L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano returns to UC Irvine, teaching students the county’s hidden histories, from indigenous villages to invisible labor
After explaining that the villages of the Acjachemen people (later renamed Juaneños by Spaniards who used their labor to build Mission San Juan Capistrano) were once carefully detailed on California maps before white settlers moved in, instructor Gustavo Arellano has a question for his students: “Why do you think modern day Orange County historians did not put their [village] names on maps?”
It would be inaccurate to describe the response as “crickets” from the 40 or so Anteaters assembled in a Social Sciences Lab classroom for the Urban Planning & Public Policy 100 course “History of Orange County” because crickets make noise.
“Again, this is history,” Arellano lightly scolds the undergrads. “This is part of Orange County history. This happens to be indigenous history, and whenever we talk about Orange County history, we do talk about the indigenous people of this land. But why weren’t the names of some of the indigenous villages put on maps?”
After some classroom hemming and hawing, a student named Dorothy finally offers, “They didn’t care enough to do more research.”
“They didn’t care enough to do more research,” Arellano repeats. “That is always the — ¿como se dice? — challenge but also the excuse of historians.”
Monday nights this quarter, “History of Orange County” students are getting no excuses from the co-author of A People’s Guide to Orange County (University of California Press, 2022). Like the class, the book ventures beyond the region’s carefully crafted image as a “subtropical paradise,” based on the scholarship and reporting of Arellano, Cal State Fullerton urban studies Professor Elaine Lewinnek and UCLA information studies and Asian American studies Assistant Professor Thuy Vo Dang.
Sitting at a bench in his wife Delilah Snell’s Alta Baja Market in downtown Santa Ana about a week after the Acjachemen village lesson, Arellano tells his inquisitor that A People’s Guide to Orange County is not required reading in the urban planning and public policy class. Nor is his regular column in the Los Angeles Times, his writings in other books and publications or even his weekly e-newsletter Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly (“The Only Canto That Matters”).
Words he writes in the nation’s fifth largest newspaper and elsewhere are routinely cited (in and out of context) by scribes across the country, and the admitted “shameless self-promoter” appears frequently on television, his own weekly live Instagram show and in-person at speaking engagements everywhere. Arellano is also a regular fixture on the radio, be it on mainstream or listener-supported stations. And yet, when asked if students take his new UC Irvine class because of his fame, Arellano says with a shrug, “They have no idea who I am.”
It’s not like he has built an instructional reputation among today’s Anteaters, considering many of them were still in diapers when he last led a UC Irvine class 16 years ago. He’d been recruited by School of Social Sciences’ Associate Professor Emeritus Caesar D. Sereseres to teach a course about Orange County’s political history.
Then again, Arellano is no stranger to the School of Social Ecology, having served as the Spring 2022 commencement speaker and a guest pundit on the school’s award-winning podcast Red County, Blue County, Orange County podcast.
He says Dean Jon B. Gould had been trying to get him to teach an Orange County history class for the past couple years. “I said, ‘I’m busy, I’m busy,’” recalls Arellano, who notes that besides the more-than full-time work described above, he teaches a Latinx history of Orange County class (and coming up, a food journalism course) at his undergraduate alma mater, Chapman University in Orange.
However, the more he thought about it, the more he realized teaching one night a week at UC Irvine “doesn’t really interfere with my day job. And so, this time when Jon asked, I said, ‘Hey, let’s do it.' And here we are. So far, I love it. The students are great.”
So is their instructor, according to Gould.
“If there is one person who has not only observed but also helped to make sense of Orange County’s transition to a ‘purple county,’ it would be Gustavo Arellano,” the dean says. “Every time I talk with him, I learn something new – even, or especially when, I may disagree with him. I’m, thus, delighted that he is sharing his insights with our students, who will benefit from an instructor who is knowledgeable, exposes them to new ideas, and is willing to engage across differences.”
One reason Arellano can expertly recount the history of Orange County is because he so embodies it. He often recounts how his father sneaked into this country from Mexico, proceeded to be fiercely opposed to other undocumented immigrants but ultimately celebrated them because of Donald Trump's actions and rhetoric. (Talk about purple!)
In the younger Arellano’s native Anaheim, he attended Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry elementary schools, Sycamore Junior High School and Anaheim High School. He earned an Associate of Arts degree in film/video and photographic arts at Orange Coast College in 1999 and a bachelor’s in film/video/cinema studies at Chapman in 2001. Figuring there was no way he would get accepted as a graduate student into UCLA’s vaunted film school – and loving history – he decided to get his master’s in Latin American studies in 2003, with plans to one day become a professor who researched Latin American films.
Little did Arellano know but his actual career path started three years before, during his senior year at Chapman, when he “stumbled” upon OC Weekly. For its April Fools issue, the then-five-year-old alternative newsweekly had a story titled “Five Latinos We Really Like.” Truth be told, the list only included one actual Latino, Tom Fuentes, who worked on Richard Nixon’s gubernatorial campaign, led the Orange County Republican Party and, before his death in 2012, served on the South Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees.
“I saw exactly what it was,” Arellano said of the “Five Latinos” article. “I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever read. So, I wrote a fake angry letter to the editor that was really over-the-top.”
His snarky and satirical reaction to the snarky and satirical April Fools story caught the eye of the Weekly’s editor Will Swaim, who connected Arellano with news editor Nick Schou (who is now communications director with the UC Santa Barbara School of Social Sciences). Arellano then went from pitching story ideas to Schou to writing stories as a contributor and, eventually, full-time staff writer.
Completely ripping off Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, OC Weekly often featured in its news section a feature called “New Column!” that would be a one-off snarky and satirical story. In 2004, Arellano wrote an advice column called ¡Ask a Mexican! with questions like “Why do Mexicans call white people gringos?” But after the column made what was intended to be its only appearance, questions from readers kept rolling in. So, Arellano kept providing insightful, thoroughly researched and hilarious answers as ¡Ask a Mexican! went on to become not only a regular weekly column but a nationally syndicated one as well.
After Swaim departed — he is now president of the California Policy Center conservative/libertarian think tank — Arellano became the managing editor and later the editor-in-chief of the Weekly, which by then was on its third owner. When Arellano was ordered to slash his staff in half in October 2017, he decided to resign instead. Two years and one month later, the owner fired everyone and closed the doors.
Arellano has of course gone on to much bigger and better things at the Los Angles Times, not that he had time to think about that as he asks his "History of Orange County" students, “How does one pick an orange?”
Amid collective stares of befuddlement, the instructor says, “To do it properly, pull it lightly. You twist it. But it’s kind of inefficient because sometimes it twists and sometimes not. So, usually what you do is you get a clipper.”
With the orange picking lesson now fresh in students’ minds, Arellano returns to the classroom projector screen displaying a colorful illustration of giant oranges against a backdrop of vibrant groves in a beautiful valley under sunny skies. It composed the label on a crate that carried the citrus and prompted the instructor to ask, “What is missing from this picture?”
Here come those crickets again.
“You have the orange trees, they are all in season,” Arellano says. “They are all ready to be harvested. You have the mountains. You don’t have any houses here, but how are those oranges going to be picked?”
He scans the room again, fixes on an Anteater and says, “Pablo?”
“It’s missing the labor,” Pablo answers matter-of-factly.
“It’s missing the labor,” repeats Arellano. “When we talk about a subtropical paradise, we’re talking about the residents there. We’re talking about the people who run all this stuff. But we’re not talking about the people who actually do the labor. So, all these orange crates never show you anyone picking these oranges.”
Arellano then completes the picture.
“It started off with Chinese labor but then came the Chinese Exclusion Act. So, those men aged out and then it went to Japanese labor, but then they also got excluded. So, they ended up with Mexican labor, and the Mexicans ended up living in segregated communities. But we’re going to talk more about that next week.”
— Matt Coker