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Gustavo Arellano's column in the OC Weekly began humbly ten years ago — ten years of abuse from gringo and Latino readers who don't get it, in Orange County and beyond. Now ¡Ask a Mexican! is like a freakin' empire, and Gustavo's the editor of the whole freakin' paper — as well as a partner in weekly commentary on KCRW. The feature has been around so long now, he was on "The Colbert Report" before it was cool. Arellano celebrates in this week's column:
This week marks the 10-year anniversary of this infernal columna—10 pinche years already! The Mexican is not much for retrospectives—that's a gabacho thing—but I do want to take a moment to offer thanks to a couple of cabrones: former OC Weekly editor Will Swaim for giving me the idea for the column; VICE Media chingón Daniel Hernández for writing the Los Angeles Times profile that changed my life; Scribner for printing ¡Ask a Mexican! in best-selling book form; mi chula esposa for all her support and pickling my peppers (and that is not a metaphor); Tom Leykis for hosting a call-in-version of ¡Ask a Mexican! all these years (subscribe to his podcast at www.blowmeuptom.com); all the haters, whose vile words remind me why I started writing this in the primera place; my friends and familia for the obvious reasons; the Albuquerque Alibi for being the first newspaper besides my home periódico to have the huevos to run the column; and, lastly but not leastly, ustedes gentle readers, whose eternal curiosity about Mexicans makes this weekly rant an eternally rollicking bit of DESMADRE. To the next decade or 50!
Read the whole column.
