Exactly.

But given I’m not giving a commencement speech of some form or other for the first time in years, might as well offer some pointers. So hear, young lady, five maxims you should sear into your mind and tell others.

Community College Above All

The only honor I boast of is being in the Orange Coast College Alumni Hall of Fame (Canto XXX). Community college forever changed me, and not just because it set me on the right academic and mental path. I was able to meet people of all different backgrounds and age groups, which is important for the well-rounded perspective graduating high schoolers need for the decades to come.

Yes, you can get diversity at a four-year university, but not nearly with the same range. Both while a student and as a profe at OCC, I had classmates and students ranging from 16 to 79. I had Republicans, Democrats, socialists and MAGAs. Veterans and kids who had no idea what they were doing, seasoned professionals and foreign exchange students. Instead of being with nothing but smart students, you see those who try but just can’t make it, those who get out at the first glimpse of a challenge, those who learn exponentially in their first taste of scholastics — again, an incredible breadth of the human experience over 16 weeks.

Community college is one of the best things this country ever did and…

IT SAVES YOU MONEY.

Money is one of the things adults worry about the most, especially in these hard times. You’re now an adult, so your parents will only be able to shield you so much from financial reality. Go to a four-year university right out of high school only if you have beaucoup scholarships and grants. DON’T take out loans for more years than absolutely necessary, which is why you should go to community college. Dorming all four years to put yourself or your parents in massive debt is overrated; going to school out of state all those years to put yourself or your parents in massive debt is overrated. With community college, you’ll be able to enjoy life faster and better if you’re not overloaded with debt. Debt sucks.

Don’t Look Back

Memories are cool; nostalgia isn’t. That’s why I don’t go to high school reunions and will only attend my 50th anniversary if I’m still around. The people you truly care for, you’ll continue to associate with somehow as long as those relationships last — and social media makes that far more easier than when your mom and I were at Anaheim High. I still hang out with my core group of friends all these decades later.

Sometimes, people from your past return to your life — that’s cool. But let the present and future determine whether you want to become friends yet again, not who said what about whom back in the day. You’ve waited your entire 18 years to leave the K-12 system — why on earth do you want to dwell in it, even mentally? Take what was good, leave what was bad, and off into the world you go.

WERK

The last thing I told my Chapman food writing class this Monday for their final — comprised almost entirely of seniors — was that the best piece of life advice I could give them was to work harder than everyone else in everything, for everything. It’s gotten me this far — and I think I’m in a good spot, so you should try it as well. See: Canto XXV. And Canto CXIX. And ESPECIALLY Canto LXIV.

Smart kids of my Chapman comadre over at Los Amigos High in what’s technically Fountain Valley but culturally SanTana and actually pertains to Garden Grove Unified School District

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Don’t Bother with Fun For Now

When I was going to school, more than a few of my classmates from Anaheim/OCC/Chapman/UCLA regularly went on vacation or partied or joined frats/sororities or studied abroad or moved away from their parents or did all the fun things you’re supposed to do when you’re young, when you supposedly have more time and less worries.

I did none of that.

School full time, work full time. Finished all my course work in four years AND got my bachelor’s AND got my master’s AND created a new career AND did so with a ridiculously low amount of debt that was so low I completely forgot about it until I got a call from the feds. And for that, my classmates made fun of me while bragging how much fun they were having. I would respond by saying I wanted to get done with all the responsibilities before me then so I could set myself up for a lifetime of fun.

On Thursday evening, I said what’s up to my neighbor while walking Cosmo.

“How was work today?” he said.

“I drove three and a half hours to the Central Valley to eat tacos, then immediately drove back.”

“Hard job, huh?”

“I ate an al pastor vampiro, steak ranchero and a taco de camarón, then drove back home and ate a gyro.”

He laughed, shook his head and cursed our land of flojos.

You Do You — But it’s Not About You

OK, the latter part is Rick Warren’s line — but it’s a good one! Your entire life will find you trying to improve it at all times: career, romantic, abode, transportation. You do you, and you deserve to do you.

But there is a world out there for you to help get to the heights you want to achieve.

Don’t bother trying to be the people above you. Bother with the people below you (no matter how bad you think you have it, there are people who have it tougher). You don’t have to go all cloistered or mendicant — help however you do you. Tutor. Give money. Volunteer in something. But helping to improve something for others is a beautiful thing that builds healthy society and individuals.

Best of luck to you, young lady. Tell your mom she did good — now, it’s your turn to do good by everyone else. CU next canto!

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Next up to harvest: blackberries!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Indio mandarinquats from Puppy Strong Farms that my honey has turned into a wonderful jam. 16 ounces for $5 — get this seasonal treasure while you can!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “The mentality of a base stealer is, when you get to first base, you see, you look around and say, ‘Now they’re in my ballpark.’ Know why? Cause I can get a lead and take two steps. Pitcher ducks. Catch’s coming out. Shortstop’s coming across. Second baseman’s coming across. Center fielder’s coming up. Cause I took two steps. And they couldn’t stop me anyway! That’s the mentality of a base stealer. You have to have that mentality/ Look at these guys! Look at that action! And they couldn’t stop me anyway!” — Billy North

LISTENING: “The Weight,” The Band with the Staple Singers. Next to Prince’s guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert, you’ll never see one music legend so dominate others while performing together — on the latter’s own song, no less. One Mavis Staple grunt crashes down with more emotional heft than any Robbie Robertson riff; Pops Staple’s slow recitation destroys Levon Helms’ wail. You can see the Band, ironically enough, crumble under the weight of performing alongside the underrated soul legends — just watch Rick Danko flail around in his part like when the Jonas Brothers did “Higher Ground” — to the point where they just let the Staple clan hum the song out at the end. And I say this all as someone who learned to appreciate the Band because of The Last Waltz! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The Guerrilla Dandy. The literary and political illusions of Carlos Fuentes, everybody’s favorite Mexican”: An oldie-but-goodie: Enrique Krauze playing Mark Twain to Carlos Fuentes’ James Fenimore Cooper — OUCH! Best line of the long piece: “it is difficult to serve truth and power at the same time.” Ain’t that the TRUTH!!!

Gustavo Events  

May 23, 6:30 p.m. aka TONIGHT: I’m going to be participating with other local authors at a read-a-thon for Arvida Book Co., 115 W Main St., Tustin. Entry is FREE, books BARATO — support your locally owned bookstore!

Gustavo in the News

“LA Times Columnist Crawls Out Of Garbage To Tell World He Loves His City Covered In Poop And Blood”: Only the first three words of this headline are right — but what else do you expect from the Daily Caller?

“A Los Angeles, des spots politiques conçus grâce à une IA déstabilisent la campagne municipale”: I don’t have a subscription to Le Monde, so someone’s going to have to tell me what’s the context of them mentioning me in a story about the Los Angeles mayor’s race.

“The LA Reporter: Squawk Box for Thursday, May 7, 2026”: A very good newsletter about Los Angeles government shouts out a columna of mine.

“Thoughts on LA on a Tuesday“: In which AltaPolicyWonk calls me the “Puck” of Los Angeles. That much closer to being the Mencken of L.A.!

“‘It’s never too late’: Why Tony Thurmond says he shouldn’t be counted out of the California governor race”: It’s been over, Tony, as good as you’ve been in debates.

“Applicants”: I’m telling you, someone at Merriam-Webster likes me!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all was ERASED because there’s a CONSPIRACY against me.

“Spencer Pratt’s Make L.A. Great Again acolytes and their dark vision of the city”: My latest L.A. Times columna is all about Prattbots. KEY QUOTE: “That nihilism might sell books and gain followers — but it’s no way to prove to Angelenos he’s serious about fixing anything other than his reputation.”

“Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt need Latinos, not Trump”: My next latest L.A. Times columna offers advice to the GOP’s hopes for California governor and L.A. mayor. KEY QUOTE: “Instead of running away, Hilton and Pratt seem fine with hitching their prospects to this political Titanic.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

Did you see the goal?

In the first minute of the first period of Game 6 between the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Anaheim Ducks this past week, Golden Knights right winger Mitch Marner got a long pass and sped to the net. He had a clear path to a shot until he didn’t — a defender slowed down his breakaway to a sputter. Then Marner did the only thing he can do:

He pivoted.

Marner turned around so that his back faced the Ducks goaltender and came to a full stop. He feinted to the right, then tapped the puck to his left. Only one way to score: through his legs.

GOAL!!!

1-0, first period in a series that the Knights led 3-2. No way the Ducks could recover. 5-1 the final, with the Knights advancing to the Western Conference Final. People are already calling Marner’s move one of the great goals in NHL history, and it very well might be the greatest since Bobby Orr’s Superman winner.

But what I especially loved about Marner’s sequence is that it displayed the importance of something anyone who wants to advance in life must master.

The pivot.

Mike Tyson once said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And ain't that the truth? So when that happens, what are you gonna do about it?

When you've prepared and trained and practiced for your big moment, and then all of that preparation won’t help you at all, what are you gonna do about it?

I've seen the scenario play out many times before in my life. Most people fail.

Politicians freeze in fear. People dumbstruck by actions they weren’t expecting. That king from the third Lord of the Rings, wandering around unable to conceive of a victory, because his plans. were…well, not up in fire because dragons are a Game of Thrones thing.

When life hands you a lemon, make limoncello.

Winners pivot.

I pivot.

Let's pivot!

Marner in his earlier days. A new Dave Henderson? By Jfvoll - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 

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Pivot.

Speech at Cal State Fullerton maybe 15 years ago — wait, that would’ve been 2011 and this speech was like 2007…that was 19 years ago?

Fuck, time flies.

Youth summer camp for Latino and black kids to learn from each other. Can't remember who ran it. Career day. About 70 people in the audience in a lecture hall meant for twice more. The person who spoke before me was a comms person for the U.S. Forest Service. Maybe it was a communications panel, now that I think of it.

Parent day — they were there to check out what the kids were doing. The Forest Service woman didn't read the room at all. She talked about Latino this and Latina that, and did a lot of it in Spanish. Suddenly, a black parent all the way in the back yelled — and that's the proper word because they were upset — that not everyone in the auditorium was “Latin.”

The poor woman fumbled through the rest of her speech until she cut herself off early. The tension was real. The Latino parents were angry. The black parents were angrier. 

My turn. 

I, of course, never have any prepared comments when I speak, unless I'm giving a commencement speech or getting some sort of honor. I just give my hosts a topic, meditate on the subject, and step up to the podium and talk. I’m not sure what I planned to talk about during that Cal State Fullerton summer camp, but I knew I had to scrap it when it was my turn because I had a new job to do.

New speech in three minutes? Sure!

First thing I announced is that I was gonna speak in three languages. English, to the parents who only spoke English. Spanish, to the parents who understood that language better. And a whole different message to the kids in Spanglish. I can't remember the particulars of the speech except I urged everyone to embrace each other because there was just no other way. 

It was probably the best speech I ever gave, because not only did I calm everyone down but I won everyone over — including the angry black dad, who thanked me afterwards. Afterwards, the woman who had been humiliated thanked me near tears for what I had done. 

Pivot!

I was able to secure an interview with someone whose handlers did not want me to talk to. Thankfully, I had a friend in the person’s inner circle who got me in. Right as I was about to start the interview — scratch that, right as I pressed the record button on my phone — the main handler said that I could only talk about one subject and could definitely not talk about the subject I thought I had been cleared to talk about.

My friend looked at me with apologetic eyes but also a bit of intrigue. How the hell was I gonna be able to salvage this one? 

He had seen it before.

So I played by the rules of the handler. I  I got the person I was interviewing on such a roll that I was able to get an even richer story out of it – and I even got to ask one question about our forbidden subject that they gladly answered as they glared at their handler, who stewed that their plan to foil me failed. (This would lead to a severe reprimand for the two of us — especially my friend — but I’ll deal with that in a future La Comédie Oranger chapter)

PIVOT!

The wedding of dear friends of my honey and I. My honey was the wedding planner. Small ceremony, big hall. I did not have to help one bit – so I drank. Didn’t get too drunk because I would have to sober up to drive home, but enough to where I was faaaaaded.

Then someone grabs me. The emcee was even more drunk than I and couldn’t continue. The person who was supposed to cover for them had stage fright and refused to do their new job. I’m the one who knew how to charm crowds – so do it. Even worse? A celebrity friend of the newlyweds was about to serenade them. I got up on stage, made everyone laugh, walked off to applause and then collapsed in a corner somewhere out of nerves.

How do you pivot?

Know everything — no, seriously

All that learning and practice sets up your muscle memory to take over and try something you couldn’t possibly think of when you have to scrap your plans. Most of the times when you’ve pivot, you shouldn’t even be thinking – you have to unlock your inner T-800 and let it do its thing.

Trust yourself

Goes without saying, right? Then why say it! (Writing lesson there for ustedes). But pivoting is when you let your insecurities wither to the pathetic roadblocks that you are. You’ve gotten this far by you being you — just a little bit more of you is expected for the pivot, is all.

Be scared but brave

When you have to pivot, things are not normal. Let that fear of the unknown and imminent failure guide you to success. Fear is an underrated positive attribute. There’s no shame in being scared. I’m no biologist, but adrenaline courses through my body when I get nervous, the adrenaline I need to do things I otherwise wouldn’t do if I was calm.

Don’t pivot for pivot’s sake

This goes specifically to media conglomerates who toss what works to “pivot” to something new. That’s not a true pivot. A true pivot is a game-changer, not a lemmings march. If it works, improve on it instead of jumping off the proverbial cliff.

Not every pivot is going to be successful. But success usually goes to the over-planners who know it’s all for naught once it’s go time.

Poor Ducks. Better pivot next year?

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

The little scamp at bottom left is Mateo THA GOD fresh off a baile folklórico command performance for a crowd of about 100. A few minutes after this, he formally endorsed Jessie Lopez in California’s 68th Assembly District race, beating Bernie Sanders by a week! Photo by manwithanappetite

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Me and my honey at her epic 50th birthday party last weekend, just after I sang for her “Since I Don’t Have You” by the Skyliners by memory instead of some damn karaoke machine or some weak-salsa mariachi reading lyrics off an iPad. Thank you all who attended and those who wish her well — my media chica’s more radiant than ever!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” — Horace Mann

LISTENING: “Rosita Alvírez,” Sparx. My mami had all the CDs of this sister group but somehow never told us — or never knew? — that they’re New Mexico music royalty, being the daughters of Tiny Morrie, the brother of Al Hurricane. AMAZING voices and harmonies, although their simultaneous swaying and off-shoulder blouses is SO 1990s. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Who should be on the Mount Rushmore of Oakland sports?”: A gimmick turned brilliant idea by the voices included and the history that unspools with each answer — even if you don’t agree with them, you learn along (my choice: Rickey Henderson, Bill Russell, Frank Robinson and Alysa Liu)

Gustavo Events  

May 23, 6:30 p.m.: I’m going to be participating with other local authors at a read-a-thon for Arvida Book Co., 115 W Main St., Tustin. Entry is FREE, books BARATO — support your locally owned bookstore!

Gustavo in the News

“Spencer Pratt Is Making Them Sweat in L.A.”: In which a Wall Street Journal reporter calls me “liberal,” showing how little the reporter actually reads me.

“Paradise Dynasty and Burritos La Palma team up on birria soup dumplings”: You know we live in a different era when the Orange County Register is quoting work of mine as an expert voice.

“California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton mocked for misidentifying a ‘street taco’: The Guardian shouts out my taco tweet, as well as…

“Steve Hilton Called a Crunchy Del Taco a ‘Street Taco’ in California. The Backlash Was Instant”: …The New York Times…

“MAGA candidate roasted after misidentification of California food staple” …The Raw Story…

“Steve Hilton Faces Criticism Over Barstow Taco Social Media Post”: …Asatu News…

“A Look at Our Less-Than-Great Slate of Gubernatorial Candidates; RIP, Jason Collins–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: May 14, 2026”: …Coachella Valley Independent…

“The ‘street taco’ blunder that shows Brits just don’t get Mexican food”: and The Times UK…

“Notebook: Alt Writing I” and “Notebook: Alt Writing II” AND “Notebook: Alt Writing III”: Someone does a multipart series on how amazing alt-weeklies were and includes me in all three parts.

“Alta Journal Lands 16 Nominations at the 2026 Southern California Journalism Awards”: Me and my “Ask a Californian” co-columnista Stacey Grenrock Woods are finalists for humor, as we should be!

“The Rise of Republicans in Latino California with Gustavo Arellano”: I don’t think I shared this one from last year, but I do remember that Chuck Rocha was pretty dismissive of me — haven’t been back on!

“To Live and Die in LA- Reconsideration?“: AltaPolicyWonk shouts me out as he usually does.

“Spencer Pratt and the Temptations of Populism”: The Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf should’ve named me instead of just link to my story given he’s also from Orange County and once wanted to debate me on immigration before he became famous haha.

“KCRW FUNdrive”: I wrote a little missive for KCRW’s drive, but I can’t find the link!

“The 2026 Pulitzer Prize winners announced”: A British publication shouts out my finalist nod.

“Rough & Tumble”: Made it into the May 15 edition.

“Nominees”: I’m telling you, someone likes me over at Merriam-Webster!

“Undercurrents with James Billot”: The British version of The Free Press quotes me but doesn’t name me.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Calvert vs. Kim: How Prop 50 forced a Republican showdown”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary is about California’s 40th congressional district.

“Top candidates for California governor face off just weeks before June 2 election”: I contribute pieces to the Los Angeles Times live blog on watching the debate without sound, questions that each candidate should’ve asked each other, and the end of Antonio Villaraigosa as the It candidate.

“Tom Steyer courts Latinos in Santa Ana. A young voter wonders if it’s just a show”: My latest L.A. Times columna sees the California gubernatorial candidate visit Alta Baja Market. KEY QUOTE: “So a visit to Santa Ana, the heart of Latino Orange County, was a good move. At Alta Baja, he could talk to my Mexican American wife and other blue-collar Latinos. When rival Xavier Becerra came to O.C. a few weeks ago, on the other hand, he appeared at a private fundraiser attended mostly by professional Latinos.”

“How a fast food taco showed us who Steve Hilton really is”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about another California gubernatorial candidate. KEY QUOTE: “A humble man would have immediately owned up to his mistakes. Hilton is not a humble man.”

“Who won and who lost in Thursday night’s California gubernatorial debate? Our columnists weigh in”: My latest L.A. Times co-columna analyzes all the debates. KEY QUOTE: “The two candidates who advance to the general election would be wise to offer Californians a hope for the future that doesn’t call back to our yesterdays.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

If you love L.A. literature, you know Mike Sonksen.

Mike the PoeT. Essayist, poet, historian. Teacher, profe. Open-mic magus. Mensch. Part of the L.A. Taco and Alta Journal familia like me.

Average height and build. Usually wearing a hat. Always sporting a smile as wide as Wilshire.

I’ve known the name forever but have only hung out with him as of recently — he’s L.A., I’m O.C. and I barely hang out with my own friends. But I’ve recently been doing more social things in L.A., and Mike has been spending more time in O.C. — specifically, my wifey’s Alta Baja Market, where he goes with his daughter and they spend hours there working on their own thing.

I’m not sure if it was at Alta Baja, or Alta Journal’s L.A. Times Festival of Books after-party at Delicious Pizza in West Adams, but Mike told me about the latest cool thing he was doing: poetry readings at a monthly performance at Verbum Dei High in Watts with the Watts Conservancy of Music.

Would I like to see what’s up?

Yes!

Not only did I think the idea was great, but I needed to work on my poetry game. See, these last two weeks marked my honey’s 50th birthday (Cinco deLilah), Cosmo’s 16th birthday, and the 20th anniversary of when I finally won my honey’s heart. We’re having a big party for her, and I promised a poem for her — so might as well try one in front of people, you know?

Wait, what’s the Watts Conservancy of Music?

Nonprofit that offers free music classes to neighborhood kids who were practicing “Come Together” when I walked inside a small room around 4:30. Mike broke down what was going on. He’s an English teacher at Verbum Dei, and he wanted his students to say some poems in front of a live audience. The Watts Conservancy of Music, which had looked for a home for over a decade, connected with the all-boys Verb last year and was wanting to showcase its students.

“That guy drumming there?” Mike told me. “That’s Stephen Perkins.”

Jane’s Addiction!

He didn’t have to introduce the guy wielding the six-string bass and playing along with a teen — I’d know that lanky tuft on his chin from a time zone away: Norwood Fisher of Fishbone.

And we’re going to read poetry backed by them?

Yep.

Some Watts Conservancy jams to start. Then poets. Jams. Poets. Jams poets. Mike introduced me to L.A.’s new poet laureate, Brian Sonia-Wallace. He and I would be the featured stars — I was billed as the “special guest poet.”

Um…

I do write poems in this here canto about once a year (Canto LIV). In these cantos I’ve documented how I’ve been in plays (Canto LXXVIII) and even recited original corridos (Canto CCCL). I’ve given prepared speeches (Canto CCXVI), can emcee (Canto CCCXCCIII) and can do a public ramble like few others.

But read a poem in public? I haven’t done that since Ms. Sinatra’s class at Anaheim High in 1997. And read poetry backed by a band? Mike did it with such ease as he introduced the evening — the second time it was happening. His body swayed with the rumble drums, the acid lead guitar, the Morello-esque bass.

UM…

A Watts Conservancy instructor soothed us through a cover of Bebel Gilberto’s “Aganju.” Some students nailed “7 Nation Army” down to Jack White’s NPC vocals and Meg White’s thunder. Mike’s students rhymed or free-versed. One of them — who crafted a great poem about what the Jesuit-run Verbum Dei stands for — brought one of them over to meet Brian and I. Mikey’s his name — going to to CSUN.

“What are you going for?” I asked.

“I don’t know, not sure yet.”

“What’s your passion?”

“Poetry. Writing.”

I pointed at Mike and Brian.

“You can make a living writing. Look at me. Look at him. Look at him. So can you.”

“Yes, sir!” the young man nodded as he left me alone.

It was my turn.

Revolución Cantina in DTF, which has a surprisingly good breakfast! Who’da ever thought The Hub would perish, but la Revu wouldn’t…

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What can I say? You can let anxiety defeat you, or you throw yourself in there to fail — and learn how to do it better next time.

Or you do something completely different.

I originally planned to read my poems about Cosmo and my honey and mine’s 20th anniversary, which I had written earlier in the day. But as I went up to face the crowd of about 40 students, parents, teachers and community members, I explained I didn’t get to Watts enough and was inspired by that sin to compose something just an hour and a half earlier. I told one of Mike’s colleagues, a guy from Philly, that I was especially a fan of the Beats and I always appreciated a koan Allen Ginsberg took to heart when writing poetry: First thought, best thought.

The crowd smiled. The band was already jamming. Time to fail. Time to read…

“Thoughts on Visiting the Watts Towers for the First Time”

No Google Maps

I looked up to the right of the freeway of my youth

105 West

Destination Torrance for my first real job

Destination UCLA for grad school

Today: Destination Watts

I was always told the Towers soared

So I scanned the horizon coming off Willowbrook

I thought of its fellow L.A. titans:

The Capitol Records building

El Pino

Graffiti Towers

Monuments of power people pride

Where were the Watts ones?

Above me were smaller giants

Jacarandas and their Barney bloom

Crosses wires poles trees graffitis

Apartments apartments apartments

Willowbrook to Wilmington to lost

I’m lost, I’m lost — Oh wow, it’s just there!

I was always told the Watts Towers bloomed in urban blight

What lies.

Black and brown kids and teens and adults and elders did their thing

Wow, even the houses have mosaics on them —

OK, no one told me 107th just ends like that

A three-point turn and reverse and I park and I’m here

Urban blight? This is like home

Park all around the towers

New building and old new murals and ghost murals

A family cleans their car a tíguere blasts bachata and wears…a White Sox hat?

¡Tío, jugaron ayer y perdieron!

And then there’s Simon Rodia’s children

$12 to get in. Fenced off.

Don’t fence me out

They’re really not that tall

But, man, they’re cool

Italian guy built it Latino guys inherited it

White men buyers Black folks caretakers

Story of America

I’m glad I came

I know fake applause when I hear it. None of the applause was fake as I zipped back to the back of the room. And damnit if the Watts Conservancy jam band made me feel and like Gil Scott-Heron (Mike has video of it that he shared on his IG stories and that you will thankfully never seen)

Then Brian recited an off-the-cuff poem using five words — orange, discombobulated, chair, Godzilla and another one I can’t make out from my notes — in an energized tone, all per the challenge of the audience. THAT is a poet.

At the same time the Verb Poets and the Watts Conservancy were doing their thing, Verbum Dei was inducting former stars and NFL players Hardy Nickerson and Kenechi Udeze into its Ring of Honor, so alumni in football jerseys were popping in to check out the music and the reads. How could they not? The Watts Conservancy/Verb Poets happening was two hours of words, beats, beauty.

But don’t take it from me. At the very end, Fisher said what we all felt:

“Whatever this was, just more of it!”

Gracias for the invite, Mike. How do we bring this to Alta Baja?

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Originally vertical, turned horizontal — it happens!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Bad photo of GREAT dumplings/scallion cake/beef soup at Northern Cafe in Irvine, a pioneering Northern Chinese place in OC.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “If Jesus Christ were to show up with his old baseball glove, some guys wouldn't vote for him. He dropped the cross three times, didn't he?” — New York Daily News columnist Dick Young, on news that Willie Mays wasn’t unanimously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame

LISTENING: “Banks of Marble,” Pete Seeger. OK, Seeger’s lyrics are pedantic, if vivid. BUT his guitar work is always righteous and his vibrato inspires you to join your closest Catholic Worker, stat! Also, no lies detected in this song. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The Espadrille: Spain's Beloved, Timeless Shoe”: I always wondered what the word meant, and now I know — and read yet another beautiful, slightly poignant, always hopeful Craftsmanship Magazine article in the process of finding out!

Gustavo Events  

May 14, 3 p.m.: I’m going to be on KCRW FUNdrive status with my Greek compa Steve Chiotakis (hola, Steve!). Here’s the link to donate — but don’t donate until I’m on that Thursday for three hours!

May 23, 6:30 p.m.: I’m going to be participating with other local authors at a read-a-thon for Arvida Book Co., 115 W Main St., Tustin. Entry is FREE, books BARATO — support your locally owned bookstore!

Gustavo in the News

“Antonio Villaraigosa is everything wrong with the governor's race.”: The ever-great The Truth OC uses the former L.A. mayor’s use of a quote of mine about him to blast him.

“'Take care of my donors': L.A.'s forgotten corruption trial”: L.A. Material, a new news site about Los Angeles, shouts out my Pulitzer Prize finalist nod in Opinion Writing, as does…

“Inside Scoop”: …The L.A. Times’ internal newsletter…

“Pulitzer Prizes: 2026 Winners List“: …The New York Times…

“Two Years of Our Stories, All the Time”: …The Latino Newsletter…

“The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Announcement”: …The Pulitzers themselves…

“Here are the winners of the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes”: …the Poynter Institute…

“Los Angeles Times Named Pulitzer Finalist in Opinion Writing and Breaking News Photography: …and the Los Angeles Times, of course…

“Associated Press, Reuters and Minnesota Star Tribune among Pulitzer winners for 2025 work”: …TWICE…

“The Winner of the Debate?”: AltaPolicyWonk shouts out a columna of mine.

“Spencer Pratt on why he's not a ‘MAGA' candidate, why he thinks he's similar to Obama”: The L.A. mayoral candidate gets mad about a columna of mine.

“Happy Mother’s Day from De Los, plus an ode to Latina moms”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“California GOP Official Preposterously Says That Illegal Aliens Should Vote”: Conservative media freaks out that a GOP leader dares have a brain!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all is actually a ONE NIGHT ONLY “Dile a Delilah” where people asked questions about my honey!

“Whittier elects its first majority-Latino city council”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about the issue at hand.

“Who won the California governor debate on CNN? Here’s what our columnists say”: My latest L.A. Times co-columna talks about the issue at hand. KEY QUOTE: “Anyone who really knows the former L.A. mayor has always seen him as Chicano Prince Hal, someone who doesn’t take himself as seriously as he should.”

“How I learned to stop worrying about noncitizens voting in L.A. elections”: My latest L.A. Times columna examines a proposal by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez. KEY QUOTE: “Did the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta, California’s original avenging Latino, suddenly possess Hernandez?”

“Two winners, one loser in L.A. mayor’s debate”: My next latest L.A. Times columna parses what was said between L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and opponents Spencer Pratt and Nithya Raman. KEY QUOTE: “Raman needed to appear liberal enough to peel away support from the mayor and come out as a progressive lioness to excite Democrats in a year when GOP candidates such as Pratt have to answer for the disaster that is President Trump’s second term.”

“California governor candidates spar over housing, immigration, Trump in high-stakes debate”: My latest L.A. Times group blog talks up the issue at hand.

“Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Spencer Pratt trade jabs over the Palisades fire, Hollywood, housing in L.A. mayoral debate”: My next-latest L.A. Times group blog talks up the issue at hand.

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

I get queries from aspiring and/or young journalists to talk about our profession more often than not. One of them is Alex Magaña.

Freshman at Cal State Northridge. 18. Writer for the Daily Sundial, their student newspaper. One of his parents is from Jerez because OF COURSE they are.

At the beginning of the academic year, Alex tuned into my weekly Instagram Live free-for-all and asked what advice could I give to a young reporter like him. I said I wouldn’t answer him then and there in the middle of my rants because I’d rather tell him one-on-one for a good while, so I asked him to send me a DM.

It’s something I ask people to do all the time if they want to talk journalism. I’m more than happy to give them some pointers and make myself available for more in-depth conversations — but they gotta seek me out. Following through is an important part of our profession, of LYFE.

Few follow through. Alex did.

Once he told me he was out in the San Fernando Valley, I said I’d take him out to lunch instead of a Zoom chat — but I warned that it would be a while. See, I’m kinda busy.

Months passed and the fall semester ended. It was time. I suggested we meet at my favorite Mexican restaurant in the San Fernando Valley – Chabelita’s in Pacoima, whose amazing corn tortillas won the last #TortillaTournament that I held back in 2024.

We met in January (I’m writing our encounter now because I’m kinda busy). Alex’s dad dropped him off. He’s of average height, with his hair combed forward but not in a full Edgar cut. White t-shirt, khaki Dickies, black-framed glasses with a gold rim on the bottom — hell, he looked and dressed like a more cherubic version of me at that age, except his persona was chill and mine was (is?) more like Jack Lemmon.

We greeted each other and placed our orders – he chose green chilaquiles, I went with my usual chile relleno plate.

“I want to be ready for journalism and I kinda hate waiting,” Alex said as we munched on tortilla chips in Chabelita’s small dining room. “I want to jump in right now.”

I asked him why he cared about journalism. “There’s something so personal about it— you can get into the nitty-gritty,” Alex replied. “It kind of feels natural to me. Besides, I’m a sucker for data and polls. And talking to people is fun.”

He said he wanted to cover under-represented communities and injustice 

“I was taught that in democracy we all had a voice. I was sad to find out that it’s not true.”

Man, when I was 18 and in my first semester of Orange Coast College, I was busy watching The Simpsons every Sunday night.

Alex told me that he first heard about me a year earlier, when I had spoken at his high school, Northridge Academy. I remembered that gig well — an English teacher invited me to speak to his class, so I was surprised when the venue was a mini-auditorium and there were at least 200 students. When you get invited to speak, you prepare your remarks for a certain amount of people — disrupt that, and you have to retool right then and there.

It happens. I pivoted and distinctly remember quieting the young bucks in the back once I started talking about political corruption.

You never know who you reach when you talk — but at least I knew I reached Alex.

He got into journalism at Northridge Academy, but the paper was “underfunded and under everything.” He also joined something called the Senior Council, whose adviser wasn’t the best.

“It was a good idea, but the reception was poor because people‘s ideas weren’t heard.”

What did you do about it, I asked.

“I did a story about it. I don’t think they were happy with it.”

Alex went home with some of those amazing corn tortillas #tortillatournament

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Some Mark Wahlberg war movie was silently playing above us. Chabelita‘s owner sat nearby – he seemed to want to say what’s up to me, but also seemed to know that Alex and I were deep in conversation so watched the Wahlberg movie (“Lone Survivor,” I blurted out at some point).

Alex enjoyed his lunch, but didn’t touch the beans. Not a fan. I admitted that I didn’t like avocado. We both laughed at our Mexican heresies.

The article he did on the Senior Council fiasco made Alex dream of “what you could do on a much larger scale” with journalism.

I congratulated him for already being way ahead of where I was, telling him I didn’t get it in my mind to become a reporter until my senior year in college. I told him that I did exactly what he did – reach out to established reporters and ask them to tell me everything they knew, so keep doing that. I also told him that the only reporters who actually responded were Ruben Martinez, and Sam Quinones – the latter told my Fookin’ Ingrate Book Club recently about how I went to meet him at the late great Espresso Mi Cultura in East Hollywood in 2002, and we sat on a bus bench for an hour after his book signing talking journalism.

And that’s why I was meeting with Alex – I’ve been trying to pay it forward ever since. Sam didn’t have to be so gracious to me back in the day, and I didn’t have to be so gracious to Alex now. But we did it because we care about the next generation and it’s the right thing to do.

One day, Alex would be in the same place as me, I told him. But it would take WERK to get there.

I told them that he had to write regularly. I mentioned how stories are everywhere if only you’re paying attention – specifically, I told Alex about the columna I did about a burnt out RV that was next to a children’s nonprofit in Pico Union for two weeks until I called the city about it. I told him to buy old anthologies of Sports Illustrated because sports writing is some of the best writing and it was my own journalism school (Canto CLXXI)

Suddenly, we both looked up. Sirens were wailing outside.

“Hopefully it’s not ICE,” Alex said.

He asked about what should he do next. I suggested he apply for internships and even think about starting his own thing because coverage of the San Fernando Valley is insultingly sparse — myself included. By focusing on his neighborhood, he could become the authority on it and market himself to bigger publications. And I also said I’d be there for him in whatever way I could for as long as he wanted to.

He told me next time we’d see each other, he’d take me to a tea place. I said I always have the tab between us.

“Buy a sports anthology,” I have in my notebook as the last thing I told him. “Buy it for me — for you.”

A few months later, Alex sent me his latest columna and I gave him my thoughts. A few weeks ago, he did the same. He’s only doing opinion right now, but I’m liking the diversity of topics in his writings (I also like that he’s going by Alejandro, but hey: tell your editors to put a pinche tilde over your last name!)

There was four journalists from Jerez just a few years ago at the Los Angeles Times (three from El Cargadero!). May Alejandro Magaña beat us all.

One more thing, young buck: Don’t get beat (Canto XXXV).

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Pure zacatecana Mami love here!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Not-bad photo of AMAZING red pozole by the mother of SanTana councilmember Benjamin Vazquez (Canto ???) at his reelection campaign kickoff last weekend.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Every culture has its southerners, peole who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses” — Susan Sontag

LISTENING: “Lloraras,” Oscar D’Leon. Salsa smash by a salsa master. Heard it this week as part of a salsa soundtrack at the Anepalco’s in Orange kitty korner from UCI Medical Center. Saw El Faraón once at the late, great JC Fandango (Canto XXVIII) — as electric on stage as on tape or stream or however you listen to music now. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Adult bathhouses were a part of Minneapolis nightlife. Then police and panic pushed them out”: A great example of how history informs the present, and why reporters who get this can do better work than those who can’t. Well-written, fabulously researched, even if slightly biased.

Gustavo Events  

May 14, 3 p.m.: I’m going to be on KCRW FUNdrive status with my Greek compa Steve Chiotakis (hola, Steve!). Here’s the link to donate — but don’t donate until I’m on that Thursday for three hours!

May 23, 6:30 p.m.: I’m going to be participating with other local authors at a read-a-thon for Arvida Book Co., 115 W Main St., Tustin. Entry is FREE, books BARATO — support your locally owned bookstore!

Gustavo in the News

“He wears many hats at one of California’s tiniest schools, including hero bus driver”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“A Good Summary in the Times of the Debate”: AltaPolicyWonk offers myself and two of my co-columnistas a plug for our work.

“#046 - Amateur Roller Hockey, Microenterprise Home Kitchens, and an Unlikely Gubernatorial Candidate“: A good newsletter about the San Fernando Valley gives a shoutout to the Northridge BBQ festival where I appeared and you didn’t go.

“Thurmond won’t attend next debate despite ‘polished’ performance”: My summation of last week’s California gubernatorial debate gets a mention.

“Letters to the Editor: Climate change is a fact, not a fairy tale. Don’t frame it as one”: Los Angeles Times readers tee off on me.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“How the late Sen. John Seymour impacted Orange County”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about California’s last Republican U.S. Senator.

“California governor candidates talk over one another in rapid-fire debate”: I participated in our live blog with insights about who needed to make the biggest move (Katie Porter), who did the best (Tony Thurmond), and why Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is so darn angry.

“A cheat sheet for the California governor debate: Here’s what to watch for”: My latest L.A. Times co-columna pre-gamed the subject in question along with fellow columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak. KEY QUOTE: “But then I hear Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton mewl, and I’m suddenly hoping alongside Anita that someone vanquishes their foes with an unassailable vision.”

“John Seymour, Anaheim mayor and U.S. senator, dies at 88”: My latest L.A. Times obituary covers the life of California’s last Republican U.S senator. KEY QUOTE: “John Seymour was the rare politician who didn’t mind harming his career if it meant doing right by his constituents.”

“Here’s who (we think) won the chaotic California gubernatorial debate”: My next latest L.A. Times co-columna post-gamed the subject in question along with fellow columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak KEY QUOTE: “As California’s Black population keeps shrinking, it would’ve been wonderful to see Thurmond do better than he has.”

“The future of Latino politics just played out in Whittier”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about one of my favorite pieces of music EVER. KEY QUOTE: “But what drove the voters I talked to wasn’t a chance to right demographic wrongs.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

Oh, there are some Bible verses that have stuck with me since my catechism days at Saint Boniface.

I never liked the parable of the prodigal son because it cut too close to home in my sibling dynamics as the eldest son. I always love Ecclesiastes because all truly is vanity. Poor Peter, crying after he denied Jesus three times after denying he would deny, is the story of mankind. Señor, yo no soy digno de something por ti, pero una palabra suya bastará para sanarme

Yahweh doing a Polymarket on Job. Whenever Jesus spoke in Aramaic. Freakin’ dumbass Esau. But the story that’s long been my North Star — and now more than ever — is Mark 12:41-44

You’ve heard this one. Jesus is with the apostles. They see the rich give a whole bunch of money, smug as smug can be. Then there’s a poor woman who gives next to nothing.

“Verily I say unto you,” He said. “That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.”

Jesus always sided with the wretched. Mary Magdalene. The blind man and the adulteress, and the woman who touched His garment and the woman who kept bleeding and the Samaritan woman at the well. Samaritans! Lepers! Yes, he said to render unto Caesar what is for Caesar — but his Sermon on the Mount wasn’t about the billionaire class, Tom Steyer.

What I loved about Mark 12:41-44 is that it showed that true commitment to better the world needs to cost you. What good is giving that doesn’t inconvenience you? What good is helping if it doesn’t take something from you? Is it truly a sacrifice if you’re able to return to your comfortable life? If your daily schedule or bank account stings just a little bit afterward?

Maybe this sort of thinking is too Catholic Worker – but as the kids say, where’s the lie?

Virgen de Guadalupe scene in a mural at the Dezember House in Whittier College

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My dad always tells me something every time I make an excuse or beg off to go hang out with my elders or accompany him somewhere:

¿Qué te cuesta?

What does it cost you?

In his case, my dad is saying it’s no inconvenience for me to do what he’s asking of me so I have no excuse other than my own selfishness.

Harsh? A little bit.

He knows exactly what I do for a living and he’s very proud of that — but I also think he doesn’t understand the scope of what I do. My type of journalism is like a vocation, I’ve realized all these decades later.

I did have aspirations for the priesthood when I was young — I thought serving people would be a beautiful thing. And that’s how I’ve committed myself to journalism. It has cost me relationships. Friendships. Parties, get-togethers, milestones, lives lived that I’m just returning to 26 years after I started, when I think I can finally breathe.

I don’t regret my career because it was all worth it. But now that I see these times and now that I know how privileged I have been to live the life I’ve lived, I’m committed to give more than ever before in every way possible — and I think all of ustedes should, too.

It does need to cost you.

To paraphrase the late, great Mr. Gold, the best work is 10 minutes further than what you originally planned for. To cite Canto CLXIII, you help not for your own glory, but for the greater glory.

To quote Profe Lisa Alvarez in Canto CDXX:

Do what you can, and then do more. That’s the advice more than ever. I told my students – I reminded them – we’re living through history and they sort of groaned. Some of them remarked they are tired of living through so much history. But these are the moments when people in the future will look back and wonder what we did and what we didn’t. You want to be a part of what secures the future.

I also remember where Jesus says that it’s better to pray in private than grandstand like the hypocrites, so I’m definitely not proclaiming I’m some desert saint. I’m not — I can do so much more. So can you. So let’s all do it — together.

Thank you for coming to my Leo Talk.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Washed down with Orange Bang!, of course

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of DELICIOUS chile relleno burrito from Lucy’s Drive-In in Mid-City, which I always get to go whenever fate takes me to La Brea.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Stradivariuses were once new” — Sign in the workshop of famed luthier Samuel Zygmuntowicz

LISTENING: “I Ain't Going Back to Nashville,” Jake Vaadeland. Proper rockabilly. Video a bit too hipster, but the music, voice and lyrics are there — not bad for a Canadian! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Island Hopper”: The Surfer’s Journal still brilliantly keeps its stories for those of us who subscribe to their gorgeous print edition, so you’ll have to hit up your neighborhood goofy foot to check out this travelogue about trying to find waves across Micronesia in progressively smaller planes. I don’t think I’ll ever try to surf, but stories like this at least make me want to travel and write — but the woods are lovely, dark and deep…

Gustavo Events  

April 25, 2 p.m. aka TOMORROW: I will be a judge at the Global Grill BBQ Fest at Northridge Park, 10120 Reseda Blvd., Northridge. Entrance is FREE!

Gustavo in the News

“Thoughts on the Eve of the Debate”: Shoutout by AltaPolicyWonk.

“A Fictional Discussion In a Campaign of the Gubernatorial”: Another shoutout by AltaPolicyWonk

“Fictional Campaign Conversation In Another One...”: Yet another shoutout by AltaPolicyWonk.

“The Dog Catching the Bus”: Still yet another shoutout by AltaPolicyWonk, this one saying “There is no better commentator of politics in LA than Gustavo” — not bad for an Anacrimer!

“Next Gubernatorial Debate”: And still yet another shoutout by AltaPolicyWonk! I owe the person a drink — no, seriously!

“Real Talk with JC Frias”: The influencer, whoever he is, flashes an article I did a decade ago.

“The Smushing Machine”: My #tortillatournament scholarship gets cited.

“Lalo on CALÓ:”: My fellow jerezano shouts out a story I did for the Infernal Rag on Mariachi Sol de México and its convenenciero boss Jose Hernandez.

“San Francisco must preserve the birthplace of the Mission burrito”: My burrito scholarship gets cited.

“This L.A. Mexican Restaurant Has Finally Been Declared A Historic-Cultural Monument — It’s Also Credited As The First Taco Truck In The U.S.“: Someone cites my taco scholarship.

“‘Maga Mayor’ Furor Rocks Downey as Mayor Says Death Threats Roll In”: People are stupid.

“Taco Madness”: Evan Kleiman shouts out the BBQ event we’ll be judging at.

“Part 161: A Substack “Hero” Post – Independent Journalism in Los Angeles”: I don’t believe I shared this plug by legendary whistleblower Zachary Ellison.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“The unlikely alliance that saved L.A. schools from striking”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about the columna I did last week.

“Meet the Mexican revolutionary turned L.A. Times columnist”: My latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter talks about Aurelio Manrique Jr. KEY QUOTE: “Or that he deserves a spot in the pantheon of legendary Times metro columnists like Jack Smith, Ruben Salazar and Steve Lopez. Alas, it was not to be.”

“Stop being so chill, Xavier Becerra. Fight for California’s future”: My latest L.A. Times columna tackles the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. KEY QUOTE: “It’s six weeks until the primary, so time to throw down — channel your inner cholo and go get what should be yours.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

Spring is looking good at Puppy Strong Farms. The lychee tree is sprouting new growth; its kumquat neighbor is going through the third of six harvests it usually gives, insha’Allah. The Indio mandarinquats should be ready in three weeks; the REAL chamomile is gorgeous (Canto CCCXC, of which ustedes failed me yet AGAIN — but no one claimed the prize so consider it null and void haha). 

I put in some new trees that I hope to write about in a few years if they take, and I think this is the first year the thornless blackberries will really give. And my loquat tree didn’t give as much as it should — but no one eats loquats!

But not all is wonderful — it never is.

Whenever you have a great harvest, you must also deal with…pests. 

A squirrel barks at me every morning when I tell it to leave my mandarinquats alone. When the avocados come, so will opossums. And as much as I love birds, I don't like them stealing my white mulberries, which don’t seem to want to come out this year . 

I could never be a rancher, because I don't have it in me to kill…until I do. When it's between a pest and what I grow, what I grow wins.

Whenever mice have come into our house, I usually catch them within the day. This weird SoCal spring have brought out a lot of cockroaches outside — huge ones, too — and I’ve been stomping on them with the ease of clacking away on a keyboard.

I have no idea how the Jains DON’T do it.

But you know what doesn't come around as much anymore? Slugs and snails. The gastropod world knows not to mess with Puppy Strong Farms.

The ñangapirís are sweeter than ever this season! (Canto CCCLIV)

First time reading this newsletter? Subscribe here for more merriment! Feedback, thoughts, commentary, rants? Send them to mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com

Through junior high, I read all the works of Stephen King. He was a great, grimy storyteller, and I still vividly remember plot points and dialogue even if I stopped reading him around “Dolores Claiborne,” which I found dull. Besides, by then I had discovered Sports Illustrated (Canto CXXIII).

King’s scariest story is “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” about a town where dead rock and rollers play and no one who comes in can ever get out ala “Hotel California” (actually, the most terrifying ones are the Richard Bachman series). The second scariest is the original “Lawnmower Man,” which has nothing to do with the movie, which sucked. 

But the grossest one is easily “Graveyard Shift,” about a guy who goes into a cave somehow that is packed with millions of…rats?!

Wait, why did I think it was snails and slugs all these years?

They’ve always disgusted me (psychoanalysis time: I do not like mushy solids like avocados, bananas, eels, and aforementioned gastropods—discuss). So when a bunch of them invaded our garden a year or two after we bought our house, I was disgusted and furious. 

Every night for weeks, I would find my seedlings half eaten, with glittery trails of slime crisscrossed around it. I tried everything to stop the destruction. Pools of beer to drown them doesn't really work. Copper tape does, but that just means the snails and slugs go somewhere else — not good enough, because they must be eliminated. 

Salt messes with the soil, just like pesticides. I wasn’t going to capture them alive to turn into escargot, which is just buttered madness, or catch and release like I will one day with that arrogant squirrel. It got so bad that I bought a headlamp to wake up at midnight and crush them with a rock like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

That made them come out in bigger numbers.

It wasn't just regular snails. It was slugs. Small ones. Spotted ones as big as my thumb. They were wasting my garden. I was losing sleep. Then one night, I decided to not do anything for a couple of nights. I wanted them to get comfortable. 

The night came. 1 a.m, maybe. Smash. Smash. Smash. At least 50. In the planters and on the ground and on bricks and the front and back.

Smash. For a good hour. Smash.

I felt no joy what I was doing — but it had to be done. I wanted to take care of my garden. And they were getting in the way. 

I smashed, and I smashed, then I smashed until there was nothing more to smash. And then they never came back. And just in case they had any ideas, I bought cute little carnivorous decollate snails that target other snails but leave plants alone and now regularly propagate in Puppy Strong Farms.

Ah, allyship!

A lot of times in life, we have to do things we don't want to do. I think victory goes to those who can find the gumption to do so and live with themselves afterward by rationalizing what we just did. This is the realm of sociopaths, of course — which is why we must anchor ourselves with good people and good thoughts and good, good, GOOD.

And once we’re done with the task, we say never again…until the next time.

I saw some slugs last night. It’s smashing time.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Gracias to those who responded to my IG video request for suggestions for my swing — who says I don’t appreciate feedback, El Dolce Vita!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Me mid-swing at The Islands Golf Center in Anacrime — first time I raised a driver in 27 years. Can’t wait to do it again but I’ll NEVER play a round unless there’s a deal at the end — who has time to waste five hours?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “I like good company, but I like hard work still better” — Camille Saint-Saëns

LISTENING: “Plánchame la Ropa,” Náfer Durán y su Conjunto. Even though Southern California has many colombianos, vallenatos have yet to penetrate our soundtrack outside of their pachangas and chipster gatherings. Damn shame, because man, how the trills and raspas ROCK. This is a funny, simple song — man, vallenatos sure love to make fun of cucks! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Stuck in the Weeds: An Invasive Plant Meets Bureaucracy”: As usual, la migra doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing. Maybe a section too long, but a hell of an ending line!

Gustavo Events  

April 23, 11 a.m.: In which I’ll be speaking about the political history of Orange County to the League of Women Voters of North Orange County at the Coyote Hills Golf Club, 1440 E. Bastanchury, Fullerton. It is NOT free but rather costs $30 that comes with a meal — but does it come with grapefruit? Try to figure that out here.

April 25, 2 p.m.: I will be a judge at the Global Grill BBQ Fest at Northridge Park, 10120 Reseda Blvd., Northridge. Entrance is FREE!

Gustavo in the News

“The Perks of Working at KCRW”: Evan Kleimain talks about the BBQ event I mentioned above.

“Republicans, weirdly, might be feeling Eric Swalwell’s pain”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“The Living Murals of a Santa Ana Councilmember’s Classroom”: NelCYN shouts me out in a story about SanTana councilmember Ben Vasquez (Canto ???)

“Could Trump cause a Catholic schism?“: I’m telling you, someone at The Week really likes me!

“Stick”: And at Merriam-Webster, too!

“Thursday with Pete”: AltaPolicyWonk shouts out my work.

“Letters to the Editor: We Missed the Point”: An Alta Journal reader did NOT like the “Ask a Californian” answer me and my co-columnista Stacey Grenrock Woods gave in our latest.

“Why are Latinos serving as immigration agents? Are they victims or oppressors?”: A dispatch by someone else from my canto last week.

“Angry Samoans”: Always a wonderful day when my Wally George writings are cited by a legendary band.

“Latinos as Agents and Targets: Power and Politics in Immigration Enforcement”: Writeup of an event I wrote about last week that maybe one of ustedes went to.

“Raul Claros”: When your L.A. city council campaign is predicated on trying to take down a hack Los Angeles Times columnista, you have no campaign, bruv.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Huntington Beach Republicans push for MAGA agenda statewide”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary is about MAGA-by-the-Sea.

"Nick Valencia News”: A snippet of the IG show I did a few weeks ago with independent reporter Nick Valencia.

“Pope Leo isn’t afraid of President Trump. We shouldn’t be, either”: My latest L.A. Times columna examines anew the pontiff versus the Pendejo in Chief. KEY QUOTE: “The president has a lot to fear these days, and not just because he violated most of the Ten Commandments with his bonkers Jesus post, which quickly disappeared.”

“A Tejano tries King Taco for the first time”: My latest L.A. Times Essential California is about what I learned from one of our great photography fellows. KEY QUOTE: “You don’t realize how special, how lucky you guys have it. King Taco is such a unicorn.”

“Meet the LAUSD veteran who leads the principals union”: My next latest L.A. Times columna is about AALA/Teamsters 2010 president Maria Nichols. KEY QUOTE: “Shiny black shoes. Black slacks. Light makeup. Tight smile. The only flash of color was her green V-neck union T-shirt, the logo peeking out of a black blazer.”

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Gentle cabrones:

A brilliant colleague of mine saw my Lalo Alcaraz calendar recently and said I needed no encryption since my serial killer writing is indecipherable. No, no, I countered – it was actually Akkadian. They laughed, and you should, too! You know, the language of the Sumerians written in cuneiform on super-duper packed clay tablets? No, never heard? ‘Cause you’re not a NERD.

I digress.

My brilliant colleague’s comment was about my penmanship, yes, but they also noted how busy my calendar is. It always is — but even this past week was a little bit more busy than others. I had an event every single day across Orange County and Los Angeles in addition to my columnas and my Chapman job and all the other things I do. Someone told me last week (what’s up, Querétaro!) that what they especially love about my writing, whether it’s in my columnas or my cantos is that I’m always someone on the beat, writing about the things that matter right now.

They said it, not me — but that’s always the goal.

Here, then, was my past five days — and, by the way, I know I did a version of this trope last year with Canto CCCXXV. BUT even this week was more packed than that one and nowhere as timely with the themes of the era…let’s go!

Monday

Went to speak for supposedly the last time at the Irvine Valley College English class of Profe Lisa Alvarez (Canto CDXX). I say “supposedly” because all the professors I know who retire inevitably moonlight, because they miss the invigoration that is teaching.

I met Profe Lisa in her office where she gave me some first-edition copies of iconic books about Cesar Chavez — she’s clearing out her office slowly like all retiring profes do. On her bookshelf was a photo of her and I from 2008, when my little-read Orange County: A Personal History was published.

“We were so much younger back then,” she said.

“We still look the same and we’re better than ever,” I countered. No argument from profe!

She asked me to focus my talk on immigration so I told her students my family story and how it informs my writing and I gave examples from my career. I usually talk to classes for an hour — a 45-minute speech, with 15 minutes of questions — but this one was more like an hour and 15 minutes of questions because the questions never stopped. All wonderful questions that varied from my work to Latino Trump supporters to how to use digital archives to one from a student from Bakersfield asking where’s some good Mexican and Italian restaurants in OC (Burritos La Palma and Cortina’s Market were some recs I gave her).

Later that evening via text, Profe Lisa said her students were especially taken by my insistence that we can reach people who disagree with us in our personal lives, but all efforts must be anchored in love. Was wonderful to hang with Profe Lisa two days in a row — the previous evening, she and her husband, literary raconteur Andrew Tonkovich, were at a party at our house… but that’s a WHOLE other story. 

Tuesday

Another community college — Golden West College, which has changed dramatically since the last time I was there probably a decade ago. I spoke to a gathering of student groups — LGBTQ, indigenous, Latino, and writers — and the mystically named Forum I, a large lecture hall. The profe who invited me didn’t really give me a prompt for my talk, so I just spoke about my academic career and the importance of Orange Coast College to it and said the greatest award I’ll ever win is one I have: I’m a member of the Orange Coast College Hall of Fame (Canto XIV). Then I talked a bit about writing — only the professors and librarian smiled when I said everyone should write a minimum of seven drafts.

Everyone did laugh when I suggested they go touch grass – I know my youth lingo! Really, the students were there to hear me so they could eat pizza afterward, which they were able to grab once I finished. I took two slices and was about to leave when some instructors invited me to go visit Golden West’s multicultural center, which just opened in the fall. It’s really just a section of the second floor of a building — a communal meeting room, a kickback space and some offices. But the students who were there beamed with joy, and so did I: incredible it was to see something like that in an era like ours, in a city like Huntington Beach. As I tell crowds again and again – this ain’t John Wayne’s Orange County – it’s not even mine. And that’s WONDERFUL.

Wednesday

I spoke at a panel about immigration at the old Herald-Examiner building in downtown LA for a panel about immigration sponsored by UCLA and Arizona State – I was there to provide the laughs among brilliant scholars. They like me to bring in for that (Canto CDXXI).

Before that, I pre-gamed at the Proper Hotel across the street with my brilliant Los Angeles Times colleague, Ruben Vives – he was one of the main reporters who broke the Bell corruption scandal from 16 years ago. He’s also my eternal plus-one at classical music concerts, which we go to at least twice a year, including with other colleagues at the Hollywood Bowl, one of my favorite places in Southern California. We were supposed to drink alongside Brittny Mejia, our colleague who’s more brilliant than the both of us together, but she couldn’t make it due to deadlines. She told Ruben to take photos of me at the event in Proud Mom mode, and Ruben complied – blurry shots of me from far away, shots of his shoes, shots were cut off. BRILLIANT.

A small bit of progressive paradise in MAGA-by-the-Sea

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Thursday

I co-moderated a Los Angeles city council debate in Highland Park at Franklin High School’s John C. Holland Auditorium featuring District 1 councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and opponents Raul Claros and Sylvia Robledo. My co-moderator was Emma Lee Del Hierro, a Franklin junior who told me she always cared about national and world issues but wants to start to learn more about local stuff. She was absolutely brilliant.

You can read two accounts in the links below. A few things that didn’t make into the account of my former colleague Marina Peña:

• Supporters of Eunisses and Raul accused me before the debate even started of being biased for the other candidate — funny!

• The evening was not as raucous as Marina’s article below makes it out to be save for two incidents:

  • A woman interrupted the debate about halfway through by yelling something I couldn’t comprehend before she was escorted out. Since we had a strict no-applause/signs/boos policy — Emma and I said that again and again for every boo, snicker, and cheer we heard via our Voice of God mic that broadcast over the auditorium speakers — I didn’t hear what the woman’s complaint was nor was I particularly interested in hearing it at the moment because rules are rules and we had questions to ask. After the debate ended, someone said that she was upset that there was no Spanish-language translation made available. I told them I wish she had told Emma and I beforehand so the organizers could’ve tried to rectify the matter, but interrupting in the fashion she did was unacceptable and the no-interruption rules were the law of the land that night. The person seemed to understand.

  • Right before closing statements, Claros stormed off because he claimed I allowed someone to mock him. I said I didn’t hear or see anything — and we probably reprimanded the crowd a good 20 times, so Emma and I were definitely ready for any excuse to declare “NO APPLAUSE” (it was pretty fun, actually Hey, maybe the evening was a bit more raucous than I remember!) Afterward, someone admitted to me that they knew who had set off Claros and claimed they did it because I allowed Claros to say supposedly misogynistic things against Hernandez and Robledo. I replied that the rule for the evening was that any time a candidate criticized another candidate, the criticized one got 30 seconds to respond (Claros set off that bylaw again and again and far more than Hernandez and Robledo — pobrecito!) I added that if I had heard or seen their friend antagonize Claros, I would’ve booted them — rules are rules. The person accused me of supporting Latino patriarchy with that statement and stormed off.

    • As Claros dramatically stormed off, he railed that I supposedly kicked out the woman who wanted Spanish translation because of her request. If he cared so much, though, why didn’t he say something — calmly — when the incident happened? And what he thought was a brilliant dig at me — “This isn’t Irvine, Gustavo” — wasn’t a paraphrase of what councilmember Monica Rodriguez once said about me but rather a reference to a columna I did where I had Hernandez walk me through MacArthur Park, which sits in CD 1, and mentioned that a “grimy” stretch of the one-hour walk felt like Irvine…for three minutes. Another candidate who wasn’t there that night, Lou Calanche, had previously ripped me for that observation on IG and mischaracterized it even worse than Claros. Pure performative pendejadas, the two of them. Advice to Claros and Calanche: When you try to score points with the public by lambasting a hack columnista, your campaign has issues, bruvs.

• Best part of the night: Before the debate started, I told the audience and debate participants to be on their best behavior and to set an example for young scholars like Emma. Halfway or so through, I asked Emma how she would rate the audience on their behavior. "6 out of 10,” she replied after thinking for a beat. What about the candidates? “3 out of 10,” Emma said without hesitation. The audience was NOT happy. Then someone yelled, “What about the moderator?” referring to me. “Gustavo 0, Emma 10.” I replied. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I AM.

• Supporters of Eunisses and Raul accused me after the debate in person and online of being biased for the other candidate — can’t wait to moderate a political debate again!

Friday

I went to Whittier College to speak to a food writing class taught by JB Burton along with New York Times food superstar Tejal Rao. The students made tamales from a delicious pork shoulder recipe by Profe JB (not revealing his secret!) with masa from Amapola Market. I didn’t join in the tamale making, though, because I told the students it was just too personal for me because of my Mami but that my sisters and brother continue the tradition. But I did make sure happy Juan Gabriel played while they smeared masa on corn husks and wrapped the tamales, and I washed dishes until Profe JB said I had earned my proverbial keep. Great students, great profe, great class — all great.

My calendar is pretty open in May. What do you got for me?

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Pickled onions and salsa verde with feta? FUUUUUUCK…

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of GREAT taquitos de camote at Lola Gaspar in SanTana that served as my reward for the week — Chef Louie makes it happen!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.” — Henry L. Stimson

LISTENING: “Please Mr. Postman,” Special Consensus. Probably can’t get further culturally than Motown and bluegrass BUT the high lonesome sound here meshes beautifully with what’s a melancholy classic. Besides, a bunch of ‘billies made it to Detroit back in the day, you know? Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The Ballad of Ollie Jackson”: The St. Lois bad man who was even meaner than his contemporary, Stagger Lee — what a great piece of ethnomusicology!

Gustavo Events  

April 23, 11 a.m.: In which I’ll be speaking about the political history of Orange County to the League of Women Voters of North Orange County at the Coyote Hills Golf Club, 1440 E. Bastanchury, Fullerton. It is NOT free but rather costs $30 that comes with a meal — but does it come with grapefruit? Try to figure that out here.

Gustavo in the News

“Tensions boil over as candidate storms out of Council District 1 forum”: The LA Local story I mentioned above. Speaking of The LA Local…

“💙 Why hundreds of singles are ditching Tinder for Dodger Stadium”: …executive editor Kristen Muller calls me California’s Loquat King in her occasional newsletter. But no one eats loquats!

“CD1: No Winners in What Was Supposed to Be the First Candidates’ Forum. If They Can’t Agree, What Can Residents Expect?”: Another perspective from the debate, in which the author — who very well knows who I am — says I “presumably” speak Spanish. No te hagas pendejo.

“El Segundo Times”: Another shoutout in an AI salsa song. Moderate Latinos have ALWAYS been annoyed by me haha.

“Cesar Chavez, l’idolo che crolla”: An Italian communist newspaper cites me!

“Where Do Tacos Originate From? It's Complicated”: My taco scholarship is cited.

“Abuse and assault allegations upend César Chávez’s legacy”: My former student interviews me for a Chapman Panther story about the subject at hand.

“Lunch with the League presents Gustavo Arellano on “A Political History of Orange County”“: A plug for my upcoming event in the Fullerton Observer.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Huntington Beach MAGAs want to take their revolution to Sacramento”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about Surf City machinations. KEY QUOTE: “And propping up Surf City — a wealthy beach town so full of itself that it makes Santa Monica seem as humble as Santa Ana — as the last, best hope to save California?”

“Pope Leo’s brave stance against Trump”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about one of my favorite pieces of music EVER. KEY QUOTE: “Trump wages war for himself; Pope Leo urges us to stand for something other than ourselves.”

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Gentle cabrones:

In Canto CCVII, I talked about how between seventh and eighth grade at Sycamore Junior High, the cool boys decided they weren't going to wear silk button-up shirts anymore and were going to dress as taggers.

I mentioned how I convinced my Mami to buy me new clothes to match the seventh grade fashion, which made me immediately out-of-style by the time we started eighth grade. 

I talked about how my fashion faux paux made me realize the folly of trying to be cool, and how I decided I would never care again what people thought of me after ninth grade, when the cool boys ditched the tagger look for the rebel look.

Two things I forgot to cite back then:

While the cool boys moved past the rebel look for God-knows-what, I’ve mostly stuck with checkered shirts, jeans and Dickies since, with a foray into Hawaiian shirts until my honey forced me to ditch all of them and the incorporation of guayaberas.

And I forgot to mention the Docs!

I have no idea how I got her to buy a pair of shiny black Dr. Martens in eighth grade. Maybe I told her that they were technically orthopedic shoes that might work wonders for my flat feet, pigeon toes and that one leg that's half an inch shorter than the other? But she bought them. She didn’t have much money to spend, but she would gladly spend it on her oldest.

Great shoes — sturdy and classed up anything I wore. The cool boys wore them through the tagging phase but dropped them around our senior year of high school — burgundy was the main color, but green was even bolder.

I kept my black Docs.

They lasted me until about college, because I didn't take care of them like my Mami said I should. So I bought another pair, realized how much my Mami had paid for them, put them away in my closet as a special occasion shoe...and promptly forgot about them as I transitioned to Chucks back when they were cheap (Canto LVII).

I bought a nice pair of brown leather shoes from Nordstroms around the time I left the Infernal Rag, quickly wore those out, then bought another pair that I wore only once: on one of the last times I had to dress up to see my Mami as she was dying of ovarian cancer. I wore the new ones specifically so she could be happy that I was dressing bien vestidito (Canto CCVII), then put them away.

That's when I found those Docs I hadn't worn in about 17 years.

Dusty. More beat up than I remembered them to be. But I put some shine on them, strapped on new laces, and have worn them now for seven years — far longer than my original pair.

Their time is nearly up.

The upper part of both have rips so you can see the white fabric underneath the leather. The back arch of the left Doc has a tear from me foolishly tying my laces around them instead of threading them through its eyes, and the heel is torn. Each sole has a hole; the insoles are long gone, as are the pull straps. One of them has a weird shiny circle that shouldn’t be there.

I want to use them for at least two more years and then I’ll buy some new ones although I do have a pair that I’ll never use. One time as an adult, my Mami bought me another pair of Docs.

The only problem? They were matte black. I don’t wear matte black. I wear shiny black.

I told her I appreciated the gift but I didn't like the pair and could she return them? She didn't because she got busy, and then she got sick, and then she died.

I wasn’t going to throw them away, of course. I kept them where I could see the box because I thought I was going to return them — my Mami kept the receipt, God bless her. Then they became a painful memory that I stuffed in the back of the top of my closet, where my archives are.

I never exactly forget Mami’s Docs, but I never opened the box. But last week, as I saw how beat-up the Docs I bought were, I decided to take a peek.

My left Doc

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Yep, I'm not going to ever wear them. Matte tones are just not my color. Maybe I don't have the best fashion style — but it's my style damnit.

My Mami would've replaced them if cancer hadn't struck her, so I have no real attachment to those Docs. And what's the point of having shoes — brand new ones, no less — in a box never to be used unless you're a sneakerhead, which I’m not? At this point, I'm going ask my cousin to sell them on eBay — freakin' Plas once bought a box of 20 white T-shirts for $20 then sold each t-shirt for $25.

I'm keeping the receipt, though.

I wrongly remembered the timing of how and when she bought them. For years, I thought it happened in 2016 during the summer, when I was out in the field leading the Infernal Rag and really had no time to shop.

No. She bought them December 2017. I was out of a job. It was around Christmas.

She was weeks away from massive surgery to try and take out the Stage IVb cancer inside of her. She was a year away from the emergency room visit that signaled the beginning of her end seven years ago this month.

My Mami was living in pain — physical, mental, emotional. Yet she took time out of her life, money out of her savings, to buy something for her cholo nerd of a son. If she was hurt that I never wore her gift, Mami never told me — but I think part of her was.

My mami always bought me small, random things even as I begged her not to. “Cómprese cosas,” I’d say. Buy yourself things. But she would never listen. Every moment of her life was devoted to her children, something I realize more and more as the years go on.

I know I frustrated my Mami in ways I’m aware of and others I never will. But I also know that she dearly loved me and was so proud that I always insisted on being ME, something she could never do for so many reasons.

My honey saw me looking at my Mami’s Docs and thought I bought them. She was surprised I bought myself something new.

“No, my Mom got them for me,” I responded, telling the story I just recounted to ustedes.

My honey smiled sadly.

“Your mom was always very kind.”

She was.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Photo by Jeff Gordinier, who keeps introducing me to writing legends because he’s a mensch like that!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Photo of me and legendary writer Tom Junod outside Laguna Beach Books before we were in conversation about his disturbing, brilliant memoir In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. They say to not meet your heroes — well, Tom is as brilliant and kind as the one time I met him the week my Mami had her surgery.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn't know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.” — Charles Bukowski

LISTENING: “Dos Pasajes,” Los Hermanos Jimenez. Have always loved this song, a ranchera classic recorded by Antonio Aguilar and others best sung by two people — but you ain’t heard a version like this! The son calentano legends lay on the harp over a faster-than-usual norteño beat with high falsettos that lend the air of fear and joy this migrant song personifies. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “It is like growing up black one more time”: Toni Morrison in the New York Times in 1974 daring to say Amos ‘n’ Andy was funny — what other prompt do you need?

Gustavo Events  

April 8, 5:45 P.M.: I will be part of a UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute and Arizona State University School of Transborder Studies conversation titled “Latinos as Agents and Targets: Power & Politics in Immigration Enforcement” that will NOT be at my alma mater but rather at the ASU California Center 1111 S. Broadway, Ste. 100. The event is FREE — but you gotta RSVP here.

April 23, 11 a.m.: In which I’ll be speaking about the political history of Orange County to the League of Women Voters of North Orange County at the Coyote Hills Golf Club, 1440 E. Bastanchury, Fullerton. I THINK it’s free? More info here.

Gustavo in the News

“L.A. Locals Share Their Favorite Burritos”: My taco scholarship is mentioned.

“PLATO Colloquium and SDG: Focus on Immigration”: I get a writeup in the PLATO Society’s newsletter for a speech I gave to them earlier this year.

“The farmworker leaders you should know — not named César Chávez”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“Ay Gustavo (¡Todo Es Racista, Todo Está Mal!)”: Do YOU have a salsa diss track? I now do!

“It’s America’s most famous bean club. Now it’s sending cease-and-desist letters to others“: In which my Alta Journal profile of Rancho Gordo owner-founder Steve Sando is cited.

“Could L.A.'s mayor win re-election by highlighting a Republican?”: In which Golden State Report, run by former colleagues of mine at the Los Angeles Times, shout out a columna of mine.

“The Impact of ICE Raids on Street-Food Vendors and Cultural Legacy in California”: My taco work gets quoted in an academic article.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“More Orange County inmates being handed over to ICE”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes.

"What is ‘Ask a Californian’?”: In which me and my Alta Journal “Ask a Californian” co-columnista Stacey Grenrock Woods explain our columna. Speaking of which…

“The Rules of Book Club, According to Californians”: Our latest “Ask a Californian” co-columna is synced to Alta Journal’s latest issue, which is all about book clubs! KEY QUOTE: “Damn, next thing you’re going to tell me is that you read Hubert Howe Bancroft’s seven-volume History of California, including the two-volume Zamorano index.”

“The books that created the César Chávez myth — and those that brought him down”: My latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter is a bibliography of the disgraced United Farm Workers leader. KEY QUOTE: “But before critics relegate those texts to the banned section, folks should read some of them to see how writers helped establish the Chávez myth and propagated it for decades.”

“Spencer Pratt is sharing a Miami sound machine ad. It won’t play in L.A.”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about a Cuban American from Miami who created a salsa video under the auspices of “Latinos Por Pratt,” which is really just him (This columna got him to do a video THREE TIMES LONGER than his original diss track against Mayor Karen Bass — ¡coño!). KEY QUOTE: “And his use of Cuban Spanish on social media to promote it — carajo, fajame, mi gente — in place of Mexican Spanish equivalents such as güey, éntrale and raza sounds like a guy who doesn’t know South L.A. from South Beach.”

“Birthright citizenship secured my family’s American dream. No wonder Trump hates it”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about what the president is trying to kill. KEY QUOTE: “It gave multiple generations the assurance that we couldn’t easily be deported, unlike others we knew who didn’t have the good fortune to be born here.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

This one is short, because the past couple have been rather long and I’m writing this one later than I usually do just because the last couple of weeks have been… a lot. 

But this one is also something that I should be doing more often: asking YOU to write to ME.

So…what’s up?

Do you still enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy writing them? Because the stats that I see seem to say so – a 58% open rate, which is supposed to be pretty good for a newsletter. 

But that means 42% of subscribers don’t open it, which is what the fuck.

The number of subscribers I have has only marginally increased in the two years I’ve been on Abejahiiv, if I’m being honest. People sign up almost at the same rate that people drop out. I ultimately don’t give a fuck – I’ve never cared who likes my writing. I do care that people read it, though, and I always looking to improve so… 

Last time I asked this was in Canto XXIV, which might’ve well been a geological age ago at this point.

What do you want me to do more? Or less? As Moeammar Szyslak once said, “What? WHAT?”

First loquats of the season — but no one eats loquats!

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I’ll tell you what I used to do that I don’t do anymore: 

• Answer a question every week. That went away because you folks stopped asking questions – and I’m never gonna bring that segment again cause I do it every Tuesday night on Instagram Live, where I have way too much fun.

• Tacos: Used to be if you gave me 50 tacos I would give you or something you value a shout out. But…someone…put a stop to that, and that’s that.

• Podcast of the Week: once the one I worked on died, I don’t think I’ve listened to a podcast since — true story! I’m rancho like that.

• I tried doing polls, but I found them dull and not enough of you voted in them anyways so that was a flop.

Two things that I will never stop are my occasional Random Cool People I Know and La Comédie Oranger segmets – because there’s some people that I know that deserve love that I’ll never be able to write about professionally, and there’s some things that I must talk about fictionally in order to write about them. And I like all my recommendations, because it’ll provide for future scholars my tastes and how they reflected the times or not.

Where I think this canto works best is that you never know what I’m going to write — it’s just me. If I did the same thing, I would wither away. But I think that might turn off the general public, or those looking for me to inveigh about one thing and one thing only.

Their loss! Random randomness reigns here, with the knowledge the Real Gs will see the through-line.

Oh, and someone once told me it’s kinda annoying when I reference a previous canto – tough tamales. It amuses me, and if you could remember that one episode of Game of Thrones where Tyrion said this or that, surely you could remember every episode of my modern-day cholo nerd Don Juan, where I got the idea of cantos in the first place.

But what else should I do? More moral lessons, which always seem to get the most responses? More stories of my crazy past? Random crap from my present? Food reviews? Profiles? Poems? Dispatches from Puppy Strong Farms? Bust out a Classic Guti Article of the Week where I post random crap I’ve done from my 26 years in journalism?

Longer? Shorter? Listicles? What? WHAT?

Told you this canto would be short. Write me – I’ve done enough, and yet there’s so much more to do… in the meanwhile, see you at Alta Baja‘s 10-year anniversary weekend this weekend (Canto CDLIX)!

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Their intermezzo is as good as it gets!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of DELICIOUS and beautiful arroz con leche at Chaak in Tustin, Yucateco-style high-end dining.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “You could not have been born at a better time, when everything has been lost” — Simone Weil

LISTENING: “The Boys of Summer,” The Ataris. Yeah, Don Henley’s supposed to be a jerk — but what a talented jerk he was, and I always liked this wistful whinefest. And the Ataris are whatever, and I used to hate covers of classics BUT I’ve now realized that covers at their best show a band who know who their predecessors are and want to pay #respect — and this is a great cover, although if a band decided to do a remake of this song today, that bumper sticker would be a Green Day one…and have I a story about THEM. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Meet a Norwegian Knitting Historian and Courageous Wartime Resister.” PieceWork magazine is all about the knitting arts, and while you have to be a subscriber to read all of its stuff, the articles this magazine puts out are written well enough so that I get their newsletter. What I especially love, of course, are the historical pieces — and this is a HELL of a piece, and proof anyone can resist tyranny if only they resist the way they can.

Gustavo Events  

March 29, 7 p.m aka THIS SUNDAY: So remember in the winter of 2024 when I said I was going to be a part of an incredible recital of medieval Nahuatl Christmas songs and urged ustedes to go — and only Guti Gang co-enforcer Diane went? You’re lucky, because Jouyssance, the Southern California choral group that focuses on songs from before the Renaissance, is staging Spirit Child again — and this time, it’s FOR FREE. At Drinkward Recital Hall at Harvey Mudd College, 320 E. Foothill Blvd, Claremont — more info here.

April 2, 5 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary magazine writer Tom Junod about his extraordinary memoir at Laguna Beach Books, 1200 S. Coast Hwy., Laguna Beach, (949) 494-4779. Talk, FREE; books, BARATO.

April 8, 5:45 P.M.: I will be part of a UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute and Arizona State University School of Transborder Studies conversation titled “Latinos as Agents and Targets: Power & Politics in Immigration Enforcement” that will NOT be at my alma mater but rather at the ASU California Center 1111 S. Broadway, Ste. 100. The event is FREE — but you gotta RSVP here.

Gustavo in the News

“RealClear Politics”: Gave me two plugs this week.

“Cesar Chavez sexual abuse allegations”: I make it into the footnotes of the Wikipedia entry of the entry at hand.

“Westword founder and editor Patty Calhoun to retire from alt-weekly after nearly 50 years”: A Western legend is on her last official run — and ustedes got to read about her in Canto CDXXXI. This Denver Post writeup quotes me from a profile I did about Calhoun and her legendary alt-weekly in High Country News from what seems like a lifetime ago.

“Press freedom and truth: Georgia Fort on the First Amendment”: I was on a First Amendment panel at Loyola Marymount this past week and thus get a plug.

“Cesar Chavez abuse allegations spur a movement to disavow the man — without erasing Latino history”: NBC News has a video segment lead their article on the matter.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all — this time, with a late cameo by NPR legend Mandalit del Barco?!

“The financial reality of renaming Cesar Chavez sites”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about the issue at hand.

"'Inside the Issues': USC debate participation criteria; César Chávez allegations fallout”: I appear on Spectrum News to talk about the issues at hand.

“Nick Valencia Live in Montebello: Where Community Meets the Crisis”: You missed out on a great event!

“Lesson plans go ‘out the window’ as educators pivot on César Chávez amid abuse allegations”: I provide the closing anecdote courtesy of Lisa Alvarez (Canto CDXX)

“Why I’m not taking down my César Chávez photo”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about the issue at hand. KEY QUOTE: “That’s why not only am I keeping up my photo of Chávez and Huerta, I’m going to put it in a more prominent place from where I can’t look away.”

“Rodolfo Acuña, writer, professor and Chicano studies pioneer, dies at 93”: My latest L.A. Times co-obituary talks about Profe Rudy, whom was once in the audience at San Diego City College while I spoke about the Former Columna and laughed LOUD. KEY QUOTE: “Crowds stayed enraptured as the profe cited centuries of Mexican American history to decry the powers that persecuted Latinos in an impassioned, slightly hoarse voice that never lost in power no matter how long he spoke.”

“Goodbye, Border Patrol bogeyman Gregory Bovino, and good riddance”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about one of the Trump administration’s worst losers — and that’s saying something. KEY QUOTE: “It also broke the spell Bovino had cast over many critics — myself included — who had feared he truly was an unstoppable Punisher. Nah, he was just a spiky-haired pendejo.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

The unverifiable truism the restaurant world is that 90% of them close within a decade. If that’s the case, then that makes my honey‘s Alta Baja Market that much more miraculous than it already is.

Next weekend will be 10 years since Delilah Snell opened the doors to her dream business in downtown SanTana. The actual anniversary date is Cinco de Mayo, which happens to fall on my honey‘s birthday and was the official grand opening of Alta Baja in 2016 – but the soft opening was March of that year. To commemorate, she’s gonna have a special wine tasting and most likely after hours Saturday and her customary Pozole Sunday (red pork or vegan green so delicious I once wrote about it for the New Yorker). All this just so all of you can come by and, well, buy some things and congratulate her on the incredible thing that she’s done – and it’s all her, not me.

She deserves every accolade in the world for what Alta Baja has become, I could write so much about her — but I’m saving that love for a forthcoming post about an another anniversary of ours that’s happening soon.  For now, I will offer 10 memories of Alta Baja for its decade – one per year.

2016: I stand on top of her custom-built counter to a packed house. Burritos La Palma is outside with its food truck. I quiet everyone, tell everyone to give my honey a huge round of applause, and then urge everyone to support this small, local, indie, woman-run business. They do. The business is simple: a market and deli open 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Sandwiches, salads, quiches, micheladas all with a Southwestern bent and specifically the border. The name Alta Baja comes from KCRW food legend Evan Kleiman. The blue cornbread is the best cornbread you’ll ever eat.

2017: My Mami and my honey are in the industrial kitchen of Fourth Street Market, which Alta Baja is a part of, because Alta Baja doesn’t have a gas stove and still doesn’t. My Mami is teaching my honey how to make pozole, with me taking notes since my mom has no recipe — it’s all in her fingertips and head. My honey eventually makes it on her own and asks how did she do. “It’s okay,” I said.

OOPS.

I tell my Mami that my honey got upset. My honey prides herself on nailing things fast. “Tell her I’ve been trying to make a perfect pot of pozole for 50 years,” my Mami says. “It’ll never be perfect, but it will always get better.”

Alta Baja Market will debut its Zacatecas-style red pork pozole on New Year’s Day 2018. My mami enthusiastically approves. The dish proves so popular that my honey decides to sell it on the last Sunday of every month. She has ever since, the pozole getting better every month.

2018: My family comes to Alta Baja on a Sunday after church — my three siblings, my little nephew, my brother-in-law and my parents. My Mami is now wearing a skullcap because the chemo she’s undergoing for her ovarian cancer has rendered her bald. She loves my honey’s cooking, but especially the Henninger toast: avocado, eggs, olive oil, herbs and a dollop of preserved lemon spread that my honey makes and my Mami especially likes (I find it too tart). Any time my siblings come eat after Mami’s death, they order a Henninger in her honor.

2019: My honey convinces Steve Sando — owner and founder of Rancho Gordo, sellers of the best beans on earth — that they should do a bean supper: a five-course dinner featuring great chefs who happen to be friends and wonderful people. The first year includes Carlos Salgado of Taco Maria and Evan and my honey and others I can’t remember right now. Quickly sells out. It will eventually expand to three days of peace, love and beans and had its greatest iteration this past year.

2020: I’m three micheladas in on the last Sunday of January when my cousins text me – hey Gus, is it true that Kobe Bryant died? Conspiracy gossip, I text. Five minutes later, I get a staff message from my boss – Kobe Bryant and others have died in a helicopter crash. All hands on deck. Michelada’s don’t make me drunk so much as they make me bloated, so I waddle off to Fullerton. It’s the beginning of a hell year for all Americans – but my honey pivots.

She masks up. She cuts the hours to 10 a.m.-4 p.m. yet makes the same amount of sales as she did with far longer hours. She switches her emphasis from in-person dining to doing meal kits and drop-off deliveries. More people come because Alta Baja has roll-up windows that effectively make it an open-air restaurant and because they feel safe in a scary world. My honey never succumb to the cynicism and conspiracy theories and excuses too many other and excuses restauranteurs in Orange County succumb to — she just WERKS and insist we adopt Hook and Cosmo, which we do.

Alta Baja this week in the morning

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2021: Fourth Street, the historical thoroughfare for Latino Orange County where my half-sonorense honey has her Alta Baja but one that city fathers have long targeted for gentrification, is completely dug up for the entire entirety of the year as part of a stupid trolley to nowhere. Business is even worse than it was during the pandemic — back then, at least people could still come to the store. This time people, can’t even get to the front door. My honey, along with others, group together to get various agencies to offer relief in the form of grants. To this day, foot traffic has never returned for too many. She also somehow wins the lottery to get a full business license and doesn’t have to hire a lawyer to finish the full application through the ingenuity of her and NelCYN. Alta Baja now not only has the largest selection of Mexican wines in the country, she starts to sell tequila, mezcal and even corn whiskey — FAAAAADED.

2022: In the outdoor patio Fourth Street Market built to help its tenants draw customers with the pandemic, Alta Baja host the debut party for A People’s Guide to Orange County, part of a groundbreaking series by the University of California Press that democratizes local histories. Soon after, myself and my co-authors Elainne Lewinnek and Thuy Vo Dang get the idea to do walking tours of SanTana — they immediately prove a smash. We expand them to Anaheim, Placentia, Little Saigon, Fullerton, and very soon Orange.

2023: My honey returns from a three-week January stay in Turkey, a country she hadn’t visited since 2001 but one that stayed in her soul when she did. It’s her first real vacation since 2017 and the first one she’s taken on her own — something she used to always do — since we’ve been together. Alta Baja runs smoothly because all her employees step it up, knowing my honey deserves a break. Soon after my honey comes back, a terrible earthquake hits Turkey. She connects with local Turkish groups and offers Alta Baja as a drop-off point for donations. They need a box truck for all the supplies people drop off. A Turkish couple comes in and asks if my honey’s Turkish.

“No,” she replies, “but I care.”

2024: Alta Baja hosts the wedding of my younger sister to the man of her dreams, someone my mom was only able to meet once but nevertheless approved of. Wonderful, small festivity with a trio and my honey‘s food. As they leave for the night, I pulled the newlyweds aside and tell them with tears in my eyes that my mami would’ve been so happy them. Then I tell my sister and her new husband that that’s the only time I’m ever gonna speak to them so earnestly. We all laugh. 

2025: Someone asks my honey if they could hang a sign that says “Chinga la Migra” at Alta Baja. She gladly complies. It remains

2026: We host for the second year in a row the annual fundraiser for Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble. Cheese platters for the wine tasting led by my honey, burritos catered by Burritos La Palma. One of the dozens of groups that my honey has hosted in the past decade. Packed. At some point, a cumbia band has everyone dancing — and one of the band members is wearing an LED mask that makes him look like a character from Minecraft.

“I want it for our 10th anniversary party!” my honey says.

Let’s do it for the quinceañera.

Congrats honey: you are loved. Everyone: please do swing by starting NOW!!!

Alta Baja Market, 201 E. Fourth St.,Ste. 101, SanTana, CA 92701. Instagram: @altabajamarket

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Went with my Chapman University food writing students — they enjoyed!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of DELICIOUS shrimp tacos at Gabbi’s Mexican Kitchen in Old Towne Orange, celebrating 20 years — congrats!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Mrs. Bass, one of these days you are going to get me killed.

Mr. Bass, it will be in a good cause” — Charlotta Bass, to her husband

LISTENING: “Cumbia Cienaguera,” Luis Enrique Martinez. One of the foundational cumbia tracks here as an OLD SKOOL vallenato — love the warm sound of the old records, with the extra-reedy accordion, the tight call-and-response wails and the the almost-quiet drums. The chipsters love this old stuff as they should! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “After Escher”: Magnificent poem about aging, the folly and vanity of youth, the insignificance of us all — and yet! We must persist.

Gustavo Events  

March 22, 2 p.m. aka TOMORROW: I’ll be in conversation with the makers and protagonists of the awesome documentary 18th & Grand: The Olympic Auditorium Story at the Frida Cinema, 305 E. Fourth St., Ste. 100, SanTana. Tickets $18.50 — buy them TODAY.

March 24, 6 p.m.: “: I'll be one of the guests for the first-ever live taping of Nick Valencia News at BLVD MRKT, 520 Whittier Blvd., Montebello. It's FREE — info here.

March 29, 7 p.m.: So remember in the winter of 2024 when I said I was going to be a part of an incredible recital of medieval Nahuatl Christmas songs and urged ustedes to go — and only Guti Gang co-enforcer Diane went? You’re lucky, because Jouyssance, the Southern California choral group that focuses on songs from before the Renaissance, is staging Spirit Child again — and this time, it’s FOR FREE. At Drinkward Recital Hall at Harvey Mudd College, 320 E. Foothill Blvd, Claremont — more info here.

April 2, 5 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary magazine writer Tom Junod about his extraordinary memoir at Laguna Beach Books, 1200 S. Coast Hwy., Laguna Beach, (949) 494-4779. Talk, FREE; books, BARATO.

April 8, 5:45 P.M.: I will be part of a UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute and Arizona State University School of Transborder Studies conversation titled “Latinos as Agents and Targets: Power & Politics in Immigration Enforcement” that will NOT be at my alma mater but rather at the ASU California Center 1111 S. Broadway, Ste. 100. The event is FREE — but you gotta RSVP here.

Gustavo in the News

“The years I spent defending César Chávez make me feel like a fool”: Julio Ricardo Varela (Canto CCCXXIV) shouts me out in a columna of his. I also get a mention in…

“She Carried His Children in Secret for 60 Years — and Still Said Sí Se Puede”: …Three Sonorans…

“A CVI Journalist Is One of 14 USC California Health Equity Fellows; PS Police Chief Andy Mills Prepares to Depart; and More!” …Coachella Valley Independent…

“La Lucha Sigue”: … and LawersGunsMoney.

“The "Great Man" Theory of History”: For the record AltaPolicyWOnk: MAGA is not Trump, nor do I think he’s a Great Man; Trump just synthesized the paranoid tendency of American politics as described by Hofstadter — but I still think Frederick Jackson Turner’s grand pronouncement of the American mind vis a vis the “closing” of the American frontier was smarter!

“On Being A Literary Citizen“: Lisa Alvarez (Canto CDXX) shouts me in a speech of hers.

“‘Over the past several years, something has changed’”: I’m telling you, someone likes me at The Week!

“The full Herb Caen[s] (+ mo'!)”: Another general shoutout in a podcast I recently appeared in.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: A SPECIAL edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all — on Wednesday, and a behind-the-scenes look as I appeared on The Story Is…with Elex Michaelson!

“The local lesson of the Noma restaurant controversy”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary is about L.A.!

“Allegations against civil rights icon Cesar Chavez spur reckoning with legacy”: I appear on AirTalk with Larry Mantle to talk about THE issue of the week, and also on…

"Cesar Chavez's Legacy Under Question After Sexual Abuse Allegations | Headline News 03/19/2026”: …L.A. Times Studios…

“New report says Cesar Chavez sexually abused girls and women at the height of his power”: …NBC News…

“The Story is…with Elex Michaelson”: …CNN…

“Major Investigation Raises Serious Allegations About Cesar Chavez”: …KQED…

“César Chávez’s legacy ‘forever tarnished’: LA Times columnist”: …NewsNation…

“LA Times columnist discusses the impacts of the sexual abuse allegations against Cesar Chavez”: … KCAL-TV Channel 9 with the legendary Pat Harvey… (fuck this CBS Los Angeles rebranding bullshit)

“César Chávez news fallout; I-5 artillery explosion findings; Padres season preview”: …KPBS Roundtable…

“KNX and Apple Podcast”: …and those entities but I can’t find the clips!

What ‘One Battle After Another’ doesn’t get about resistance in Trump’s America”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about the overwrought Best Picture winner. KEY QUOTE: “In his attempt to make a comedy of errors about an era of terror, Anderson missed the forest for the trees about resistance in Trump’s America. His critiques and conclusions are as edgy as a soap bubble.”

“‘Profoundly shocking’ allegations against Cesar Chavez spark soul-searching in movement”: My latest L.A. Times co-front pager hinted at the coming storm (and here’s the version in Spanish and a video). KEY QUOTE: “But Chavez’s legacy became increasingly tarnished as the years went on.”

“And just like that, the Cesar Chavez myth is punctured. What’s next?”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about one of my favorite pieces of music EVER. KEY QUOTE: “To quote an old UFW slogan that Chavez transformed into a mantra, la lucha sigue — the fight continues. It’s a statement that’s more pertinent than ever, damn its imperfect messenger.”

“The grief behind the cascade of online Dolores Huerta photos”: My still next latest L.A. Times columna talks about what many of ustedes gentle cabrones are doing. KEY QUOTE: “Together, the photos stand as a communal family album. It’s a show of love and solidarity to Huerta — but also a challenge to ourselves.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

®ssssssssssssssss

The Politico was a titan. A pioneer. An inspiration, a doer, a legend.

The Writer never cared for the Politico.

The Politico was an archetype. A kingpin who loved being a kingpin. Creator of a machine that doled out favors like Tammany Hall. Vengeful, vain, vacuous. Representative of everything that the Writer was against.

The Writer never really had to cover the Politico until his new role — and when he did, the coverage was never pretty because it was truthful. By then, the Politico’s glory days were long gone. His time in office had ended in disgrace. But because politics are the way politics are, the Politico lived his later years as an elder statesman, something the Writer could never understand because his worldview was simple: Bad is bad, good is good.

The Politico’s people despised the Writer for not worshiping their patriarch. Yet the Writer wanted to talk to the Politico in his winter. The Writer always believed in letting others have their say, even if he didn't agree with them. Especially if he didn’t agree with them. So after months and months of trying, the Politico agreed.

The Politico was dying.

The Writer had studied the Politico’s life. The Politico was a titan. An archetype. An inspiration, a doer, a legend. Vengeful, vain, virtuous. What surprised the Writer was how the Politico’s former foes had all turned into admirers. Montgomery respected Rommel. Grant respected Lee. The Politico had ultimately done more good than bad. Bad is good is good is bad.

Only the Writer could do true justice to the Politico. But the story would be incomplete without the Politico’s people. They refused to talk.

Then the Politico died sooner than expected.

There were those among the Politico’s people who knew what the Writer was about. Who knew he always gave everyone a chance despite their past relationships. Who knew having the Writer weigh in on anything meant something. So they talked to the others, and the call from the Politico’s people came the morning their Patton passed.

The Writer expressed his deepest condolences, which he meant. And he told them the Politico’s people he understood why they were so skeptical of him. He wasn’t going to apologize for the past, but he could now say he understood the Politico and his world and that whatever he might write in the obituary would reflect that.

The Politico’s people praised the obituary that followed. They told the Writer something so indicative of how much they now appreciated him that the Writer would never forget it and vowed to never share. The gesture was stunning — a mark not even of detente but respect.

They invited him to attend the Politico’s funeral. He asked if he could cover it. They agreed.

The Writer showed up to the church early. He met one of the Politico’s people, someone he had sparred with for years yet was one of those who had made the peace between the Writer and his associates because he respected the Writer’s conviction and abilities.

The two began to talk. Then three security guards and a well-dressed woman surrounded the Writer and the Politico’s peacemaker. She was the facilities director

"You are not allowed in here," the Director snapped at the Writer.

The Writer was confused. The Politico’s peacemaker told the Director that the family had allowed the Writer to cover the funeral.

The director didn't care.

The director demanded that the Writer leave, so the Politico’s peacemaker ran off to flag down someone more powerful. The Writer refused yet understood the Director’s ire. If he had been uncharitable to the Politico, he was ruthless against the Director's boss, someone with even less redeeming values than the Politico. But beefs were besides the point at the moment: the Writer needed to figure out how to remain.

The Director’s boss had allowed the press to cover previous high-profile funerals, the Writer argued. Why was this one different?

“You need to leave now.”

The Writer thought fast. He was at his best in the worst times. So the Writer told the Director he’d put away his notepad and attend the funeral as a well-wishing member of the Politico’s faith. Surely, she wouldn't kick out a person of faith?

The Director sneered in defeat as the Politico’s peacemaker returned. His people not only had no problem with the Writer being there, they wanted him there to write. They requested what amounted to a forgiveness of the Writer’s sins.

The Director fumed.

“I’m going to talk to someone. You’re going to wait in front of the church. If you interview anyone, you will be immediately escorted from the premises.”

The Writer stood in front of the church’s entrance. Two security guards glared at him from about 15 feet away.

La Mano Poderosa of Mexican Catholicism

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It was a hot summer day, so the Writer wore a white guayabera. In the public, it classed him up like few things could.

In front of the entrance of a church, a white guayabera made the Writer look like an usher.

Strangers approached him. Where was the bathroom? Where were the pastoral offices? When would Mass begin?

The Writer patiently answered questions as he saw the people strolling in to pay their respects to the Politico. The old guard. Young guns. Rivals. Family. Millionaires, philanthropists, the powerful. All power. People the writer had covered before.

Almost none of them greeted him.

People he had written nice things about. People he had got gotten drunk with. People who in other circumstances would’ve shook his hand — even hugged him.

Not even a nod of recognition.

The Writer was amused. He was reminded of why he was always friendly to people but rarely made friends. He stuck to a moral code from which the people who had known the Writer since high school knew he had never strayed. The moral code of the people he mostly wrote about was only about getting ahead and staying there.

Then came someone the Writer had hounded for years and would ultimately topple. One of the Politico’s people.

“Morning, Gustavo,” that person wearily said. They shook hands and meant it.

Then came another person the Writer had hounded for years but never quite toppled.

“What on earth are you doing here?” the Writer said as the two shook hands and laughed and meant it. The person was from the Land of Oranges, far from the Politico’s Land of Palms.

“The Politico was my mentor.”

Of course.

The security guards looked on but didn’t figure out that every time someone greeted the Writer, he asked them for a quick quote that the Writer would then write on his cell phone. By the time the Director returned, the Writer had enough for what he needed and was ready to leave.

“You can cover the funeral,” she said triumphantly. “But you can only stay in one place.”

The director led him to the church’s tech room, far away from everyone. Complete with an iron door that clanged loudly when the director slammed it behind her.

The Writer was initially insulted but then looked down. The tech room was on a ledge that loomed over the pews. The Writer now towered over everyone. Soon, people started pointing at him as if he was an apparition. Friends whom he hadn’t seen stroll in began to text. A writing legend came up and hugged the Writer. “Come sit with us!” the writing legend exclaimed, then laughed when the Writer shared his predicament.

"Only you would get banned from funerals.”

It wasn't the first time.

The Politico’s funeral was beautiful. When it came to Communion, the Writer left his putative prison. The officiant's eyes widened when the Writer took the host — another person the writer had knocked down over the years.

Tantum ergo sacramentum.

The Writer hugged the people he needed to hug, shook the hands of the people he needed to greet. People who had ignored him now couldn’t. Then he saw the Director.

The Writer nodded his head. The Director looked away.

Years earlier — months earlier, even — the Writer would’ve trashed the Politico and included the Director in his writeup out of spite. But his time in the Land of Palms had…the Writer would never admit to have been tempered, because that wasn’t it.

But there was more to life than rage, more to work than enmity, more to historical narrative than temporal beefs. The Writer’s time in his Land of Oranges demanded fire; the Land of Palms demanded more.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Enjoyed with NelCYN after she lectured to my food writing class at Chapman

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of GREAT pork shoulder taco, taquitos de panela and baby bean-and-cheese burrito at Taco Mesita’s happy hour.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: ““I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.” — Thurgood Marshall

LISTENING: “Didn't It Rain,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The Godmother of Rock and Roll getting down on…an acoustic guitar? Oh yeah. Rocked harder than Hendrix in this song about the Flood and that call-and-response could rouse atheists to heed the call. Hypnotic, bluesy, jazzy, and even some boogie-woogie — you’ll never hear a song this original for a while. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “The royal collection that is one of Vienna’s crowning glories”: Apollo is a frou-frou arts magazine that’s nevertheless a regularly impressive read with its coverage of galleries worldwide — mostly the big-budget ones, but never afraid of modern art. The writing is clear, informed and engrossing, as seen in this article about Liechenstein’s art collection — you get a history of the small country, a history of its art collection and how it’s evolving. One of the publications I subscribe to in its print form.

Gustavo Events  

March 17, 7 p.m.: I’ll be speaking to the Canyon Dems about who-the-hell-knows at the Norman P. Murray Community and Senior Center, 24932 Veterans Way, Mission Viejo. Lecture, FREE — but you gotta RSVP here.

March 22, 2 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with the makers and protagonists of the awesome documentary 18th & Grand: The Olympic Auditorium Story at the Frida Cinema, 305 E. Fourth St., Ste. 100, SanTana. Tickets $18.50 — buy them TODAY.

March 29, 7 p.m.: So remember in the winter of 2024 when I said I was going to be a part of an incredible recital of medieval Nahuatl Christmas songs and urged ustedes to go — and only Guti Gang co-enforcer Diane went? You’re lucky, because Jouyssance, the Southern California choral group that focuses on songs from before the Renaissance, is staging Spirit Child again — and this time, it’s FOR FREE. At Drinkward Recital Hall at Harvey Mudd College, 320 E. Foothill Blvd, Claremont — more info here.

April 2, 5 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary magazine writer Tom Junod about his extraordinary memoir at Laguna Beach Books, 1200 S. Coast Hwy., Laguna Beach, (949) 494-4779. Talk, FREE; books, BARATO.

April 8, 5:45 P.M.: I will be part of a UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute and Arizona State University School of Transborder Studies conversation titled “Latinos as Agents and Targets: Power & Politics in Immigration Enforcement” that will NOT be at my alma mater but rather at the ASU California Center 1111 S. Broadway, Ste. 100. The event is FREE — but you gotta RSVP here.

Gustavo in the News

“Gustavo Arellano and Early Detection”: The email version of my appearance on The Latino Newsletter podcast.

“Merriam-Webster Dictionary”: In which I’m cited for using a synonym for “non-compliance.”

“Three ex-Horses chefs have created L.A.’s true pop-up of the moment”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“Letters to the Editor: Trump voters have plenty of repenting to do this Lent”: Los Angeles Times readers sound off on a columna of mine.

“Taking My Medicine”: In which Peter Murrieta, The Most Important Chicano in Hollywood That You Don’t Know®, doesn’t name me in his tone poem but does say “There’s a vato in a bedroom with a borrowed mic Spitting truth at the void every Tuesday night.” I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been called a vato!

“Rojas: Santa Ana Can Become California’s Open-Air Museum — If We Protect Our Public Art“: In which SanTana artist/comadre to my honey and I Alicia Rojas (Canto CCCLXXXI) shouts out my work in the Infernal Rag.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Great Park in Irvine is still not finished after 20 years”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about that big gap of nada in Irvine.

"Gustavo Arellano apoya tu amor por la OC”: Donnell Alexander is a Southern California writing legend who had me on his podcast — which I summarily fucked up because my Zoom kept going wacky!

“Marco Rubio proves he really is Little Marco”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about Trump’s secretary of state. KEY QUOTE: “He’s living up to a realpolitik maxim attributed to various Latin American caudillos: For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

“Noma’s $1,500 meal is the antithesis of L.A. and the way we eat”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about René Redzepi and his downfall. KEY QUOTE: “While Redzepi bragged about walking Sunset Boulevard from Chinatown to Santa Monica to absorb the city, he must not have soaked in an important fact: L.A. doesn’t need an outsider to tell us how great we are. We already know.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!

Gentle cabrones:

The date, time, and place was written long ago on my Lalo Alcaraz calendar for this past Thursday:

1:45 p.m. for a 2 p.m. talk. Leisure World, Clubhouse 4. Talk to the group Senior Citizens for Peace about immigration.

I got there at 1:30. because reporters always show up early. Clubhouse 4 was buzzing like Leisure World always does. Joggers. Stretchers. Chatters. Readers. I had never been to Clubhouse 4 before, so I was really impressed with all the different classrooms devoted to crafts like sewing, woodworking, pottery, and photography. I guess it’s true what they say about retirement — you’re busier than when you were working.

(Hey, I’m only eight years away from being able to move in…HA!)

I walked and walked and walked and looked for signs of where I was supposed to speak…but nothing. So I called my host.

“I’m at Clubhouse 4 but I just can’t seem to find where I’m supposed to talk.”

“We'll be standing out in the front waiting for you!”

I hung up, and I walked to the front of the building. Waited a minute — nothing.

“Sorry, but I don’t seem to see where you are.”

“We're right here in the front!”

"Well, I'm here at Clubhouse 4,” I repeated, politely but firmly. “It says ‘Clubhouse 4.’ I passed the swimming pool. I went down the stairs. Are you sure I’m supposed to be at Clubhouse 4?”

I quickly Googled ‘Gustavo Arellano Leisure World Clubhouse 4.’ Yeah, I was supposed to speak at Clubhouse 4.

“That's not how Clubhouse 4 looks.” A beat.

"Are you in Seal Beach?”

No…" I replied. And then…

Fuck.

I was in Leisure World Laguna Woods. My speech was supposed to be at Leisure World Seal Beach.

FUCK.

My host stayed uncomfortably silent as I began to profusely apologize. I asked if I could Zoom in my speech.

“We’re not set up for that.”

I asked if I could reschedule while profusely apologizing again.

“We have a lot of people here for you. I think they'll wait. Just get in your car and start driving. I think we'll wait.”

It was 1:55. Google Maps said it would take me 38 minutes to get to them. I hoped she would let me reschedule. I couldn’t speak longer than 3 p.m.

“Get on the freeway and start driving. I’ll ask everyone and call back.”

I zipped through Leisure World Laguna Woods, got back on El Toro Road, onto the 5 North and waited for the El Toro Y to see where the rest of my Thursday would take me. Jake Tapper was talking about the Iran War on CNN’s Sirius station when my Leisure World Seal Beach host called.

“Everyone’s willing to wait for you! Don't get a ticket!”

FUCK!

Never get tired of that mighty globe!

First time reading this newsletter? Subscribe here for more merriment! Feedback, thoughts, commentary, rants? Send them to mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com

Missing out on appearances because of your mistake is humiliating, insulting and unacceptable. It happens.

My worst flub was when I was supposed to give a commencement address at East Los Angeles College. I wrote it out, read it out loud, and waited for the day only to have someone email me at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday evening in the offices of the Infernal Rag, which is when we’d put that week’s issue to rest, just as the students were lining up with people wondering where I was. I was rightfully trashed for it, especially after I wrote a blog post apologizing profusely.

Apologizing profusely can work if you mean it, which I always do. But messing up Leisure World Laguna Woods with Leisure World Seal Beach?

FUUUUUUCK.

I’m not sure if they hate each other like the Dodgers and Giants — but at least I can say I’m a constant at both, which made my mistake even worse.

I am a proud Laguna Woods Democrat, having registered with that particular party chapter in 2018. During a speech before that year’s election, I predicted that Orange County’s congressional delegation would pick up one other seat but would no way win a majority — in fact, I would register as a Dem for the first time in my life if they did.

The entire congregation turned blue. I kept my word, and have spoken to one Leisure World Laguna Woods group or other every year since.

Last year was my first time speaking at Leisure World Seal Beach, to that community’s Democratic Club. Much more spartan in layout, housing and design. Reflective of its coastal host. Another great time. Leisure World Dems are a great group of folks, because many proudly say they were red diaper babies and want to do something, anything to fight back against Trump — and usually have the time and money to do it.

And now, I had dissed both by mixing them up. I needed to drive fast, but careful and make it up to them.

But first, música, maestro! 

Baseball players have their walk-up music, the tune that they want the world to associate with them, the melodies that psych them up. People have soundtracks to work out to. I needed music that would put me in a fight-to-flight flight. And fast.

While I do have a Radiola of Randomness on YouTube and Sirius has great channels, my mind and senses needed an edge of readiness and desperation.

The obvious choice would’ve been “Eastbound and Down,” but I needed something careening, not rollicking. That would be “Midnight Confessions” by The Grass Roots, which is the score to the scene in Jackie Brown, where Robert De Niro's character tries to drive off from the Del Amo Mall only to have his VW automatic bus turn off, then turn on again — the most accurate depiction of a Kombi in cinematic history.

A quiet bass line you almost don’t hear that leads to too-loud horns and taut drums as the start. Desperate voice, high-pitched organ. Title sung as a chorus around the 30-second mark — completely off-kilter song, which is why I didn't like the song the first time I heard it, but also why I think it’s an underrated slab (Baba Booey).

It took me up the 405 — past the towers, past South Coast Plaza, the BJ’s tower in Huntington Beach. I got a damn spam call, just as it was ending so I put it back on because why not?

Weaved in and out of traffic, always signalling, never going about 73 miles per hour but staying within the flow of traffic. Six minutes down. 20 more to go. What’s next?

I had to keep my eyes on the road so I let the algorithm go with whatever it was going to choose. Damn demons are getting smarter by the minute, because the next song was “Hollywood Nights” by Bob Seger, whom my honey introduced me to when we just started going out in Round 2 — her dance to “Night Moves” basically sealed the proverbial deal.

“Hollywood Nights” is all about the rush of goober love, the knowledge by the protagonist that he’s being entranced by someone but not caring because he's never felt something like this before. Seger's aching, breathless vocals. Relentless instruments that flare up from time to time. No wonder it’s the finishing song to Grand Theft Auto 5. 

Seal Beach Boulevard exit. Leisure World Seal Beach is just five minutes away, per Google Maps.

One more song, algorithm.

“Here Today” by the Beach Boys?

Gorgeous, shimmering peak of Pet Sounds, the greatest sad-boy album of them all and the one I played nonstop between Round 1 and Round 2 between me and my honey. Dramatic yet hopeful yet wary — this is me ALWAYS.

I told my host Google Maps would have me at Leisure World Seal Beach Clubhouse 4 at 2:40. I made it at 2:26. What do algorithms know?

100 people, easily. Great questions. Made them laugh, and made them happy because I told them they could auction off a lunch with me and a select group of members next time they did a fundraisers. Left at 3:40 — thank God they were graceful and that I rose to the pinche occasion.

I shall return, but back on the 22 — I was late in picking up my honey. I almost wanted to tune back to CNN, but figured the algorithm was on a hit streak sent by God.

Cheerful salsa horns and conga beats, then the drop:

🎵Tu amor es como un peri-ó-dico de ayeeer🎵

Hector Lavoe, one of my five favorite singers of all time. Crooning his breakup song of irrelevance that wouldn’t make sense to today’s generation. Depressing as hell…but it’s salsa. How can you not dance and speed off to what’s next and sing along to taking account of your mortality?

🎵¿Y para qué leer, un periódico de ayer?
Oye noticia que todos saben, ya yo no quiero leer🎵

I don't believe my hype. I take speaking gigs as they come because you never know when they're gonna end. I’ll write until I can’t write anymore. Enjoy it while you can. Pay attention, and pivot when you fuck up.

Don’t fuck up.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Not sure about the taste description, but it was better than any other ginger beer I know

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of GREAT ginger beer made by Fever-Tree, whose products I love. My lunchtime refreshment while I caught up with my àmiga (Canto CDXXII)

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Too honest again I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country’s a getting to where it cain’t hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change” — Woody Guthrie to Alan Lomax upon news that CBS Zeus William S. Paley canceled their hillbilly radio show. The more things change…

LISTENING: “Fanfare for the Common Man,” Aaron Copland. Short, thundering, elegiac, triumphant. Overwrought? Sure — but this was for Henry Wallace, so I’m for it! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “Walking Bruce Lee’s Oakland with Jeff Chang”: Walk-and-talks are always a great journalistic trick — one I love to do as a way to expose people for who they are — but you rarely get them this long or this insightful. Chang, of course, is a brilliant writer — and now I got to buy this book!

Gustavo Events  

March 29, 7 p.m.: So remember in the winter of 2024 when I said I was going to be a part of an incredible recital of medieval Nahuatl Christmas songs and urged ustedes to go — and only Guti Gang co-enforcer Diane went? You’re lucky, because Jouyssance, the Southern California choral group that focuses on songs from before the Renaissance, is staging Spirit Child again — and this time, it’s FOR FREE. At Drinkward Recital Hall at Harvey Mudd College, 320 E. Foothill Blvd, Claremont — more info here.

April 2, 5 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary magazine writer Tom Junod about his extraordinary memoir at Laguna Beach Books, 1200 S. Coast Hwy., Laguna Beach, (949) 494-4779. Talk, FREE; books, BARATO.

Gustavo in the News

“Luz Pasos”: This comedian flashed a 2007 image of me selling oranges, claimed I was "white" and that she sicced ICE on me and was sent back to Melrose Avenue. She has 101,000 followers on IG — it happens!

“Award-Winning LA Times Columnist to Speak at Seniors for Peace Meeting”: A plug for the speech I gave.

“City of Masa: L.A. TACO’s Ultimate Guide to Tortillas in Los Angeles”: I get shouted out for my #TortillaTournament, which IS coming back this year one way or another because joy must reign.

“Yes, Republicans have a chance in California governor’s race. Here’s our expert analysis“: An Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“Merriam-Webster”: I’m listed as an example of a synonym of “contend (with)” and for “problem.”

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Trump’s grip on L.A.’s Latino voters slips”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary actually focused on L.A.!

"LA Times’ Gustavo Arellano on ICE Raids, Latino Voters, and America’s Breaking Point”: I appear on the wonderfully named podcast Talkin' Politics & Religion Without Killin' Each Other.

“Gustavo Arellano and Early Detection”: In which I appeared on The Latino Newsletter podcast to talk about colorectal cancer with host Michelle Zacarias.

“Too many Democrats in California governor’s race? That’s a great thing”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about the upcoming blue traffic jam at the Golden State ballot box this June. KEY QUOTE: “But telling candidates to kill their campaigns to make it easier for people who supposedly have a better chance is the type of least-worst choice that Democratic leaders have forced upon party faithful for too long.”

“For this Lent, may Christians repent of Trump and the warmongers he’s unleashed”: My next latest L.A. Times columna gets all biblical. KEY QUOTE: “They are the men that Psalms asked God to deliver us from, the warmongers who “imagine mischiefs in their heart” and “continually” seek violence.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!