Canto CCCXXV: From OC to Santa Barbara to Colorado Springs and Back

Gentle cabrones:

People always ask me how is it that I’m able to do so much — columnas! Teach a class! Talk to classes! Work at Alta Baja! Run a book club! Garden! Co-lead tours! Other columnas!

And the answers are always easy:

WERK (Canto CLVIII, kinda)

A talachear (Canto CXIX)

It has to be fun (which could be its own canto, but this will suffice).

But even April was a lot for me.

Columnas! Teach a class! Talk to classes! Work at Alta Baja! Run a book club! Garden! Co-lead tours! Three panels at the L.A. Times Festival of Books!

And then there was a road trip for work that was also supposed to be a mini-vacation — but you have no vacation when work is a dream.

Behold, then, a week of mine from last month, which really wasn’t THAT busy compared to the week ahead of me. Because WERK.

FRIDAY

Began my morning in Little Saigon, specifically at Westminster’s famed Coffee Factory. My guide was my colleague Anh Do, who’s one of the nicest people you’ll meet, a talented writer and reporter, and a huge fan of rescue pups. I told her I hadn’t visited Coffee Factory in over 20 years, ever since I went with an ex of mine who’s now a state representative and will one day probably go to Congress.

It happens.

The co-interviews went great, then off to Santa Barbara I went since I was hosting a Saturday morning screening of Night of the Iguana as an excuse to do a lecture on famed Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. I did it at the invite of El Encanto, a gorgeous resort on top of an estate that I could only afford because of Claudia Schou, their marketing manager. I’ve known her ever since she started going out with her now-husband, my former Infernal Rag managing editor/forever compa, Nick Schou.

We ate dinner at the Santa Barbara Public Market, specifically Corazon Cocina, which makes good tacos and their own tortillas, which made respectable showings in last year’s #tortillatournament. I text Nick about once a week but only see him whenever I visit Santa Barbara, which isn’t really often — and I hadn’t seen Claudia in years. So our chat, while short, was necessary and lovely and a reminder of how a quarter-century after we met, here we all are: buenos y listos pa’ más.

Nick dropped me off at El Encanto while playing the latest Manu Chao — just like 2000, actually! I wanted a nightcap and had to work on a canto, so I went to the Belmond’s bar. Great bar, great snacks, then back to writing my Little Saigon columna.

SATURDAY

Had breakfast at the Belmond with legendary Chicano Studies profe Mario T. Garcia (Canto XCVIII) and his wife, legendary UC Santa Barbara literature professor Ellen McCracken. Delicious breakfast, better chat! They bought breakfast, Profe Mario gave me one of the few books of his I don’t know, and they were kind enough to go to the The Night of the Iguana screening across the street at the historic Riviera Theater, where I introduced Profe Mario to Nick, who now works with UC Santa Barbara.

I gave a short lecture on Figueroa then sat next to Nick and Claudia to see the film. What a film! Sordid and sweaty, like the good Tennessee Williams play that it originally was. Richard Burton was smoldering, Sue Lyon replayed her Lolita schtick, Ava Gardner was this side of a cha-cha, Deborah Kerr was a fabulous Yankee grifter with a heart of gold, and even Emilio “El Indio” Fernández made a cameo because John Huston was a G like that. It was the only film for which Figueroa was ever nominated for an Oscar, but you know who should’ve won? The maraca-wielding Mexicans — that’s all I’ll say about THAT.

Would’ve loved to hang out more, but I had to drive back to OC to get ready for my road trip. Arrived home at 5 in the afternoon, walked Cosmo and tried to go to bed at 8. YEAH RIGHT.

SUNDAY

My honey and I got up at 3 a.m. to do a trip we used to do all the time — I-40 until we dropped, which was usually around Amarillo (Canto CCCLX). This time, we were only going to Albuquerque. A 12-hour drive? As easy as going up Harbor to Fullerton.

A long, nonstop drive should be uneventful, and this one was save for the full moon that was still shining as we somewhere near Fenner. I texted my comadre who was at Coachella whether she saw it; nah, she slept through it. Pinche millennials…oh, and don’t stop in Seligman, unless you want to see a Confederate flag next to a mural of Lightning McQueen.

MONDAY

My media chica and I always like to tell the story about how the last time she went to New York, she stayed in our hotel room for four straight days, emerging only to have lunch with her former boss and dinner with a friend of ours while I was out on business. Who goes to New York to only stay in a hotel room? She does, because she NEVER gets to truly relax and hibernates the moment she stops working.

She would only be staying in Albuquerque for a day, at Los Poblanos Inn, a lavender farm that has done the impossible and expanded over the decade we’ve been staying there while maintaining its New Mexico charm. My honey planned to do a spa treatment, wander around, all of that. Instead, she stayed in bed to watch Game of Thrones while I drove around Albuquerque all day on assignment for…something. We did enjoy a bountiful, delicious dinner with a friend at Los Poblanos’ James Beard-nominated restaurant, Campo, then retired to the resort’s spectacular library bar, where we had enjoyed cocktails with the Axios compa Russell Contreras the night before.

Oh, ABQ: Never enough time. But my honey wants to celebrate her next birthday there for a stretch, so prepárense…

TUESDAY

Up at 4 a.m. to drop off my honey at the airport, back to Los Poblanos so I could sleep a bit. YEAH RIGHT. Picoteé at a columna, waiting for the sun to come up so I could continue my assignment on…something…before taking I-25 to Colorado Springs. I wanted to stop at Charlie’s Spic & Span in Las Vegas, home of fiery adovada, chewy New Mexico-style flour tortillas and cinnamon rolls the size of a baby’s head, but I needed to be on time since I had an afternoon lecture at Colorado College.

But first, two Colorado pilgrimages.

The first one was at the Ludlow Massacre memorial, which I’ve been blessed to have now visited three times. Never heard of it? It’s when National Guardsmen and Pinkerton goons hired by the Rockefellers fired on an immigrant mining camp in 1914, killing 21 people, including 11 children and two women hiding in a pit below a tent that burned and asphyxiated them.

I never spend enough time here, but I always offer prayers: to the dead, to exploited workers, for this nation, for immigrants. Every time I’ve visited, the cold wind has howled with its lament.

The next stop was a bit happier: Corine’s Mexican Food in Walsenberg, which I highlighted in my 2019 Eater article on eating chile from Las Cruces to Denver. Corine’s specializes in Pueblo-Mex cuisine, a cousin of Den-Mex and New Mexico cuisine with its most famous creation the taco on white: a fried flour tortilla folded into a hard-shell taco. Southern Colorado’s tortillas are even thicker than those in New Mexico, but I didn’t go for a taco on white at Corine’s — I instead went for the red chile. Nothing more than beans, beef bits, potatoes and red Mirasol chiles turned into — you guessed it — chile.

You don’t know what chile is until you’ve eaten in Walsenberg.

The lecture at Colorado College was great — you had to be there, although a sequel just might come that I’ll publish. Even better was being able to catch up with random friends or their friends I’ve acquired over the years, from the Fierros of Atrevida Beer Company (whom gifted me a four-pack of their fabulous canned suds) to the son of an El Paso compa to the friend of my Madison pals to English professor Juan Morales (who’s also a fabulous poet and whom I first met in Pueblo long, long ago) to Felicia Gallegos Pettis, an incredible educator and stage performer who introduced me to the beauty that is Pueblo-Mex. More than a few of this crew joined me for a late dinner at Chile Colorado, where I ordered fabulous enchiladas but couldn’t drink anything because I needed to get up early the following day because…

WEDNESDAY

I had a 7 a.m. date with the mechanic in Pueblo!

I bought a new car in January, which I’ll write about in a future canto, insha’Allah. All you need to know for now is that it requires an oil change every 7,000 miles (technology)…and I got to that level in three months. WERK.

While I was getting the car serviced, I checked in with CSU Pueblo biology profe Lee Anne Martínez, who’s also a distant cousin of mine and who was kind enough to have me moderate a panel at the last-ever Conference of Ford Fellows last year (Canto CCCLVIII). She went to my Colorado College lecture and dinner, and she would be my host for two talks at CSU Pueblo: a lecture to a Chicano literature class in the morning, then a campuswide chat in the evening.

I first visited Pueblo in 2016 or so, and have been entranced ever since. The steel mills, working and abandoned, stand like weathered giants at the southern end of town and are visible for miles around. That industry gave the town its working class, multicultural ethos and also a chip on its shoulder since the rest of Colorado has historically looked down on it. I like working class, multicultural towns with a chip on their shoulder.

Highlight of the first talk: When a student was shocked I knew about his hometown of Antonito, Colorado (population 600-some), let alone visited it.

Highlight of the second one: Meeting members of Las Comadres, a group of Pueblo women who love their town and help out young people. They must’ve liked what I said, because we took a photo together.

Food? Smothered pork chop with a chicken taco on white at Cactus Flower, Italian food in downtown. Both with Profe Lee Anne. Profe Juan invited me for a beer at a local brewery afterward, but I couldn’t swing it because I needed to get back home. Hopefully later this year, Profe Juan AND Lee Anne!

THURSDAY

Up at 3 a.m. I-25 from Pueblo to Las Vegas save Trinidad is the darkest I’ve ever driven in to the point I wouldn’t recommend anyone do it. At one point south of Raton, I turned off the headlights to my car and stopped in the middle of I-25. The only illumination were the stars above, bright and beautiful. The sunrise over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains was even better, the embodiment of its sanguinary name.

A 5:30 a.m. stop at Love’s in Las Vegas and Gallup were a perfect time to take stock of how lucky I am in love, life and labor. Now’s the time to start savoring everything I’ved WERKED to accomplish — because, as Booker T & the MGs warned, time is tight.

I originally planned to spend the night in Flagstaff, a funky town that’s only seven hours away from home (actually, I originally meant to go through the San Luis Valley, but that’s another story). But I saw that there was snow forecast for Thursday night — and no way was this Anacrime boy going to get stuck in Arizona because of snow.

Somewhere around Grants, I texted my honey I’d be traveling down to Phoenix and so could she order some products from Ramona Farms for Alta Baja? I mean, I was already carrying a U-Haul’s worth of products from New Mexico, so why not?

To get to their warehouse in Sacaton, I’d have to cut across Arizona starting at Holbrook, which is stuck in 1965 and thus means I need to spend time there. From there, State Route 377 took me through desert to the ponderosa pines of 260 to the saguaro forests of 87 to the Phoenix metro area. I’m not much of a nature person and DEFINITELY not a nature boy (Canto CCXCIV), but this was one of the most stunning short drives I’ve ever taken. The Toto Mountains, in particular, looked like rolling hills of grass.

Everything I saw was even better with the sounds of KTNN, which calls itself the Voice of the Navajo Nation. Was it! From about Gallup to the edge of the Mazatzal Mountains, its mix of 2000s-era country, Navajo chants, and PSAs in English and Diné was so good that I didn’t even have to rely on my SiriusXM.

After I picked up my Ramona Farms order, I stopped for a late lunch at Carolina’s in Phoenix, where the burritos are called burros, the flour tortillas are ethereal and as big as a manhole cover, and the buttered tortillas glimmered like a hubcap. I could’ve driven home at this point, but I decided to rest at the Holiday Inn Express in Buckeye. Besides, there was a columna to polish.

FRIDAY

I had essentially been on Mountain Time for a week, so I naturally got up at 4 a.m. PST and began the five-hour drive home. Stopped for some breakfast tacos at the Love’s in Quartzsite, which were actually delicious. No California ag guards at Blythe, Coachella traffic at the 10, another columna didn’t pan out in Indio, but no time for dates, damnit! NelCYN watered my plants right — then back to it.

The roads are lovely, dark and deep…

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: One more photo from the road trip: The red chile from Corine’s. Been around for decades — and when I went, there was a For Sale sign. Sigh…

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: ““Journalism, which is supposed to be of the day, is in my case something that could live for 50 years. Why? Craft. My father was a tailor. I have clothes that are 60 years old. The buttons don’t fall off, the stitches don’t come apart. They’re made with affection and attention to detail and idealism. I believe in that. If you adhere to that with real faith, what you do will have a long, long life.” — Gay Talese

LISTENING: “Mi Carrito Paseado,” Robert Mondragon. The only disappointment of my trip — well, there was one I can’t speak of because I’m hoping to redeem it in the summer. But the main one I can’t win back was the absolute lack of New Mexico music. Wasn’t playing on KANW while I was passing through ABQ, forgot to bring my CD adapter, and then when I finally heard an Al Hurricane song outside Las Vegas, the damn station went out! So while I usually don’t like to tie in the songs I recommend to the canto’s theme, allow me this one. Great, humorous Spanglish song the way only a Hispano could do it — man, why can’t Eleni Kounalakis do this instead of whatever the hell she does?

READING: “An Appointment”: A super-short but lyrical, melancholy rumination on aging. The visuals, the pacing, the march of time — Commonweal can be too brainy most of the time, and then it publishes stuff like this!

BUY MY NEW CO-BOOK! People’s Guide to Orange County tells an alternative history of OC through the scholarship and reporting of myself, Elaine Lewinnek, and Thuy Vo Dang. There’ll be signings all year — in meanwhile, buy your copy TODAY. And, yes: I’ll autograph it!

Gustavo Events  

May 28, 12:30 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with Rancho Gordo owner and founder Steve Sando as part of Alta Live!, the awesome weekly Zoom salons hosted by Alta Journal. It’s FREE, but you have to register to get the link!

Guti’s Fookin’ Ingrate Book Club!

We just had our first get-together, a fabulous Zoom chat with Macarthur genius comadre (and Fookin’ Ingrate Book Club member!) Natalia Molina about her James Beard-deserving book, A Place at the Nayarit. I’m about to send out the video of our convo, but not here! Only to Fookin’ Ingrate Book Club members! Sign up here — I only allow new members in after we’re done with a book but before we start a new one!

Gustavo in the News

“Letters to the Editor: Readers have mixed feelings about what it means to have an American pope”: Los Angeles Times readers let me have it over a columna of mine.

“Letters to the Editor: Does English-language proficiency really affect truck driver safety?”: More Los Angeles Times readers let me have it over a columna of mine.

“Part 171: A “tipping point” in Los Angeles – Shadows of Rick Caruso and SteadfastLA”: Legendary whistleblower Zachary Ellison mentions me in a story of his.

“Coffee Shops Past, Present and No Future”: I’m the unofficial copy editor for Peter Murrieta, the Most Famous Chicano in Hollywood You Don’t Know®, whose newsletter you should subscribe to.

“Community leaders reflect on the 2024 elections and the Latino political shift”: My De Los panel gets a shoutout.

“Tearing Down the Orange Curtain How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World”: My blurb for this integral book — “So great, even John Wayne is moshing in his grave.”

“THIS is the loquat guy”: So apparently the AP English exam used my long-ago columna on loquats for some prompt, and AP Lang TikTok is trashing me for it? Don’t use TikTok, and never took any AP tests because they’re for dweebs and dorks. Except Kiki, of course!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Original Pantry workers are cooking its breakfasts at an East L.A. taqueria”: My latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter talks about a famous L.A. restaurant that officially closed but lives on through its former workers. KEY QUOTE: “Between them, La Azteca Tortilleria and La Carreta, the corner of Avenida Cesar E. Chavez and Ford Boulevard is as great a stretch of breakfast in L.A. as you’ll find right now. Let your panzas grow!”

“Montebello’s ex-mayor now works to root elected Republicans out of Orange County”: My next latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter profiles Central Democrats of Orange County chair Frank Gomez. KEY QUOTE: ““It’s not like I didn’t know” what to expect when moving to O.C., he said. “But it’s the difference between Fashion Island and the Citadel.””

“When the deportation of an illegal immigrant united L.A. to bring him back”: My still next latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter tells the story of a chilango teen from the 1950s. KEY QUOTE: “Toscano’s story shows that the story can have a different ending — if only immigration officials have a heart.”

“The Menendez brothers’ resentencing would have shocked 1990s L.A.”: My even still next latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter considers the evolution of Southern California’s most notorious case of children murdering their parents. KEY QUOTE: “The adult part of me knows that public perception of them has dramatically changed in the time they’ve been imprisoned.”

“7 newbie tips to the L.A. County Fair”: My yet even still next latest L.A. Times Essential California newsletter sees me go to the Pomona Fairplex. KEY QUOTE: “I asked [Miguel A. Santana] if this fair was as big as the Orange County Fair. He laughed the way all Angelenos do when presented with a comparison to Orange County.”

Now, back to columnas…

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!