The Mexican OC

I loved this article. Several years ago after graduating from college in a very "open minded" dare I say activist town of Santa Cruz I moved home to Long Beach and I did my time working in Orange County. I did my time people! I think everyone who has the strength needs to get step out of their supportive communities and do your time as well in other areas that desperately need some alternative voices in the mix...

O.C. can you say ... 'anti-Mexican'?
By Gustavo Arellano, GUSTAVO ARELLANO is a staff writer with OC Weekly, where he writes the "¡Ask a Mexican!" column.


I TEND TO SNORE during plays, but my peepers didn't flutter once when I attended a staging of "The Mexican OC," a new play highlighting the history of Mexicans in Orange County. Though the vignettes jump from the 1892 lynching of a Mexican laborer by Santa Ana civic leaders to the student walkouts of this March, the theme remained the same: If you're a Mexican in the county of milk and Mickey, expect mucho discrimination.

"The Mexican OC" retells many familiar yarns — about the Minutemen, gentrification battles, Mendez vs. Westminster (the 1945 legal case that desegregated schools in Orange County and that Thurgood Marshall cited in arguing Brown vs. Board of Education). My only complaint with the play was that it only scratched the surface of my county's bizarre history of hating the Mexican.


For instance, it didn't mention the late INS Commissioner Harold Ezell, a Newport Beach resident and local GOP stalwart who once told reporters that "illegal aliens shouldn't be deported; they should be deep-fried." Or the recent incident in which a Rancho Santa Margarita woman accused three maids of stealing her purse and got the Orange County Sheriff's Department to help deport them before officers determined that this Desperate Housewife had left the purse at a McDonald's.
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