To the editor: Gustavo Arellano's recent column in Los Angeles Times trying to soften Cynthia González's comments about gang members “protection [their] grass “is more than disappointing (“What a Los Angeles County policy meant when he hit 'Cholos' to fight ice.” June 26). It is dangerous.
Let's be clear: González, in his role as Cudahy vice mayor, did not ask for peaceful resistance. She explicitly invoked violent streets, with long stories of murder, extortion and drug trafficking, to occupy space and power against federal agents. That is not protest. That is incitement.
My parents had a 7-Eleven in the corner of Figueroa and Avenue 52 for 35 years and had direct experience in the treatment of the gangs of the avenue. It was a terrifying problem for them, and gang culture is not something to be glorified.
Instead of holding González, Arellano chose to romantize his rhetoric, dictating it as part of an misunderstood neighborhood. That is not analysis. That is complicity. He rethinks his language as nostalgic, as if calling groups like Florence 13 and 18th street to “protect” his neighborhoods is somehow a cultural cry instead of what it is: reckless and inflammatory.
What is equally worrying is the silence of UCLA. González was recently appointed director of a program that enables educators. If she continues to hold that title, she would send a chilling message: that incendiary and dangerous rhetoric is excusable if it is undercover in the correct cultural language, and that is a standard that no integrity institution must support.
If Arellano wants to defend communities like mine, he must stop filtering them through sentimentality and begin to confront what is real: González's words do not misunderstood. They are unacceptable. And his turn only makes them more.
Migdia Chinea, Glendale
