Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, covering Southern California everything and a bunch of the West and beyond. He was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and the Mike Royko Award for Commentary and Column Writing and was part of the team that won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News for reporting on a leaked audio recording that upended Los Angeles politics. Arellano previously worked at OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for 15 years and editor for six, wrote a column called ¡Ask a Mexican! and is the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.” He’s the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
Latest From This Author
Teens quit or went on strike across the country to protest abysmal work conditions. A-TEAM was such a disaster that the federal government never tried it again.
There are people who keep reliving their glory days, and then there’s Dean Cain.
L.A. is amazingly resilient — and nothing has proved this more than this year’s fires and immigration raids. We can — and will — survive whatever happens next.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department historian tells of the agency’s deadliest day— and it wasn’t the explosion that killed three deputies last month.
With the Games happening in a presidential election year, Trump would love nothing more than to traipse around an L.A. radically transformed by his deportation aggressions to proclaim his mission accomplished and broadcast his conquest to the world.
The legendary accordion player died last week at 86. While his sound made waves in rock and pop culture with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, he used his songs as funny weapons to fight against anti-immigration sentiment.
Your morning catch-up: Bipartisan support for cookies, In-N-Out’s owner is leaving California; is the state’s economy doomed? Plus more big stories.
The Untold Story’s owner, Lizzette Barrios Gracián, wants to offer more author signings and launch an oral history project for students to record the stories of Anaheim’s Latino elders.