'Orange County' by Gustavo Arellano
BOOK REVIEW
A journalist writes about his family's exodus from south of the border to one of the most affluent areas in the U.S.
Orange County
A Personal History
Gustavo Arellano
Scribner: 270 pp. $24
IF SURREALISM has an address, I think it exists in Orange County.
The fifth-largest suburban county in the U.S., and the nation's second-most expensive housing market, Orange County is framed on television shows like "The O.C." and "The Real Housewives of Orange County" as a money-grubbing, social-climbing, xenophobic enclave of the super-rich.
I'm sure such portrayals satisfy some kind of bizarre hunger on our parts, but a truer rendering -- including financial scandals, mega-religion settlements and racial transgressions -- would have Dali and Buñuel bidding on a McMansion in the gated community of Coto de Caza if they were alive today.
It's hard to imagine that one region could be home to Rep. Robert Dornan and Mickey Mouse, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and extraterrestrial basketballer Dennis Rodman, not to mention the largest community of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. Here we have but a few of the parallel universes that one experiences while exploring the county's 789 square miles.
These odd juxtapositions and contradictions exist at the center of Gustavo Arellano's warm memoir-cum-history lesson, "Orange County," a familial journey of immigration interwoven with a hilarious dissection of the region's history. Arellano, who writes the syndicated "¡Ask a Mexican!" column for OC Weekly, is a satirist at heart, and his brand of humor and bold subject matter has its critics and supporters among Latinos and non-Latinos. He is irreverent, very funny and willfully liberal -- a distinct irony coming from a region once referred to by Ronald Reagan as the place where "all the good Republicans go to die."
The opening pages of "Orange County" provide an assessment of the place today. It's still affluent and politically powerful with a large conservative base. According to a recent census, however, the demographics are shifting; the population is now roughly 60% white, 30% Latino/Hispanic (a number that has nearly doubled in the last 15 years), with a rapidly growing Asian community. Thirty percent of its residents are foreign-born.
And yet, writes Arellano, it's not just television that has failed to paint a realistic portrait of Orange County. Also to blame are the founding fathers and historians who "follow a tight OC Story, almost positivist in predetermined steps and outcome. . . . We don't care for the facts -- we print the legend."
