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It began as a lark: a abusive admonition cavalcade in which readers could address in and ask a catechism — any catechism — of the Mexican columnist. And the questions caked in. Why do Mexicans adulation dancing so much? Why do Mexicans alarm anniversary added güey? Why do so abounding Mexicans blare to communicate?

To these missives, best of which can’t be reprinted in their absoluteness due to acrid language, Gustavo Arellano would appropriately acknowledge in his “Ask a Mexican” column, appear in the pages of the OC Weekly:

One clairvoyant wrote in to ask why cholos adulation Old English fonts again concluded the cannonball by stating: “They’re ugly, aloof like aggregate about your culture.”

Arellano’s bane reply: “Dear Racist: The acceptance of Old English calligraphy is a bastille abnormality that transcends chase — aloof assay out some of the tats on your white-supremacist cousins the abutting time they appearance up at your ancestors picnic.”

I aboriginal stumbled assimilate “Ask a Mexican” about a decade ago, and it was a little bit like actuality hit by lightning. Actuality was a biographer who was both chattering and erudite. He took austere capacity — like racism — and fabricated them blisteringly funny. He deployed Spanglish argot afterwards activity like he had to explain it to death. And did it all while waxing anapestic about things like the “mexcelente Mexi-mullet” of Los Tigres del Norte bassist Hernán Hernández.

For the OC Weekly, Arellano wrote about a host of added things too: music, food, ability and the animal bribery scandals afflictive the Catholic Church in Orange County. He admired to muck about in actual archives. Back 2011, the annual has run a semi-regular alternation about Orange Canton founders who were associates of the Ku Klux Klan. And he wrote books, including the cultural history “Taco USA,” and served as a adviser on the now-defunct Fox activated alternation “Bordertown.”

Most significantly, as a writer, and afterwards in his role as editor of the OC Weekly, he fabricated the Latino acquaintance — in particular, the Chicano acquaintance — axial to the media conversation, rather than the sidebar.

Arkasha Stevenson / Los Angeles Times

Gustavo Arellano

Gustavo Arellano (Arkasha Stevenson / Los Angeles Times)

And he did it in a canton that has been about associated with the white and affluent un-realities of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” and the aboriginal aughts TV ball “The O.C.” (Never apperception that Orange Canton has been a majority-minority canton back 2004 — and that the Mexican attendance has been a mainstay back its foundation.)

“The actuality that there was a Mexican active the OC Weekly?” Arellano tells me via telephone. “That was significant, because it shows we are actuality as the bodies who are allowance move the chat along. Look at Southern California, it’s Latino. And we are Americans.”

On Friday, afterwards 15 years at the OC Annual — about six of them as its editor-in-chief — Arellano abruptly accommodated from the paper. He beneath to altercate the capacity of his abandonment with The Times. But in an annual on the “Tom Leykis Show” on Friday afternoon, he declared that he had been asked to lay off bisected of his agents by the paper’s owners, Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc.

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“I offered them a plan that would not absorb accident all of those amazing, accomplished people,” he told Leykis. The plan, he said, complex acid his own bacon in half. The angle was not accustomed by the aggregation and Arellano resigned.

In a annual issued to The Times aftermost week, McIntosh, the OC Weekly’s president, said that the paper’s beat agents and annual had “remained around banausic for a decade” and that beat costs had “consistently exceeded” their limits. A cachet amend acquaint to the weekly’s Facebook annual acclaimed Arellano’s service: “He will be missed, but his addition to the bi-weekly and bequest of administration will consistently be remembered.”

Arkasha Stevenson / Los Angeles Times

Gustavo Arellano poses at the Cielito Lindo restaurant in city Los Angeles in 2012.

Gustavo Arellano poses at the Cielito Lindo restaurant in city Los Angeles in 2012. (Arkasha Stevenson / Los Angeles Times)

Whatever the capacity of Arellano’s resignation, his abandonment lays bald the all-a-quiver position that Latinos absorb in English-language media.

Arellano was the attenuate Latino editor-in-chief amid American alt weeklies. In fact, he was the attenuate Latino baton at any English-language annual alignment — period.

According to demography citizenry estimates from 2016, Latinos annual for about 39% of the citizenry of California and 18% of the absolute U.S. population, but abide clearly underrepresented in media both in the accompaniment and civic — abnormally at its top ranks.

On the television side, a address appear by Columbia University’s Center for the Abstraction of Ethnicity in 2014 appear that alone 1.8% of annual producers at the top civic annual programs are Latino.

In newspapers, a 2016 newsroom assortment assay by the American Society for Bi-weekly Editors appear that alone 17% of newsroom workers are associates of an underrepresented minority. The abstraction didn’t breach out alone boyhood groups, so it’s absurd to define Latino representation specifically. But accustomed that Latinos and African Americans calm comprise added than 30% of the U.S. population, it’s safe to say that newsrooms do not alongside the country’s demographic trends.

An assay of baronial editors at above English-language dailies, appear in August by the apprentice advertisement affairs at the Asian American Journalists’ Assn., acknowledge the aforementioned pattern. Latinos abide underrepresented — if represented at all. The New York Times and Washington Post anniversary accept one Latino editor on their mastheads. The Los Angeles Times has none (though the newsroom had the best assorted newsroom agents of the above newspapers polled.)

Certainly, the abridgement of a Latino attendance affects not alone the belief that get told, but how they get told — if at all.

The Columbia University abstraction showed that from the nine-year aeon from 1995 to 2004, Latino-themed belief fabricated up beneath than 1% of all arrangement annual belief — and those that did accomplish it on air were abundantly about crime, agitation or actionable immigration.

Of the three presidential debates captivated aftermost year, for example, not one was chastened by a Latino — admitting the actuality that clearing was a afire affair throughout the election. (That wall? The prototypes are happening.)

At aftermost month’s Emmy Awards, no Latino actor, director, ambassador or biographer was nominated for any of the ceremony’s big awards. Writers such as Dennis Romero of LA Annual and Patricia Garcia of Vogue accent the blank — but the acknowledgment was about muted, with the adventure abiding almost one annual cycle.

And back Beyoncé appeared on a remix of Colombian reggaeton brilliant J. Balvin’s “Mi Gente,” it was aback actuality declared by media outlets as “Beyoncé’s new song.” Except it wasn’t Beyoncé’s song. It was a accord amid Balvin and DJ Willy William and it had already been on the archive for months. (Sorry, Beyhive.)

It is anecdotes such as this that fabricated Arellano’s assignment and attendance at the OC Annual so important.

He ran belief about groundbreaking Latino chefs, stoner norteño bands, Latino Islamophobia and the Mexican bequest of Santa Ana — which he spelled “SanTana,” to actor the Spanish accentuation of the city’s name.

“People would say, ‘That’s not how it’s spelled!’” says Arellano. “But I say, that’s how the citizenry arresting it.”

These belief were as axial to the cardboard as were the letters about political corruption, badge brutality, U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa), sci-fi biographer Philip K. Dick and alleviative pot. In added words, Arellano covered Latino ability as the boilerplate it is, not as the alien sidebar.

“The OC Annual helps save Orange Canton from itself,” he says. “It’s cogent our history, about citrus wars, about Chicano murals, about the Black Panther Party, about desperadoes — all of those stories.”

Now that Arellano has larboard the OC Weekly, it leaves the Southern California media mural aloof a little bit barren.

For years, publications alfresco of Orange Canton accept courted Arellano. But he has deeply banned to leave — because he capital to “stop the academician drain” of writers abrogation the county, and partly because it was a abode affluent with belief — Latino and not — that artlessly weren’t accepting told.

“It is a abhorrent abode and it’s a admirable place,” he says. “It’s paradise absent and paradise found.”

Now that he has larboard the OC Weekly, the advertisement with which he has been carefully articular with for so abounding years, the big catechism is what comes next.

Arellano will no best address “Ask a Mexican,” back the OC Annual owns the rights to the column. In the actual future, he will focus on a cardinal of freelance pieces he already had in the works — including a analysis cruise to South Carolina. Amid his various, non-OC Annual pursuits, he has been a approved contributor to “Gravy,” the annual of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

But the big picture? That’s still unclear.

“I’m activity to delay for the amazon harvest,” Arellano says with a laugh, “and again I will anticipate about things.”

carolina.miranda@latimes.com

@cmonstah

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