 I'm Catherine Liu and I'm Director of the Humanities Center at UCI and I am very pleased to welcome all of you here and above all to welcome Gustavo Ariano to UCI. His presentation today is the inaugural event for the Humanities Center in our new building called the Humanities Gateway. We didn't have any furniture in this room for the budget cuts, so Maritas and I moved some furniture too. And I noticed on your website that you said you'd move lawns and Maritas and I moved furniture, but if you'd give us water breaks too. Is that a word? Yeah. I want to thank Maritas Santiago for once again designing a beautiful poster and for her hard work at the center which is now part of the UCI Humanities Collective. There's a new website for you to visit it. And I'm going to do all the introductions first. Professor Glen Mimora here is going to do a short response. It took Gustavo by surprise, but it is one of the sort of academic things we do. This kind of sporadic dialogue where one person speaks and the other person responds and we'll have Q&A from the audience, we hope. We hope it will be lively. Professor Mimora is the Interim Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the School of Humanities and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, my home department. He has just published a much-awaited book called Ghost Life of Third Cinema, Asian, American Film and Video, and it's come out with the University of Minnesota Press. He teaches courses on Asian, American, popular culture and the politics and theory of race and identity. And he is a historian of orange counties, volatile histories. He is a colleague of impeccable and discerning wit and competence in good humor. Thank you Glen for agreeing to respond to Stavara Ariyana's talk today. Now, Gustavo Ariyana was probably someone who doesn't need introduction, but I would still like to say a few words about his many accomplishments and the nature of his writing and his larger project. He is the author of two books, both published with Scriveners, the first derived from his notorious column for the OC Weekly Ask a Mexican, and the second is titled Orange County, A Personal History. Ask a Mexican won the 2006 Association of Alternative News Weekly's award for the best column in a large circulation weekly. He is contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times and he regularly goes toe-to-toe with conservative and liberal pundits in all sorts of media. I was shocked to learn that he is barely of drinking age and we might have to card him. At the inception, Ariyana appeared on Colbert Report and gave Stephen Colbert a run for his own money. He is a proud product of the Anaheim Public Schools and was born, in his own words, to a quote, tomato canner and an illegal immigrant. In the spirit of full disclosure, I believe my parents did not arrive with their papers in order when they came to the United States either, but I think everything is okay now. Like Gustavo's parents, they've been in the U.S. for more than four decades but speak less English than ever, thanks to Time Warner Cable's Orient Pearl package. But enough about me. Ariyana's commitment to unearthing the good, the bad, and the ugly of the OC to give our county more texture, more history, more context, more substance will help to write the future of this oft mythologized and very misunderstood place. The talk he is giving today is titled, This Is How We Do It in the OC. Civic history is plaything in how to fight it. I want to focus on his use of we. Ariyana has expanded the meaning of the first person, plural pronoun. He never gives an inch to those who want to divide it into two or three intractable parts. He also never fringes when he uses the we as a way of making us all take full responsibility for the achievements and failures, the traditions, communities, and publics to which we all belong. Please join me in welcoming Gustavo Ariyana to UCI. Thank you so much. I didn't know you could say such wonderful things about the word we, amazing. Thank you, thank you all the folks for coming out here. Let me just sit for a little bit. My name is Gustavo Ariyana. I do a couple of things and as any writer knows, or even academic for that matter, if you guys play the same game we do, whenever you have a chance to shamelessly promote yourself, you do it. And so just give me a couple, not a couple of minutes, more like one minute. Let me just list of things that I do. First and foremost, I am a staff writer with the OC Weekly. And by far my most important responsibility on the food editor for this paper. So I, you know, when it comes to the Q&As, obviously we want to maintain some sort of academic decor here. But if you want to tell me where the Best Acadias are in Orange County, that's fair game. Absolutely. So food editor. You know, I am the food editor, have been actually the food editor longer than I've been doing the other things that I do. I'm also an investigative reporter. As an investigative reporter, I cover a couple of beats here, of course, in Orange County immigration. The big stories, the religion, specifically the Catholic sex abuse scandal, but everything from Muslim Islam to Buddhism and whatever is important here. Most of the cities of Central County, all the facets of it, politics, education, sports, whatever, whatever you need to do. But also, though, from that part, what I enjoy the most is what I'm going to talk about today, which is Orange County history. In my case, my obsession, my beat, is unknown Orange County history. More specifically, history of Orange County that hasn't happened but yet has, quote unquote, mysteriously disappeared from the Orange County history books or never even bothered to make it in the first place. And so that's what I do with investigative stuff. I'm also, as the professor said, what probably gets me the most notoriety, though, is a column that I do called Ask a Mexican. And it's exactly what it sounds like if you've never heard of it. People send me questions about Mexicans and I answer them. And it's supposed to be a satirical response, really, to the history of Orange County, a twisted history between the population at large and the Mexican community, of which I'm a proud product of. And that's actually what I usually lecture on. In fact, I just came back from Northwestern yesterday to Lecker. So forgive me if I'm a little bit haggard and unkempt here. I needed to shave, I forgot. So Ask a Mexican, though, that's a lecture for another day. I also appear every other Thursday on air talk with Larry Mantel, 89.3 FM KPCC, where I, Bill Lauderdale, formerly of The Times, and now we're looking for somebody from the Orange County Register, we discuss Orange County issues. Tellingly, it is the only half hour on radio in Southern California devoted to Orange County, only one half hour every other week. For a population of over 3 million, that's absolutely absurd. But that is a Southern California media landscape. And that is also, I think, telling of how Southern California still treats Orange County, or rather treats us as something that's still insignificant. So I do that. I also host a radio show on KPFK FM 90.7 every Tuesday at 4 o'clock. That's a combination of John and Ken, but from a liberal perspective. You know, A.P. and Larry Mantel, interviews, music, whatever I feel like that particular week. I also do commentaries for Marketplace about once a month, Op-Ed contributor to Lally Times, once a month. And the final thing I'll say, if you're not already, please be my friend on Facebook. Nowadays, that's the best way to keep up with people, on what they do, especially with reporters. So I'm posting stuff up daily. There's a lot of Gustavo Alianos on Facebook, but there's only one that's studiously looking at a tortilla chip while putting sauce on it. That's me. Sauce is very, very important in my world. So the lecture, the topic that I picked for that, the title that I picked for the lecture, you know, this is how we do it in the OC civic history as plating and then parentheses, and then how we fight it, then I play in parentheses to hint, you know, using UC Irvine microfilm machines. It was a joke. It was a ridiculous title, but mostly because whenever people ask me to title my lectures, I try to think of the most pretentious thing imaginable. However, the thought behind it, it's very serious. And I'll begin with the microfilm because I'm sure that was probably the most enigmatic portion of that title. First off, how many of you have used the microfilms here at UCI? Okay, a couple of you. Well, we all know that those microfilm machines are in horrible condition. They're absolutely horrible. The paper jams, the lens are usually broken. It's an absolute mess. And I think that, you know, I think to me that's telling of how we consider a lot of history, especially newspapers of the past in Orange County, but in total. Nowadays, a lot of students and a lot of newspapers have their archives online. A lot of, especially the older papers like the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, they have their historical archives where you can look for an article that happened in 1886. You just type in the terms and they pop up. That's absolutely amazing. And I can't tell you how easy it's made my job, how easy it's made my job whenever I have to do a story about Orange County's past. But at the same time, it's a very specific, when you use search engines for history, you're limiting yourself. In fact, you're erasing full, full, full sediments of the county's history. With microfilm, you're forced, when you're doing research, as you folks know, you're forced to read day after day after week after month of articles that came out in newspaper. You have to read almost everything so as to you don't lose the context of it. With newspapers, newspapers have been notorious in showing a certain side of history, telling certain types of stories, and none of, you know, nowhere is that more telling with the Santa Ana Register, which is now the Orange County Register. You read the Orange County Register from today all the way to the very beginning when it was the Santa Ana Register, it's a very specific story. Orange County is a wonderful place. Orange County is a glorious place. Any, you know, in their turn, any negro here is a member of the Black Panther Party. Any Mexican here is either a communist or being riled up by outside influences that riled these folks up. You know, any Jap, unfortunately, any Jap or any chink as, you know, shouldn't be in this county in the first place, and sell houses to them, even if you're an Olympic gold medal diver like Sammy Lee was. It's a story that's ugly, and it's a story that even if you read those newspapers in the microfilm department, it just comes out, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, but the most unfortunate part is that people, for the most part, when it comes to Orange County history, they'll care for the easy history. They won't read through the microfilms. They won't go through the archives. They won't go and do the extra effort to those speak to some of those protagonists that have made County history, and that have made this county much more interesting than the propaganda that most historians exploit, but expound upon when it comes to Orange County history. You look at the most, you know, you look at most of the Orange County history books that have been published. They're also the same. They also have that, what I call a positivist approach to history, a wonderful approach. And the metaphor that I use, even though it's a cliche, really, the metaphor that I use is the Orange Crate label. And the Orange Crate label, we all know them because we're all here from Southern California, but let's just talk about that a little bit. The Orange Crate label that was created in the 1920s and 1930s by the Citrus Industries, the Citrus Industry here in Southern California, not just in Orange County, but the Linde Empire, a little bit San Diego, a little bit Los Angeles, and it was done by Citrus farmers who were packing their oranges, or their lemons, or, you know, their citrus. They were packing them so they could be sent off across the United States because refrigerated cars had made that possible. And so, to try to gain popularity or to try to gain at least a presence in a national environment, they would make these, they would commission, and I always wanted to know who painted those pictures, but they would commission these beautiful, evocative labels that would go on these Orange Crate labels. And this was one of the first true mass advertisements that happened to put Orange County on the map. I consider them to be the real housewives of the 1920s and 1930s. You know, these postcards, these postcards from afar, and so you go out, these Orange Crates go across the rest of the United States, and so people say, oh, Orange California, look at these beautiful visages, look at these rolling orange, you know, these rolling hills covered with orange trees that go up into the foothills, that go up into the Santa Ana Mountains, and with wonderful, evocative titles like Esperanza, Old Mission, you know, AIDS Best, there's just so many dozens, if not hundreds, of these beautiful, beautiful labels. And so that being Orange County, those were the first steps to really make Orange County this wonderland, the same wonderland that our city fathers and our county fathers still expound upon to this day and age. Did it show Orange County? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely, Orange County was at one point covered with tens of thousands of acres of agriculture, tens of thousands of acres of orange groves, I think 60,000 acres of orange groves at its height. So that, if you call it Orange County, absolutely did exist. But it wasn't the truth. It's never been the truth. Because to me, the personal story for me is that those orange crate labels, it might have shown the beautiful, the beautiful vis-thus, it might have shown the beautiful scene, but somebody had to pick those oranges. And those people who had to pick the oranges, at first were mostly minorities, but eventually by the 1930s, 1940s were overwhelmingly Mexicans. Mexicans like my great-grandpa and my grandfather. Those orange crate labels don't tell the stories of those people who helped make Orange County rich. It doesn't tell the stories of those Mexicans who, they got to make Orange County rich, something very, very rich, but at the end of the day, they were trucked back to their segregated bodies, and run down shacks in, you know, in barrios, in San Ana, in Westminster, in Anaheim. Those children, when they wanted to go to school, well, if there was too many Mexican kids in one area, well, they'd have to go to the Mexican school. If you wanted to go to a movie theater, well, you had to go upstairs. If you wanted to go to the swimming pool, the local plunge, you had to wait until the very last day before they cleaned the water. So everybody had to run in the middle of the swimming pool. God knows what fluvia they put into that water. And then at the end of the day, that's when it was, you know, for the Mexicans and the Asian-American and the Asians and the blacks, they got to swim in there. You read the history books of Orange County, all of them. I'm a nerd, so one of my, the only true vice slash hobby that I have, I like to collect history books of Orange County. In fact, this, I don't know, what a nerdy you had to exploit, right? In fact, this Orange thing that I have, it's the study guide and also notes through a history course on Orange County that was taught here at the UCI in 1970 by Esther Kramer within this really great history of Bahabra. I found it, you know, I went to some book sale, and I just bought all these crates of Orange County, does that word, Ephemera? Ephemera. Ephemera, yeah, sorry, I'm still learning English, sorry. So, yeah, that word, whatever. So, and I found this, and I was looking through it, and it's good, it's good in terms of, it has all the stats, all the land grants, all the, you know, all the Yorba's and all the McFadden's and all the Irvine's, the Irvine family and so forth, but it really doesn't, you know, it really doesn't tell many stories and all the other books that are out there of Orange County really until, I want to say the 90s, so we're talking about hundreds of books, almost every single one of them just tells the same story, no matter what community you are in, it tells the same stories. No mention of the historic desegregation case, Mendez v. Westminster, until the L.A. Times mentioned it in 1989. No mention of segregation, no mention, a little bit of mention of the Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, but that's an easy story to tell, the Klan came and then we drove them out. Instead what you see in these history books of Orange County is outright propaganda, is outright discussion of stories and then no real pushing into them unless it's something that, unless it's something that's easy to tell. And it continues to this day. I'll give you an example. There was a book written about the Civil War veterans of Orange County. I can't remember, I think it's called The Grey in the Blue, but it was released a couple of years ago because there was a huge Civil War contingent that migrated to Orange County after the Civil War. Some Confederate, some Union, and they were some of the city fathers, some of the first assembly members, some of the first mayors, some of the first county supervisors, first DAs, they alternated between being grey and then being blue. So in the discussion of some of these pioneers, they had short little vials of these people. And so one of the vials that was given in this book was about a man named Henry W. Head. Henry W. Head was a pretty significant man in Orange County history. He was an assembly member who, back then when Orange County was a part of Los Angeles County, he was the assembly member who went up to Sacramento for the first time to try to serve basically all Los Angeles with the succession papers that would make Orange County Orange County. It didn't happen under his watch. It didn't happen, but he was the first one. He also served as one of the founders of the Garden Grove Unified School District. His son, Horace Head, ended up becoming one of Orange County's district attorneys for a couple of terms. So this is a pretty significant man in the Hannells of Orange County. You read this biography, this small little biography of Henry W. Head, and it just says, yes, certainly the Confederacy and the Confederacy, he fought along, he fought in a couple of battles and when he saw the chaos and the human suffering that happened there, he decided to become a doctor, came to Orange County, everything wonderful. You look at the two main histories of Orange County. There's a specific historical term for that, but these were basically histories that had biographies of the leading men and women at the time, but they would pay these historians to write these biographies. One of them was written by Samuel Armory. It came out in 1911. This was the first history of Orange County. It's called, I think, Orange County, it's a huge huge name, but written by Samuel Armory, who was a member of the board of supervisors. It tells you that exact same story about Henry W. Head, a pioneer, a good man. Inman has a picture of Henry W. Head with his wife. Just, you know, good, good stories and then there was another one and it was written by Miss Adelina Pleasance, who, that was called History of Orange County, that was three volume, that also has that almost word for word of the exact same biography. None of those histories mention that Mr. Henry W. Head was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I don't know, to me, I think it's important to know if one of the founding fathers of Orange County is a member of the Ku Klux Klan and it's not that difficult to try to figure out that Henry W. Head was a member of the Ku Klux Klan because his son, Horace Head, wrote it by a history, oh, so nice to see you. That's a friend that I haven't seen in a long time, in my apologies. Henry W. Head, Horace Head, his son, wrote a history of the Head family going back to England, going through the entire experience of the Head so he talked at length about his father's involvement in the Ku Klux Klan and of course made excuses that Ku Klux Klan, it wasn't racist at all, it was just to defend Southern honor and to defend good people which if you read the founding documents of the Ku Klux Klan they're called the San Anna's. So Henry, and this book about and the name of the book was called About Some of the Heads and it's here at UCI. UCI library, it's at the Sherman Library at Coronado Mar. It's even in the San Anna history very, you know, it's not difficult to find. So the question, I found out about Henry Head's involvement in the Ku Klux Klan just by random, by random. I was going through microfilm in the San Anna's 1920s and it made this mention of Henry Head in the Ku Klux Klan. So I bought that book, the one about the Civil War legacy in Orange County and it wasn't there. So as a historian, I wrote a historian, amateur historian slash amateur journalist I wrote an article about this about this phenomenon of, you know, told the whole story of Henry W. Head told the bids that those official histories of Orange County didn't say I put out the question, I said why is it that these histories, these official histories of Orange County didn't mention Head's membership in the Ku Klux Klan and even better, there's a book that was written in 1916 it was propaganda for the Klan but this book, it was a pamphlet celebrating the Klan that was the Klan, because we remember after the birth of the nation and so forth in 1915, that's when the Klan shot and promised. So this was a nationally released pamphlet about the Ku Klux Klan and the author interviewed Henry W. Head to talk about the good old days of the Klan and this little pamphlet also had a picture of Henry W. Head in his 70's wearing the outfit of the Ku Klux Klan. And you know this is the original Klan because this outfit, it wasn't white, it was black the original robes of the Ku Klux Klan were in black. So in those he weekly repolished this huge picture of Henry W. Head in his Klan robe and even telling me, he told the lady that because he served under the founder of the Klan, Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the Confederate General and after the United States government started cracking down the Klan Forrest told his Klan members, we needed to span and we needed to burn our uniforms, our robes. Why didn't Henry Head burn his robes? I think those are important stories, those are important questions to ask of those historians that wrote those histories So I mean my theory, which is the theory that I was talking about with the Orange Trade label is that that's an ugly history. That is an ugly history. You don't want to let people know that one of the founding fathers of Orange County was a member of the Klan because that would just confirm everyone's suspicion of Orange County being the racist capital of the United States. It's an ugly story. So I wrote that story and the historian who wrote the, you know, the battle rise version of the Civil War legacy in St. Anna he wrote a letter to the editor and he said well I knew Henry Head was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I just didn't include it because I didn't think it was important. And then not only that, he asked me I demand an apology from you for smearing me by trying to make me out to be this amateur historian. Well I did a little bit more research and it turned out that his little bio on Henry W. Head was plagiarized almost word for word from that initial Samuel Armour biography of Henry W. Head. That's what passes for the most part as history in Orange County. Retellings for people that don't really try to dig for those stories. We tell the same stories again and again and again. Another example of you the most notorious example in Orange County history, the history of Mendez versus Westminster. How many of you know Mendez versus Westminster? A lot of you but not all of you. Which is okay in fact the fact that a lot of you don't know about Mendez versus Westminster just proves my thesis further. How many of you know Brown versus Board of Education? Of course. Brown versus Board of Education the historic civil rights case that desegregated schools in the United States. Well the precursor the precursor to Brown versus Board of Education was a case called Mendez versus Westminster. The Mendez actually Mendez et al versus Westminster et al. Mendez the Mendez family was a family in Westminster during the 1940s who tried to enroll their children into the white only school that was right across the street from their house. The school district said your kids are Mexican, they're going to the Mexican school three miles away right next to a cow farm that's where they're going to get their education. The Mendez parents obviously were very upset because their children were American citizens their children spoke English or perfectly fine and so they and other families in the El Modino which is now part of the Orange Unified School District, the Unified School District and the San Ana Unified School District they got together and they filed a lawsuit against those school districts. The testimony still exists this is 1945 the school districts insisted no we need Mexican schools because Mexican kids I'm pointing this verbatim, Mexican kids they don't speak English they don't know nursery rhymes they all have lice they're only they're only good for picking oranges anyway so they really don't need an education I mean just horrible, horrible things but the parents they fought back and eventually they won their case here in Orange County Superior Court those school districts could have easily let the tide of history go on, no they decided to appeal so they appealed up to the California State Supreme Court or it might have been even the US court I forget my apologies for that but they're the judge upheld the decision of Mendez or Westminster and said you know we can't discriminate against Mexican children these school districts cannot do that so finally a friend of amicus curia a friend of the court a friend of the court brief on behalf of Mendez vs. Westminster was a young lawyer from the NAACP named Thurgood Marshall of course Thurgood Marshall would go on to argue Ram or support of education before the US Supreme Court and became the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court so all of this happened in 1940 it ended up in 1946 following year a couple years later actually the governor of the state of California signed a law into effect that outlawed all school desegregation in California schools because Mendez or Westminster only affected those four school districts the governor signed the law outlawed all segregation in California schools well that governor happened to be Earl Warren of course became the chief justice of the Supreme Court when Brown vs. education was decided I don't know about you I think it's a monumental case I mean we can say that despite all the nasty racist efforts and movements that have come out of Orange County our saving grace is Mendez vs. Westminster but go through the history books almost no mention there's a mention in one book called Orange County Through Four Centuries written by Leo Briss or Friese which actually I think is one of the better histories it's only failures it stops at 1967 so it starts talking about yeah there's a small community called Irvine and maybe it's going to be a pretty big thing one day but it really is a great blood so he makes a little like a two sentence mention of Mendez vs. Westminster doesn't call it by a family this is a story that literally disappeared from the history books in fact it's a story that the Mendez family one of the younger daughters younger sisters of the Mendez family she didn't find out about this the story goes until she came here to UCI in the 1970s and took a Chicago studies course and was reading a book called North from Mexico by the great historian Kerry McWilliams he mentioned Mendez vs. Westminster so a guy with a national perspective knew, in the national perspective people knew the importance of this case in Orange County it just slipped from history, it just absolutely slipped why? I want to know why why did nobody in Orange County none of the historians, none of the educators why did nobody try to think try to teach this case try to celebrate this case try to immortalize this case I don't know about you again I think it's an amazing story to tell thankfully though that's changing but it's only changing because the Mendez family the surviving siblings now in their 70s they're now making an effort to teach Mendez vs. Westminster at all the schools there's a postage stamp named after that there's even a there's a Mendez school in Santa Ana and there's also a high school in Florida and in Los Angeles but there's no Mendez plaque anywhere in Westminster there's no Mendez school anywhere in Westminster and still people do not know and even the little Mendez vs. Westminster in 2007 Sylvia Mendez which as a nine year old girl testified on her behalf in perfect English in his court she signed she signed for an application in the Huntington Beach for the July parade one of the biggest in fact it is the biggest for the July parade west of Mississippi the Huntington Beach for the July parade committee told her first of all who are you Sylvia Mendez we don't know who you are she explains who she is and when her idea she has this tricked out VW the 21 window deluxe you know displays VW bus tricked out to Living History Museum has pictures and documents of Mendez of the Mendez vs. Westminster case all around the United States I think it's just absolutely family deserves all the attention in the world so she told them that's what she wanted to do she called it the magical history tour so she wanted to drive I know it's cool that she likes the Beatles right so she wanted to drive this magical history tour on the Huntington Beach for the July parade in the Huntington Beach for the July parade she tells us to the organizers and they tell her that's what Westminster is and we don't want you in this parade because you don't have enough entertainment value that was what they told her by the way the grand marshal that year was like the 8th place finisher for American Idol so somehow they deserve more attention than the living grieving civil rights icon I wrote not bad piece in LA Times about it a lot of people got upset even before me I'm not going to claim that with me it changed Huntington Beach for the July parade he came to their senses and allowed her in this parade but only in Orange County can we tell a civil rights icon not enough entertainment value so to me that's just such an Orange County story that we dismiss we ignore even the little the ugly history people can tell you the first mayor of Irvine was this person or the Irvine ranch oh man Disneyland I'm being sarcastic obviously more people can tell you about Gooby architecture in Anaheim during the 1950s that they can tell you about these stories and they can tell you about the Japanese internment that happened here that they can tell you about the 1936 citrus war which saw Orange County literally in the state of the civil war between the Orange growers and the Mexican community of Orange County more people can tell you about all the history of Disneyland or the history of Newport Beach they can tell you more than that than the history of the Black Panther Party in Orange County then the own radical history of UC Irvine I did a story about a murder that happened 40 years ago between that eventually it turned out that a Black Panther member shot or murdered a Santa Ana police officer first of all I was shocked that there was a Black Panther Party in Orange County because around those areas because you looked at the histories there's almost no African Americans in the history books of Orange County in fact I need to check that even further but I would wait here to say there's next to no mention recently Cal State Fullerton they released a book called A Different Shade of Orange which is calling from their oral histories a history of African American experience in Orange County which is a wonderful book if you could check it out but African Americans they also played a crucial role in Orange County really quickly the law that ultimately ended up outlining housing segregation in the United States originated here in Orange County Mulkey v. Reitman to Navy and Marines veterans, young African American couple they wanted to get an apartment in Santa Ana they were rejected again and again and again ultimately they sued the the apartment owner and it went all the way to the Supreme Court it was around 1968-69 and they found in the couple's favor two incredibly significant civil rights victories happened here in Orange County especially Mulkey v. Reitman not in the history books at all so that's a little bit of a tangent to talk about what I was going to with the UCI radicalism so I'm riffing through the microfilm 1969 Orange County I must have read from six months I spent like five hours, no six hours a day here so my eyes still kind of shake and shake and shake and the story that came out of Orange County in 1969 it's not the story, it's a story I never knew riots, there was a riot involving 400 people in Santa Ana where they nearly beat up the Santa Ana Police Department there was a Huntington Beach Police Station that was overtaken here at UCI you know you were bringing in Eldridge Cleaver there was a huge controversy with Eldridge Cleaver you had Angela Davis that was actually the bigger controversy because Eldridge Cleaver here at UCI excused my language and excused the tape he said you know fuck Ronald Reagan right here in UCI I'm fascinated by that at Saddleback College maybe some of you are from there but there was a court case because they outlawed long hair on the man on campus it was the only community college United States with the dress code so they had to go through all the courts to be able to fight it I never knew any of this history maybe some of you folks some of the more learned folks in the audience lived through that history and know about it but you read the official histories they're not there, they're ugly histories I agree they're ugly histories to me it's not nice to know there was a Black Panther party they were going around murdering police officers to me it's not, it's ugly to hear that the experiences of my family being discriminated in the 60's at junior high that no longer exists called Fremont Junior High and now those are ugly stories but those are stories that need to be told those are stories that need to be discovered those are stories and especially I'll put the challenge out to the students we need more serious scholarship on Orange County there's a lot of great stuff being come out from the school you know the anthropological departments and the sociology departments the health departments the planning, I read all of these because I just want to read as much as possible at Orange County, but the history not so much, not so much but we need that, if we as a county are going to advance beyond those stereotypes of the birchers and the crazy Republicans and the nut evangelical Christians and you know all the stuff that makes us look bad that are nevertheless still very much a part of the county but if we're going to move beyond that stock caricature we need to tell those stories, no matter how ugly they may be no matter how difficult it is to find, no matter how how unimportant the Lords of Orange County tell us it is no, every single history is important I'll close with this one final story which to me ties it back into UCI ties it back into microfilm and ties to me the ultimate you know why I do what I do and why I think it's important maybe some of you have taken a class here with Professor Gilbert Gonzalez and Gilbert Gonzalez wrote the first history on orange pickers in Orange County all along we loved telling people yeah this is how Orange County used to be the orange craze, oh you know yeah we had this wonderful industry and then the orange the orange um the orange groves turned into subdivisions and it was all beautiful nobody ever bothered to talk to the orange craze and say so how did you like getting this segregated against how did you like getting your kids called you know what are they called ratas little rats because the kid the boys they would also pick oranges and anything that fell they would pick it up no one ever bothered until Professor Gonzalez came out with this book 1990-1991 around there he's still teaching here at UC Irvine and to me it really is a great read even though it's very you know sometimes it'll be a little bit pedantic as great academics tend to be but it's a great read and it's an essential read so in reading this book I come across a paragraph that he wrote about an organizer named Emilio Martinez and you know he's talking about you know telling about his reflections of the citrus war of 1936 um you know talking about him and then he makes almost as an aside oh yeah Emilio Martinez he was also a musician he used to appear on you know he used to appear on radio stations he would make these these coronals these Mexican ballads and so um Professor Gonzalez exerted a ballad that he wrote about the great flood of 1938 the greatest natural disaster that ever fell upon Orange County that's a story that people know that's a story that's made the county narrative but tellingly the figures that the total death figures are completely wrong some people say it's 15 some people say 58 the total really went around in my final calculation was about 30 some or so the problem was that most of those people who died were Mexicans and most of those Mexicans were children below 15 years old so he wrote this amazing about that Professor Gonzalez and I said do you still have those interviews that you did with Emilio Martinez? he said yeah as a matter of fact I do they're in the corner of my office he hadn't touched them in almost 20 years I did the story a couple years ago so he did those interviews in 1989 real to real you don't see that technology much anymore so I said do you mind if I listen to them? and he said well I don't have a real to real machine anymore but I know a place that converts them onto a CD and you can't so I got this and I listened to the interviews an amazing completely unknown pioneer pioneer of Latino history in Orange County I ended up calling him Orange County's Woody Guffin same thing 1930s organizer went to jail for his cause wrote these songs about Orange County history there's very few songs about Orange County telling the county life from the 1930s let alone from the Mexican perspective so after I listened to that I said do you know Mr. Martinez is still alive I assumed he passed away he passed away a couple years after I did those interviews but I think his family is still around I'm not really sure where they are though you're going to have to find that out so I looked through obituaries again going through the microfilm I was able to find an obituary for a view of my penis told all of his siblings all of his children that remain and I found one name I found her phone number and I called she was the phone number listed her as living out in a nun part and all the old man picks up the phone and I forget what the lady's name is let's just call her Baptiste it is Baptiste Martinez there the guy said nah she died last year and I'm like oh you know I felt bad because it turned out to be the husband I said you know sir I apologize for calling you but I want to do this story on her father and then he said well his sister is still alive lives in Stanton so I call I find this lady her name her name now is Lisa Karpas Lisa Martinez so I called her and she said how do you even know about my father and I told her the story with Professor Gonzalez like you know basically one paragraph and a citation about this man and I said you know do you have his stuff and he said yeah you know I have books and books of lyrics that my father wrote I have pictures I have documents of all these events that he organized and I said well do you mind if I go out and interview you and also his son and another sister so on and on we spoke for hours they made me copies like this much copies of gorillas that he wrote you know most of them about love but a lot of them about Orange County and listening to the tapes I found out that Emilio Martinez was crucial in desegregating in desegregating the swimming pools of Orange County I'm going to tell you more more about Martinez because I would urge you to look up my story that I did on him it's called the not a kettle blues that orange picker blues but an amazing unknown civil rights icon somebody that the Mexican community knew about him the older folks remembered him never made it into the Orange County history books so there's this pretty popular history blog of Orange County that says about historical moments he linked to my story and he said it's a okay story even though I don't always agree with Gustavo so me being me I said well you don't be like about my stories like you I mean he just went off the gentleman he actually works for the Orange County Archives and he said you basically have a skewed view history you have this whole conspiracy that we're trying to wipe out all the Mexicans from the history books and my response to him was go through the history books you tell me how many Mexicans are there you tell me why as one of the official historians you haven't been able to find the stories of Emilio Martinez and other civil rights icons I'm just a journalist who works for a yellow newspaper so I'm a half I'm a half I work for a rag you know that has sexy ads in the back and now a whole bunch of marijuana we know marijuana dispensary pages why do we have to rely on those muckrakers to find the history of Orange County why don't don't don't let us tell you those histories you go tell your histories and go find other histories thank you