Free Republic

The sun was bright and the sky was blue on Saturday morning as I enjoyed breakfast with a friend at my wife’s restaurant in downtown Santa Ana. We were talking about how Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley will bounce all over the Kansas City Chiefs defense like a pinball during the Super Bowl, when the sound of faint yelling made us look outside. Street preachers, boisterous hipsters and people blasting corridos and oldies are part of the neighborhood’s soundtrack, so we went back to our chat. But the faraway noise kept getting louder and louder until it began to...

Six years ago in this newspaper, I coined the term “rancho libertarian” to describe a political ideology I was observing in many of the Latino men I knew. Proud of their family’s rural immigrant roots but fully of this country. Working class at heart, middle class in income. Skeptical of big government and woke politics yet committed to bettering their communities. Believers in the American Dream they had seen their parents achieve — and afraid it was slipping away. Proud of their family’s rural immigrant roots but fully of this country. Working class at heart, middle class in income....

Is it dangerous to speak Spanish in public in Trump's America? Well, sí! Just this month, we've seen a lawyer threaten to call ICE after he overheard people in a restaurant in Manhattan speak in Spanish, and a Border Patrol agent in Montana detain two Mexican-American women for 40 minutes because he heard the bilingual women chatting en español, because the language “is very unheard of up here,” according to la migra man.

The columns date back to 2004! :)

Dear Mexican, Why do Mexicans call white people gringos? It was the type of impolite question few people would dare ask in everyday Southern California, much less in print. "Dear Gabacho," began Gustavo Arellano's answer in the OC Weekly alternative newspaper. "Mexicans do not call gringos gringos. Only gringos call gringos gringos. Mexicans call gringos gabachos." Arellano went on to explain that gabacho is a sometimes pejorative slang term for white Americans, with "its etymological roots in the Castilian slur for a French national." "Ask a Mexican," the newspaper headlined it. The column, published in 2004, was meant as a...