Canto CDLIX: Don't Forget It, Ben: It's Santa Ana's Chinatown

Gentle cabrones:

If you're a reporter like me, who writes nonstop, you're faced with a fascinating calculation every time there’s a holiday:

What can you write that you’ll be proud of but won't be TOO upset that no one's going to read it?

I'm not talking about Stories themed to set holidays or seasons, or year-end lists. Those are expected. I'm talking about standalone stories that could run any time of the year but that you have to publish at a time when not that many people are reading.

The two weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s Day? Forget it. Thanksgiving week? A bomb. Week leading up to Labor Day is when everyone’s burning in the sun — but as a publication, you still have to publish something?

Writing a throwaway piece is a terrible situation, and one I've had to repeatedly deal with my entire career because that’s how LYFE goes, Jack. I’ll never not be proud of something I write — but I also don’t want to unleash the best of the best in a down time, you know?

So I'm not sure why I decided to publish my longform for the Infernal Rag about the intentional burning of Santa Ana's Chinatown in 1906 by city officials as the last story of 2015. I was the editor then, so the choice wasn’t forced on me like other times. 2006 would be the 100th anniversary of that ignominious feat of ethnic cleansing — but the actual anniversary was months away.

What probably happened is that everyone else was on vacation, and we needed something, so I pulled out an idea from the backlog of story ideas I have that makes J.D. Salinger’s archives seem as copious as the known writings of Sappho (someone ask me about the time I did a 4,000-word cover story on Chalino Sanchez’s legacy in four hours on demand — only time I ever closed my office door to get down to WERK)

City officials burnt down Chinatown, which occupied nearly a full block on the southwest corner of what’s now Bush and Third streets in downtown SanTana, after they claimed to have found a man dying of leprosy. It’s a known story in OC history but usually told as inevitable progress. I was able to ridicule that historiography, broke some new stuff, and found enough evidence to lead me to conclude what happened was essentially state-sanctioned murder.

But I also knew my Chinatown story was not gonna have the reach that I hope it would have. But that's the funny thing with stories: You never know which ones hit, and you never know when.

And when I tell this essential journalism lesson in the years to come, I will share my Chinatown story as proof.

One person who did read my SanTana Chinatown story when it published was my good friend, Ben Vasquez (Canto ???) He’s now a SanTana councilmember but at the time, he was a volunteer for the Centro Cultural de Mexico and an ethnic studies teacher at Valley High School. Ben was part of a cohort of instructors who were trying to bring ethnic studies into SanTana Unified School District long before California made a requirement — and boy, was he interested in my piece.

Ben has always been one of my biggest fans. Gregarious, kind guy — and razor sharp. He began teaching about the fate of SanTana’s Chinatown in his class and spread the word around. Other teachers did as well as the years went on, and it had a far longer shelf life that most of what I write. It got to the point where people would ask me if I knew about the case, and I would mention that I wrote a long thing about it some years back, and they’d smile and say that they read it and they loved it and what other hidden OC history did I know?

BRUH…

Another lesson I’ve said in the past: write so that people forget or don’t realize you wrote the story but remember the story. Write for eternity.

In 2022, the SanTana City Council held a ceremony on the southeast corner of Bush and Third streets to dedicate a plaque to the city’s burnt-down Chinatown while also issuing a formal apology (it was their predecessors who officially killed off the neighborhood with a vote). Simple thing — copper plaque telling a version of the history set on a big rock — that was vandalized within a week. I posted the tagging on Instagram, decrying ignorant idiots and it never got tagged again, thank God.

The city also put up banners on lampposts around the actual site of SanTana’s Chinatown, but the commemoration seemed perfunctory, incomplete. What was especially interesting was how the monument was placed looking away from the actual Chinatown site — as if the city still couldn’t bring itself to fully accept what had happened 120 years ago.

But I was nevertheless happy. In a county that loves to forget its unsavory part, SanTana was trying to do the right thing.

A few weeks ago, I noticed the monument was no longer there. Construction crews readied something, so I was worried. I forgot to text Ben about what was going on because of this damn primary season. But someone told me that they were gonna rededicate the monument and that I should go.

I usually don't go to such things unless I'm asked to speak, because I'm always beyond busy. But the ceremony would happen on a Saturday morning and coincide with me helping my honey open up Alta Baja, and it was one street over.

Might as well stop by, you know?

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About 150 people showed up on a cloudy morning. A youth lion dance troupe prepared to perform. The Asian American Senior Citizens Service Center gave out supplies underneath a tent that had the Mencius quote, “Care for elders and children as if they were our own.” The six SanTana councilmembers were there, including Ben (Mayor Valerie Amezcua wasn’t there — maybe some Brown Act thing?).

"This wouldn’t have happened without you,” he told me, which I immediately brushed off. Then someone else said the same. Another person. And another.

Councilmember David Peñaloza, who’s running for a state assembly seat against councilmember Jessie Lopez, said he nodded his head in recognition when he saw the byline on the Infernal Rag story about the burning of SanTana’s Chinatown years ago. So did Jessie.

And then Dylan Almendral walked up to me.

He’s a local historian who’s criticized my methodology in the past. “He doesn’t like me” I had told someone just minutes before.

“He doesn’t doesn’t like you,” the person responded.

Hoo boy.

The Bowers Museum once canceled a speech he wanted to give on SanTana’s Chinatown because Dylan maintains the circumstances behind its burning were tragic and racist but also not that tragic and racist — and some people didn’t like that approach

There we were, historians together, and he offered a running commentary of what the speech givers were getting wrong and the political show that it all was — and I listened.

Ben publicly acknowledged me, which made people turn toward us. I sheepishly looked down and waved. “They’re only doing that because I’m mainstream now,” I told Dylan. “When I was doing that stuff, no way would they do that. You're now the alternative.”

The council and others unveiled the new SanTana Chinatown memorial. Wow! Gone was the small plaque on a rock. In its place was a massive bronze slab made to look like an extended scroll with dragons on each end wrapped around rods and supported by a lectern of sorts. Engravings showed SanTana’s city seal, a rendering of how SanTana’s Chinatown looked along with lot blueprints.

Ben asked me to take a photo with him — “the one I really want to do.” What a journey for the both of us over the past 11 years.

City planners placed the monument so that visitors would be looking toward the modern-day parking lot and hipster lofts that stand on Chinatown’s ruins instead of looking away from it like the old one. The caption should’ve been more damning against the city and it should’ve named Wong Woh Ye, the Chinese immigrant whose supposed leprosy and subsequent martyr’s death should be known by all OC residents as political racism at its worst. But it was still a sight to see — and to hear that something I wrote as essentially a throwaway helped to spark this was a reminder that you should never write to be read in the first place.

Write for eternity.

“Is it bad?” Dylan asked when I noticed he was in front of the plaque but didn’t dare approach it and ribbed him about it.

“It’s worse,” I joked.

He took a peak.

“Maybe the people who commissioned it cared about remembering a community so it won't be forgotten anymore instead of focusing on the tragedy that destroyed it,” I argued.

Dylan stayed quiet. “They have the map, that's good,” he said. “Man, I need a beer.”

About an hour later, I saw him at Alta Baja. Michelada on me.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Terrible photo of GREAT guacamole margarita at Daisy in Sherman Oaks — the type of wonderful drink that’s immediately intriguing and way better than you expect!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Moreover, a supreme destiny was reserved for him: his voice became at one moment that of the conscience of mankind.” — Anatole France, on Émile Zola

LISTENING: “La Charamusca,” Sonido La Conga. Some of that OLD SKOOL Mexican cumbia, the type so slow and muddy yet reedy it sounds like Houston’s chopped and screwed scene! 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: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”: Someone pass along to JD Vance.

Gustavo Events  

June 17, 6 p.m.: I will be co-emcee along with my compa Kedric Francis at the OC Press Club Awards’ annual gala at the Anaheim Hills Golf Course, 6501 Nohl Ranch Rd., Anaheim. Tickets are $75 BUT support scholarships for the next generation of OC reporters, so go support!

Gustavo in the News

“My Two-Year Birthday Wish for The Latino Newsletter”: Julio Ricardo Varela (Canto CCCXXIV) is happy for the future of his wonderful, if terribly named, publication.

“We need to talk about Delaney Hall.”: This Week in ICE says nice things about my Pulitzer finalist work!

“Food history: How America (and the world) developed a taste for hot sauce and ‘spicy’ sweets”: In which my taco work is cited and I’m described as a “humourist” — their spelling, not mine.

“A Becerra-Steyer race in November? It’s possible”: My Los Angeles Times fellow columnista Anita Chabria shouts me out.

“And a Note on Texas...“: AltaPolicyWonk randomly mentions me!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Because of the infinite idiocies of Instagram, this is actually my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all from two weeks ago — UGH…

"How will the Latino vote swing in the California governor and mayoral races?”: De Los asks for my thoughts on the question at hand.

“O.C.’s most overlooked city weathers chemical crisis”: My latest L.A. Times columna gives some love to Stanton. KEY QUOTE: “Neighboring towns looked down on its working-class residents and the beat-up motels along Beach Boulevard, which cleaves the city in half.”

“Spencer Pratt says Jesus is his role model. His take on homeless people isn’t Christ-like”: My next latest L.A. Times columna takes on the Los Angeles mayoral hopeful. KEY QUOTE: “Spencer, what New Testament book says that your crude campaign against the most destitute among us is holy?.”

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