What’s with all the people in my adopted city of Los Angeles claiming to be fourth- or sixth-generation Angelenos? In my hometown of New York, another city of immigrants, nobody cares about stuff like that. What gives? Go Yankees!
—PROUD TO BE A TRANSPLANT IN SILVER LAKE
Gustavo: Insecurities about belonging is the reason. Fourth-gen Angeleno? All that means is that their great-grandparents moved here from Iowa in the early 1900s, when everyone’s great-Hawkeyes were doing the same. In San Francisco, home to de Youngs, Hearsts, Haases, and Peraltas, four generations makes your clan a newcomer. Score tied: 1–1, S.F. versus L.A.!
Stacey: As residents of a younger city, we Angelenos tend to be impressed by anything older than Pink’s Hot Dogs. And when you grow up constantly hearing that your state’s going to fall into the sea, you cling to whatever permanence you can find. New Yorkers aren’t concerned with such things. Everyone assumes your family’s been there for generations, since there’s no way anyone can move there now.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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Governor Gavin Newsom obviously has his eyes set on moving to the White House. Who do you think would be his best replacement for California’s 41st governor?
—GOODBYE, GAV
Gustavo: For the June primary, I’m casting my vote for General Sherman. It’s the perfect leader for California: Everyone loves the giant sequoia; it’ll never say anything stupid; it’s multicolored and both male and female. At about 2,200 years old, the 275-foot baller knows that partisan politics is for the birds, wears its 102-foot waistline with pizzazz, and has no plans to raise your taxes or pine—pun not intended, but man, did it land!—for higher office.
Stacey: Ready or not, Newsom’s time is up, so if he’s taken anything of yours—your job, your roads, your Dyson Supersonic—you’d better get it back now. You ask about a “best replacement,” but that would be someone just like him—a “960 SAT guy” with silly hair and a podcast. So until we enact a lottery system and the job goes to my neighbor José, who always has a kind word and who brings in everyone’s trash cans, I’ll just have to do what I must in November: Close my eyes and think of Oakland.
Is anyone else’s smartphone weather app a total liar? Mine will promise storms, thunder, and lightning, and all we ever seem to experience is a mild drizzle. What gives?
—Unused Umbrella
Stacey: Total liar. The weather app, I’m sure we’ll find out, is in league with the weakstream media, which is controlled, for sure, by Chicken Little, and together they think up ways to make every ordinary rainstorm into an atmospheric river.
Gustavo: I like to garden, so I’m actually very good at predicting weather: I’ll go outside in the morning and feel how the sun hits me, greet the clouds, and tell the wind, “Please blow Jax from Vanderpump Rules/The Valley away from television already.” I’m better at predicting the weather than Steph Curry is at nailing threes!•
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Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
Stacey Grenrock Woods is a regular contributor to Esquire and a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She writes and consults on various TV shows, and has a recurring role as Tricia Thoon on Fox’s Arrested Development. Her first book is I, California.
