Maybe Ontiveros' goat was made into birria?

​It's always a blast speaking before the Anaheim Historical Society, not just because it's my hometown crowd but also because the fine folks who belong are receptive to my diagnosis of our collective Sunkist memories. So, when I brought up the story of the hypothetical goat that created Anaheim and dismissed it as probably a fable, no one flinched.

It's a story that makes it into almost all the tellings of Anaheim's founding, and goes something like this: when  Germans bought the land in 1857 that became the first chunk of Anaheim, seller Juan Pacifico Ontiveros told them that the lot wouldn't be able to support even a goat. Those industrious Germans sure proved that dumb Mexican wrong, and Anaheim bloomed into the glorious city that it remains to this day (massive, looming staff layoffs notwithstanding).

The latter statement is the unspoken sentiment of these Anaheim and Orange County historians that tell the story again and again, a sentiment that plugs into their traditional telling of California as an untapped wilderness that floundered under Mexican rule and prospered only when gabachos came into power. Really: why else mention a goat, a goat that even those historians usually make sure to qualify with statements like "It is said" or "Tradition has it"?

Fact is, there is no primary document yet discovered that points to the goat's existence, and that goat story should be scrubbed until it pops up.
…More >>

Proof? An 1899 Los Angeles Times article I found detailing the exploits of one Joaquin Gonzales. Seems he spat upon an American flag and a virtuous White man knocked him out. When Gonzales tried to get up, according to the Times' correspondent, "his feet was again sent to the pavement." The craven greaser left to find a gun and brandished it at the gabacho, only to get disarmed. "If experience counts for anything," the Times concluded, "it will be a long time before Gonzales again takes liborties [sic] with the Stars and Stripes. The service of a surgeon were necessary to make his face presentable."

In other news, what's the latest on the Larry "Nativo" Lopez felony counts? And here's the musical equivalent of Gonzales' sentiments:

Kind of like the editorial cartoon, except it was an old-school Donald, with a fatter bottom and bigger bill...

​
One more storm to go, and Southern California has largely weathered what we'd consider monsoon weather but Floridians would laugh off as a sprinkle. Maybe we worry because of the history lurking within the Orange County experience--might not rain much, but when it does, ya better get to higher ground fast.

On that note, read here for my 2005 story on Orange County's worst natural disaster, the Great Flood of 1938. The flood is why the Santa Ana River is now usually a concrete gulch and was the inspiration for one of the most bizarre editorial cartoons I've seen: a Los Angeles Times drawing of a smiling Donald Duck standing on top of a fire hydrant while it poured (I have a copy of it in my cubicle but can't share it due to copyright reasons). Considering at least 38 drowned in Orange County because of the cataclysm, and dozens more throughout Southern California, its publication during the flood would be like having a cartoonist draw a laughing voodoo dancer a couple of days after the recent Haiti earthquake. But no records exist of sensitive liberals writing in to complain...

Taken from Wikipedia lest we pay the papparazzi...

​
I get the strangest, most beautiful letters regarding my book, Orange County: A Personal History, and I probably got the best one yet last week from a middle-aged lady who lives in the San Gabriel Valley. She had long heard me on the Orange County round table that airs every other Thursday (not this week, but next week) on KPCC-FM 89.3's AirTalk with Larry Mantle, but only recently began reading my articles after receiving my book as a gift. Her dad told the woman I was their distant cousin, so she got in contact with me so we could share family trees.

The dad was right: we are related, from my mom's side of the family, meaning they're part of the diaspora from my mami's hometown of El Cargadero, Jerez, Zacatecas, the tiny village that has sent thousands of people to Anaheim over the past century. The middle-aged woman included the professions of many of her uncles, siblings, cousins, and nieces and nephews in her family tree to show that not only do wabs come to this country with no education and learn fast, they also become Air Force vets, thermonuclear scientists, and professors that teach everywhere from Fullerton College to Brown University.

Included in that list, under the category "some more of the grandchildren" as an afterthought? Hollywood sexpot Jessica Alba.
…More >>

Henry W. Head, founding father of OC, longtime Santa Ana doctor...

​I was speaking with a local GOP operative recently when he said something that shocked me. The topic was my recent cover story on the Candy-Ass Gang, the trio of pendejos and one pendeja who prosecutors say drove into Huntington Beach's Slater Slum neighborhood with the expressed purpose of beating up a Mexican, only to have their asses cracked at the hands of wabs. We agreed Surf City is the most racist city in the county, a title few would disagree with. But then, the operative claimed Fullerton was our second-most racist city. Fullerton? That nice college town with great food, a buzzing downtown, and two women on the city council? "Yeah, it doesn't seem to click," he admitted. "But the old guard there is baaad."

Hmm. Well, there was that whitewashed mural at Fullerton High's Plummer Auditorium that dared show Mexicans as something other than bandidos, and the dumb comments by current councilmember Shawn Nelson about the Chicano murals on Lemon Street. And there was that dumb bro who beat up two girls because he thought they were lesbians. And there was a historic incident in the past I'm not prepared to write about just yet. But, even those incidents wouldn't place Fullerton in my top 10 list of la naranja's most racist 'burbs. The winners? Here's five, based on current trends and each city's history and psyche:

1. Huntington Beach: Undisputed. From burning down buildings to keep African-Americans away from the beach to naming a barrio the Slater Slums just because Mexicans lived there to its many skinheads, bros, and hos, to rejecting the parade float of living civil rights icon Sylvia Mendez to its idiot congressman, Dana Rohrabacher (R-Taliban) and Barbara Coe, HB is just bad news overall. Only caveat: the world will soon know this.


…More >>

D. Ball photo courtesy of Craig Lockwood

Laguna Beach original George "Peanuts" Larson, on top of a Dana Point wave in 1939.

​Did George Saunders Zimmerman "Peanuts" Larson (1916-1986) catch the biggest wave ever ridden in California?

…More >>

Brenice Lee Smith and Friends circa 1972

​Orange County Sheriff's Department inmate number 2537327, better known as Brenice "Brennie" Lee Smith--or Dorje to his family and fellow Buddhist devotees--has been behind bars for almost two months now thanks to a pair of nearly 40-year-old hash smuggling charges. At the moment, the founding member of Orange County's Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the group of hippies who sought to transform the world one acid trip at the time and even produced its own trademark acid Orange Sunshine, is awaiting trial at the notorious Theo Lacy Men's Jail across the street from The Block in Orange. …More >>

​Sorry to say I don't know much about Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. I went there once with a cute Vietnamese girl in 2001 to hear Nobel Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu speak, and I once asked South Orange County Community College District trustee and longtime GOP head Tom Fuentes about his feelings regarding the Diocese of Orange sex-abuse scandal (the very first Ex Cathedra story) after a board meeting at the hilly campus. And my chica once presented there, so I had to drop her off.

My first actual visit to the campus happened last week, at a well-attended lecture that was well-attended only because nearly all the attendees earned extra credit. I took a quick glance at the school's newspaper, the Lariat, before my speech and became speechless. There, in the sports page, was the logo for Saddleback's sports teams' nickname, the Gaucho, the fabled cowboy of the Argentine pampas. Except it wasn't a Gaucho--it was a dirty Mexican that looked just like my dirty Mexican!

Above is the logo for my Ask a Mexican! column. Click on the jump to see Saddleback's "gaucho."
…More >>

McWilliams: The Original Gunkist Historian...

​This week's cover story on the controversy in the retelling of the historic Mendez vs. Westminster decision has a brief mention of the case's best chronicler: the great progressive historian Carey McWilliams. The Fullerton College professor quoted in the story isn't the first person to admit they originally heard about the landmark desegregation lawsuit in McWilliams' 1948 book North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States--no less a figure than Sandra Mendez, the youngest sister of Sylvia, says she learned about her family's involvement when reading the book during the 1970s for a UC Riverside Chicano Studies class.

McWilliams devoted three pages to the story, two-and-three-quarter more pages than the totality of Orange County chroniclers bothered to give their locale's greatest contribution to American civil rights until the 1990s (Leo Friis' 1965 Orange County Through Four Centuries gave but a paragraph). This followed his March 15, 1947 article in The Nation (of which he would eventually edit) on Mendez vs. Westminster titled, "Is Your Name Gonzales?" in which he prophetically wrote that the "decision may sound the death knell of Jim Crow in education."

But the Mendez trial wasn't the first time McWilliams beat Orange County historians at writing about the county's tortured relationship with Mexicans.
…More >>

Brenice Lee Smith: Welcome Home, Now go to Jail.

​

Wow, that was fast.

Yesterday I blogged that a judge denied a request by Gerardo Gutierrez, the lawyer for Brenice Lee Smith, the onetime member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love who has spent the past three decades living in a Nepalese monastery, to reduce his client's bail from $1.1 million to $50,000. Smith has now been behind bars for a month, apparently awaiting trial on 40-year-old charges that he conspired to smuggle a bunch of hashish from Afghanistan. In the post I mentioned that Gutierrez hadn't filed a motion to have the charges dismissed but that he planned to do so no later than Dec. 7. I also outlined some common-sense reasons why Smith should be set free immediately.

Today, Gutierrez emailed me a copy of that very motion, which essentially argues that the 1972 conspiracy indictment against Smith and more than two dozen other Brotherhood defendants failed to convincingly charge anybody with any specific crimes, instead simply stating that all of the defendants had conspired to form a church, live in Laguna Beach, deal acid and smuggle hash. (And yes, one of the charges in that indictment really was living in Laguna Beach, and yes, every single person charged in that indictment either pled guilty to lesser charges or had the charges dismissed with prejudice, meaning they can never be refiled).
…More >>