The Orange County I didn't know

The Other Orange County . . .

I think of this blog as a way to comment about the stuff I know about – global political economy – but I also know about, or thought I knew about Orange County, California. Now that I’ve spent the day reading Orange County: A Personal History by Gustavo Arellano I know a lot more. What follows is a bunch of fairly random ruminations.

I picked up the book in the Baltimore County Public Library. It was on one of the display tables as a special librarian’s pick. Who could resist? A book about the homecounty found by serendipity.

Gustavo – I’m going to tutear him since his personality really comes through in this book and I do feel like I know him now and I am a lot older than he is– grew up in Anaheim. That’s seven miles and a world apart from where I grew up in the Sunny Hills (read: Money Hills) neighborhood of Fullerton. The story of Orange County that Gustavo tells is the story of Mexican immigrants and their children and the Orange County they faced. In most ways it’s very, very different from the Orange County of privilege that I knew, but there were some similarities. To be a Jew in Christian Orange County (at least back then) was to be an outsider, too.

I always wanted to know more about the lives of the kids the bus picked up and dropped off in the Fullerton barrio on the way to Ladera Vista Junior High for seventh grade. I don’t remember any of those kids being in my classes, except for Spanish. (Were they all tracked out of honors classes?) They spoke Spanish fluently but in the very particular colloquial dialect of the barrio. I remember the girl who was confused by the vocabulary word for cake, postre. In her family, they referred to queque. I have to say that these children scared me a bit. We didn’t know them, and we had to squeeze three to a seat with them. They weren’t bad, just boisterous in a way that we – or at least I – wasn’t. I remember wanting to talk to them, to make friends, but I never did. We lived in different worlds. But even that limited contact ended the following year when a new junior high opened closer to my neighborhood. No more drives through the barrio.

A major theme of this book is that the Anglos’ fear of Mexicans is misguided at best and racist at worst. Gustavo thumbs his nose at the gabachos (the Anglo-Americans) who are worried about the “influx” of Mexicans, the hysterics who rail against the “illegals.” The book starts with “I’ve seen the Mexican future of this country, the coming of the Reconquista – and it’s absolutely banal.” Too bad, gabacho! You lost. Deal with it.

And the truth is that there really isn’t much to deal with – and that’s what the Anglo-Americans don’t seem to understand. Mexicans want to earn a living, save money, buy stuff. Just like gabachos. Big shock. Their kids want to get college degrees – and do so – so that their lives are easier than their parents’. Gee, are those brown folks getting uppity? No. They’re just being Americans.

I know someone who still lives in Orange County. An otherwise extremely intelligent woman, she unfortunately tends to believe every piece of anti-immigrant balderdash and claptrap that comes her way. (The Internet: The Source of All Knowledge.) The e-mails she forwards to me highlight the kind of stupidity that Gustavo points out. Among the inflammatory assertions:

“The illegals are overrunning the hospitals and making everyone’s medical bills soar.” (Uh, illegals work in jobs that don’t have health insurance. The lack of universal health insurance means that low income workers don’t have enough money to go to private physicians and end up in emergency rooms.)

“Illegals come to this country to have babies so that their children will be American citizens.” (Some do. I would if I were desperately poor and saw the opportunity to give my children a better life.)

“The children of these illegals are overrunning the school system and costing California too much money.” (Many if not most undocumented workers are employed using false social security cards. Their taxes are deducted from their salaries. They are paying for schools just like legal workers. Their children have as much right to schooling as other taxpayers’ children. And how good would it be for society if California decided to stop allowing these children to get an education. Would that be good for society???)

“Why don’t they learn English? Why don’t their children learn English?” (The answer to the first question is that adults find it very hard to learn new languages. Given the difficulties of making a living, if they can get by in Yiddish or Spanish or whatever, there’s little incentive to learn English. I never had a conversation with my Bubbie and Papa because they never learned English, despite the fact that they came to the US in the early part of the 20th Century. And as for the children not learning English, that’s simply not true. Gustavo and his many cousins are proof of that.)

It’s not just crazy conservative Republicans in Orange County who have this opinion. The above-mentioned person is actually very liberal in her political beliefs. And Gustavo once faced an angry crowd of Democrats who articulated those biased and unsupported assertions. Anglo-Americans are scared of these brown people (who actually come in a wide range of skin tones), some of whom speak a language they don’t understand.

But as Gustavo notes, Orange County has a history for extreme conservatism. In fact the very first time I voted was in a primary election. The poll worker thought there was some mistake since I was registered as a Democrat.

In the chapter entitled, “Where All the Good Idiot Republicans Go to Die,” Gustavo reports on the stupidities of Congressman William Dannemeyer, State Assemblyman Nolan Frizzelle, State Senator John Seymour, State Senator John Briggs, Congressman James Utt, Congressman John Schmitz, State Assemblyman Mickey Conroy, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and Congressman Bob Dornan. I want to add another whopper to the ones listed. (Read the book – pp. 83-85. It would be really, really funny if it weren’t so scary.)

As Gustavo notes, Orange County has been and continues to be a very Christian place. In those early days of the 1960s, Jews were few and far between in Orange County. In our first year in Orange County, my mother went to the market (Lucky's?) to do her Passover shopping -- pick up the matzah, etc. She asked the clerk where the Passover foods were. "What's a Passover?" he replied. (That wasn’t evil, just ignorant.)

Here’s another story, as told to me by my mother, a witness. In the 1960s, a representative of James Utt attended a pre-election, “learn about the candidates” meeting at our synagogue, Temple Beth Emet of Anaheim. At that meeting the representative declared, speaking for Utt, presumably, that “White Anglo Saxon Christians were more equal than other people.” (That was evil.) The assembled other people were not impressed.

In my senior year of high school (1976-77), one of my classmates, a girl I had known since elementary school, asked me why the Jews killed Christ.

My cousin worked at Knott’s Berry Farm, but had to hide the fact that he was Jewish because Old Man Knott didn’t hire Jews.

Anti-semitism coincided hand-in-hand with anti-Mexican and anti-Black and anti-anyone-not-white sentiment. For many years neither Knott’s Berry Farm nor Disneyland hired kids for their “casts” who didn’t fit their wholesome (read: Anglo Christian) image.

Gustavo documents a lot of the hateful racism he and other Mexicans have been and are being subjected to in Orange County. He touches a bit on the racism experienced by African-Americans and describes the legal fight of Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln Mulkey, African-Americans who wanted to rent an apartment in Orange County and were denied because of their race. (The California Supreme Court ultimately upheld their right to housing.)

That reminded me of an incident that happened in the 1960s or early 1970s. The doorbell rang. My father answered the door and spoke for a moment or two with the person who rang. Then he slammed the door. His face was beet-red in anger. My mother told me later (he was too upset to talk) that the doorbell ringer was bringing around a petition to prevent a Black family from buying the house down the street. My parents had absolutely no problem with African Americans in the neighborhood. They did have a problem with racists. Eventually the largest house in the neighborhood, which we all dubbed the Sunny Hills Hilton, was bought by an African American family. I don’t know if they had any problems with neighbors. They certainly did not have any from us.

Another odd Orange County trait is wanting to be like Mexico but not really wanting Mexicans. Many city names and street names are Spanish (La Palma, Hermosa St.), but as my high school Spanish teacher often complained (and as Gustavo notes), too often the names are just wrong: Mission Viejo ought to be Misión Veija. Buena Park should be Buen Parque or Parque Bueno. Your adjectivos y nombres need to agree.

Also, the respect for things Mexican and Mexicans in Mexico was taught in the schools. We all were introduced to Mexican culture and Spanish language in fourth and fifth grade. (In sixth grade, we were allowed to choose a foreign language. I continued with Spanish.) I remember El Señor Pill who came to the school on Tuesdays (Hoy es martes. Mañana es miécoles. Ayer fue lunes.) From him we learned about prickly pear cactus, chocolate, los estados de México (my report was on Sonora), bailes (the boys hated that), and las posadas. The idea was not to teach us about our neighbors down the road, but rather about those people across the border. I actually found it all quite interesting, but it didn’t help me at all to understand those girls who had to squish on to my seat on the bus and ate queque with their families.

The only down side of this book is that Gustavo comes across as something of a chiquillo mocoso metido a grande – a runny nosed kid pretending to be big. (I learned that in a dialog we had to memorize en la clase de español. There was some value to those diálogos after all.) When he says that other reporters in the OC Weekly newsroom complained about his excellent productivity, I wonder whether they really complained about an immaturity. And we learn in the book about the sad state of his love life, something I would have been happy to know less about.

But the book is a good read, especially for those of us from Orange County. I recommend it highly.