Books

As the writer of the syndicated weekly column Ask a Mexican! Gustavo Arellano is used to getting hate mail.

But in advance of his visit Saturday to Dallas, he has received his first threat of bodily harm. A man who read Mr. Arellano's new book, Orange County, threatened to stop by Borders and kick his "punk [backside]."

"I'm debating what I want to do, if I actually want to make a big scene out of it, or if I want to make the guy challenge me, and then we can get in a fight or something," says the author, 29, who was born in Orange County, Calif., and still lives there. "I'm going to have fun with it, though."

Orange County, Mr. Arellano's critically well-received second book, is a mixture of memoir and cultural history. In it, Mr. Arellano argues that children of immigrants can and do succeed, and that as Orange County goes, politically and socially, so goes the rest of the country.

"When I read about Farmers Branch trying to pull the stuff they did, I laughed. I said, 'Oh, we did this in Orange County 15 years ago,' " Mr. Arellano says. "Dallas is just catching up to our level of Mexican-hating."

He spoke by phone from the OC Weekly, the alternative paper where he works.

There's a lot of talk in the book about how the minority population is growing whether people like it or not. Do you really think the haters or anti-immigration groups are going to read it?

It's funny, because the haters, they're the ones who read most vigorously, by far. I hate talk radio, conservative talk radio. I listen to it religiously because I need to know what's going on. Orange County, the book, it's much different from [the book] Ask a Mexican! ... It's much more straight ahead. It's a book with a narrative and themes. The language is much less coarse and vulgar than it was in Ask a Mexican!

How did you research your ancestry?

Interviews. A lot of interviews. My grandmother is still alive – she's 93 years old and still has a very good memory. But of course you can't base everything on what people tell you, so I corroborated that with other accounts by other family members. And I did a little primary document research.

I was able to find my grandpa's passport when he went through El Paso. The most interesting thing I found, and I mentioned it in the book, was my great-grandfather's World War I registration card on ancestry.com

A lot of the book revolves around the crazy things that have happened in Orange County. If it's so bad, why are you still living there?

As a journalist, it's one of the best places to work in the country because there are so many crazy people. There's so much corruption. And all that corruption goes hand in hand.

In my chapter on religion, I end with the Catholic sex abuse scandal, and I talk about how the reason the church hasn't been prosecuted as much as it deserves to [be] is because the county is run by Republicans, who also happen to be Catholics. ... It's a very incestuous place. There's just so much craziness coming out of Orange County, as a reporter, it'd be stupid for me to leave.

What about as a person?

As a person, all my family's here. We've been here for four generations. This is home to me. This is where my raíces (roots) are, to use some Spanglish. We've been here almost a century. PLAN YOUR LIFE

Gustavo Arellano reads from Orange County at 2 p.m. Saturday at Border's, 5500 Greenville Ave. (at Lovers Lane).

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