"People Can't Look at Us as Just a Hot Place Anymore"

"'Most of the folks here are going to be very friendly and nice, but very apolitical,' he said. 'They just want to survive and hang out with their family and drink some beers and make some carne asada. Chicanismo is, like, for other places.'
"Even Border Patrol agents on bicycles from the El Centro station zipped around the fiesta with smiles. No one booed or made a fuss about it.
"'People are going to know where we're at now,' said Adrian Guillermo-Barrera, who set up lawn chairs for his family three hours before the start of the parade and rally. 'We're not just between San Diego and Arizona.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Gustavo Arellano visits the Imperial Valley.

"The Waterloo of the Far-Right in California"

"Lawsuits kept it from ever being fully implemented, and a federal judge finally ruled it unconstitutional in 1999. It energized a Latino electorate–yes, John Boehner, there are plenty of legal Latino immigrant and Latinos born here–that came out in larger and larger numbers in subsequent elections, overwhelmingly voting Democrat and leading to de facto one-party rule California for the past decade. (The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2002 was an anomaly that American can blame on all my cousins who loved him in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.)
"The proposition also galvanized a generation of Latino politicians with long memories, who have effectively created a sanctuary state in California in subsequent years–offering driver's licenses to folks without papers, providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students, officially telling la migra to butt out of state affairs–as penance for the sins of their predecessors. It's these same legislators who crafted the bill that finally, fully repealed Prop 187, portions of which were still officially on the books up despite being unenforceable."


Gustavo Arellano in The Guardian observes the legacy of Proposition 187.

Taking the "Whole Bird"

"Obama wants to encourage this move, which would be good for him and good for progressive politics. Fear that Obama's analysis is exactly right is why so many conservatives are so angry with Warren for blessing the new president's inaugural."

E.J. Dionne, Jr., in The New Republic tells leftist critics of Barack Obama to relax over the Rick Warren invitation.

And in a January 2009 Los Angeles Times article, Gustavo Arellano places Warren into the history of religion in Orange County, California.