Canto CDXLIX: Ten Memories for 10 Years of Alta Baja

Or: Puro Pinche Parrrrrrri

Author

Gustavo Arellano
March 21, 2026

Gentle cabrones:

The unverifiable truism the restaurant world is that 90% of them close within a decade. If that’s the case, then that makes my honey‘s Alta Baja Market that much more miraculous than it already is.

Next weekend will be 10 years since Delilah Snell opened the doors to her dream business in downtown SanTana. The actual anniversary date is Cinco de Mayo, which happens to fall on my honey‘s birthday and was the official grand opening of Alta Baja in 2016 – but the soft opening was March of that year. To commemorate, she’s gonna have a special wine tasting and most likely after hours Saturday and her customary Pozole Sunday (red pork or vegan green so delicious I once wrote about it for the New Yorker). All this just so all of you can come by and, well, buy some things and congratulate her on the incredible thing that she’s done – and it’s all her, not me.

She deserves every accolade in the world for what Alta Baja has become, I could write so much about her — but I’m saving that love for a forthcoming post about an another anniversary of ours that’s happening soon.  For now, I will offer 10 memories of Alta Baja for its decade – one per year.

2016: I stand on top of her custom-built counter to a packed house. Burritos La Palma is outside with its food truck. I quiet everyone, tell everyone to give my honey a huge round of applause, and then urge everyone to support this small, local, indie, woman-run business. They do. The business is simple: a market and deli open 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Sandwiches, salads, quiches, micheladas all with a Southwestern bent and specifically the border. The name Alta Baja comes from KCRW food legend Evan Kleiman. The blue cornbread is the best cornbread you’ll ever eat.

2017: My Mami and my honey are in the industrial kitchen of Fourth Street Market, which Alta Baja is a part of, because Alta Baja doesn’t have a gas stove and still doesn’t. My Mami is teaching my honey how to make pozole, with me taking notes since my mom has no recipe — it’s all in her fingertips and head. My honey eventually makes it on her own and asks how did she do. “It’s okay,” I said.

OOPS.

I tell my Mami that my honey got upset. My honey prides herself on nailing things fast. “Tell her I’ve been trying to make a perfect pot of pozole for 50 years,” my Mami says. “It’ll never be perfect, but it will always get better.”

Alta Baja Market will debut its Zacatecas-style red pork pozole on New Year’s Day 2018. My mami enthusiastically approves. The dish proves so popular that my honey decides to sell it on the last Sunday of every month. She has ever since, the pozole getting better every month.

2018: My family comes to Alta Baja on a Sunday after church — my three siblings, my little nephew, my brother-in-law and my parents. My Mami is now wearing a skullcap because the chemo she’s undergoing for her ovarian cancer has rendered her bald. She loves my honey’s cooking, but especially the Henninger toast: avocado, eggs, olive oil, herbs and a dollop of preserved lemon spread that my honey makes and my Mami especially likes (I find it too tart). Any time my siblings come eat after Mami’s death, they order a Henninger in her honor.

2019: My honey convinces Steve Sando — owner and founder of Rancho Gordo, sellers of the best beans on earth — that they should do a bean supper: a five-course dinner featuring great chefs who happen to be friends and wonderful people. The first year includes Carlos Salgado of Taco Maria and Evan and my honey and others I can’t remember right now. Quickly sells out. It will eventually expand to three days of peace, love and beans and had its greatest iteration this past year.

2020: I’m three micheladas in on the last Sunday of January when my cousins text me – hey Gus, is it true that Kobe Bryant died? Conspiracy gossip, I text. Five minutes later, I get a staff message from my boss – Kobe Bryant and others have died in a helicopter crash. All hands on deck. Michelada’s don’t make me drunk so much as they make me bloated, so I waddle off to Fullerton. It’s the beginning of a hell year for all Americans – but my honey pivots.

She masks up. She cuts the hours to 10 a.m.-4 p.m. yet makes the same amount of sales as she did with far longer hours. She switches her emphasis from in-person dining to doing meal kits and drop-off deliveries. More people come because Alta Baja has roll-up windows that effectively make it an open-air restaurant and because they feel safe in a scary world. My honey never succumb to the cynicism and conspiracy theories and excuses too many other and excuses restauranteurs in Orange County succumb to — she just WERKS and insist we adopt Hook and Cosmo, which we do.

Alta Baja this week in the morning

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2021: Fourth Street, the historical thoroughfare for Latino Orange County where my half-sonorense honey has her Alta Baja but one that city fathers have long targeted for gentrification, is completely dug up for the entire entirety of the year as part of a stupid trolley to nowhere. Business is even worse than it was during the pandemic — back then, at least people could still come to the store. This time people, can’t even get to the front door. My honey, along with others, group together to get various agencies to offer relief in the form of grants. To this day, foot traffic has never returned for too many. She also somehow wins the lottery to get a full business license and doesn’t have to hire a lawyer to finish the full application through the ingenuity of her and NelCYN. Alta Baja now not only has the largest selection of Mexican wines in the country, she starts to sell tequila, mezcal and even corn whiskey — FAAAAADED.

2022: In the outdoor patio Fourth Street Market built to help its tenants draw customers with the pandemic, Alta Baja host the debut party for A People’s Guide to Orange County, part of a groundbreaking series by the University of California Press that democratizes local histories. Soon after, myself and my co-authors Elainne Lewinnek and Thuy Vo Dang get the idea to do walking tours of SanTana — they immediately prove a smash. We expand them to Anaheim, Placentia, Little Saigon, Fullerton, and very soon Orange.

2023: My honey returns from a three-week January stay in Turkey, a country she hadn’t visited since 2001 but one that stayed in her soul when she did. It’s her first real vacation since 2017 and the first one she’s taken on her own — something she used to always do — since we’ve been together. Alta Baja runs smoothly because all her employees step it up, knowing my honey deserves a break. Soon after my honey comes back, a terrible earthquake hits Turkey. She connects with local Turkish groups and offers Alta Baja as a drop-off point for donations. They need a box truck for all the supplies people drop off. A Turkish couple comes in and asks if my honey’s Turkish.

“No,” she replies, “but I care.”

2024: Alta Baja hosts the wedding of my younger sister to the man of her dreams, someone my mom was only able to meet once but nevertheless approved of. Wonderful, small festivity with a trio and my honey‘s food. As they leave for the night, I pulled the newlyweds aside and tell them with tears in my eyes that my mami would’ve been so happy them. Then I tell my sister and her new husband that that’s the only time I’m ever gonna speak to them so earnestly. We all laugh. 

2025: Someone asks my honey if they could hang a sign that says “Chinga la Migra” at Alta Baja. She gladly complies. It remains

2026: We host for the second year in a row the annual fundraiser for Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble. Cheese platters for the wine tasting led by my honey, burritos catered by Burritos La Palma. One of the dozens of groups that my honey has hosted in the past decade. Packed. At some point, a cumbia band has everyone dancing — and one of the band members is wearing an LED mask that makes him look like a character from Minecraft.

“I want it for our 10th anniversary party!” my honey says.

Let’s do it for the quinceañera.

Congrats honey: you are loved. Everyone: please do swing by starting NOW!!!

Alta Baja Market, 201 E. Fourth St.,Ste. 101, SanTana, CA 92701. Instagram: @altabajamarket

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

Went with my Chapman University food writing students — they enjoyed!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of DELICIOUS shrimp tacos at Gabbi’s Mexican Kitchen in Old Towne Orange, celebrating 20 years — congrats!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Mrs. Bass, one of these days you are going to get me killed.

Mr. Bass, it will be in a good cause” — Charlotta Bass, to her husband

LISTENING: “Cumbia Cienaguera,” Luis Enrique Martinez. One of the foundational cumbia tracks here as an OLD SKOOL vallenato — love the warm sound of the old records, with the extra-reedy accordion, the tight call-and-response wails and the the almost-quiet drums. The chipsters love this old stuff as they should! Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “After Escher”: Magnificent poem about aging, the folly and vanity of youth, the insignificance of us all — and yet! We must persist.

Gustavo Events  

March 22, 2 p.m. aka TOMORROW: I’ll be in conversation with the makers and protagonists of the awesome documentary 18th & Grand: The Olympic Auditorium Story at the Frida Cinema, 305 E. Fourth St., Ste. 100, SanTana. Tickets $18.50 — buy them TODAY.

March 24, 6 p.m.: “: I'll be one of the guests for the first-ever live taping of Nick Valencia News at BLVD MRKT, 520 Whittier Blvd., Montebello. It's FREE — info here.

March 29, 7 p.m.: So remember in the winter of 2024 when I said I was going to be a part of an incredible recital of medieval Nahuatl Christmas songs and urged ustedes to go — and only Guti Gang co-enforcer Diane went? You’re lucky, because Jouyssance, the Southern California choral group that focuses on songs from before the Renaissance, is staging Spirit Child again — and this time, it’s FOR FREE. At Drinkward Recital Hall at Harvey Mudd College, 320 E. Foothill Blvd, Claremont — more info here.

April 2, 5 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with legendary magazine writer Tom Junod about his extraordinary memoir at Laguna Beach Books, 1200 S. Coast Hwy., Laguna Beach, (949) 494-4779. Talk, FREE; books, BARATO.

April 8, 5:45 P.M.: I will be part of a UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute and Arizona State University School of Transborder Studies conversation titled “Latinos as Agents and Targets: Power & Politics in Immigration Enforcement” that will NOT be at my alma mater but rather at the ASU California Center 1111 S. Broadway, Ste. 100. The event is FREE — but you gotta RSVP here.

Gustavo in the News

“The years I spent defending César Chávez make me feel like a fool”: Julio Ricardo Varela (Canto CCCXXIV) shouts me out in a columna of his. I also get a mention in…

“La Lucha Sigue”: … and LawersGunsMoney.

“The "Great Man" Theory of History”: For the record AltaPolicyWOnk: MAGA is not Trump, nor do I think he’s a Great Man; Trump just synthesized the paranoid tendency of American politics as described by Hofstadter — but I still think Frederick Jackson Turner’s grand pronouncement of the American mind vis a vis the “closing” of the American frontier was smarter!

“On Being A Literary Citizen“: Lisa Alvarez (Canto CDXX) shouts me in a speech of hers.

“‘Over the past several years, something has changed’”: I’m telling you, someone likes me at The Week!

“The full Herb Caen[s] (+ mo'!)”: Another general shoutout in a podcast I recently appeared in.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: A SPECIAL edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all — on Wednesday, and a behind-the-scenes look as I appeared on The Story Is…with Elex Michaelson!

“The local lesson of the Noma restaurant controversy”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary is about L.A.!

“Allegations against civil rights icon Cesar Chavez spur reckoning with legacy”: I appear on AirTalk with Larry Mantle to talk about THE issue of the week, and also on…

“LA Times columnist discusses the impacts of the sexual abuse allegations against Cesar Chavez”: … KCAL-TV Channel 9 with the legendary Pat Harvey… (fuck this CBS Los Angeles rebranding bullshit)

“KNX and Apple Podcast”: …and those entities but I can’t find the clips!

What ‘One Battle After Another’ doesn’t get about resistance in Trump’s America”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about the overwrought Best Picture winner. KEY QUOTE: “In his attempt to make a comedy of errors about an era of terror, Anderson missed the forest for the trees about resistance in Trump’s America. His critiques and conclusions are as edgy as a soap bubble.”

“‘Profoundly shocking’ allegations against Cesar Chavez spark soul-searching in movement”: My latest L.A. Times co-front pager hinted at the coming storm (and here’s the version in Spanish and a video). KEY QUOTE: “But Chavez’s legacy became increasingly tarnished as the years went on.”

“And just like that, the Cesar Chavez myth is punctured. What’s next?”: My next latest L.A. Times columna talks about one of my favorite pieces of music EVER. KEY QUOTE: “To quote an old UFW slogan that Chavez transformed into a mantra, la lucha sigue — the fight continues. It’s a statement that’s more pertinent than ever, damn its imperfect messenger.”

“The grief behind the cascade of online Dolores Huerta photos”: My still next latest L.A. Times columna talks about what many of ustedes gentle cabrones are doing. KEY QUOTE: “Together, the photos stand as a communal family album. It’s a show of love and solidarity to Huerta — but also a challenge to ourselves.”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!