temptation to fire off some text messages to his friends, because the event he had just witnessed was too big, too monumental, he decided, to be reduced to the usual texting acronyms and abbreviations. Giovanni Lozano, a twenty-six-year-old Chicano Studies maven and perpetual Cal State Fullerton undergrad, had been following Araceli’s case on television for days. He was the most active and most read poster on the La Bloga Latina page dedicated to Araceli’s case, where he had a large following among the small but growing segment of Spanish-surnamed population that Giovanni called “the Latino intelligentsia, such as it is.” His readers were a largely college-educated and over-qualified bunch, their ranks including underpaid municipal employees, unpublished novelists, untenured professors, underappreciated midlevel executives, unheralded poets, and the directors of underfunded nonprofits seeking to house, feed, and teach a tragically undereducated people. These readers appreciated his Spanglish wit, his Orange County Chicano, Y-Qué attitude—thanks to them, he was winning the war on Google, outpacing the One California nativist website on “Araceli Ramirez” searches by nearly two to one. As he drove he began to craft, in his head, a succinct summary of the events that had just unfolded: Araceli Noemi Ramirez is free on bail! La Bloga’s campaign—successful! We just saw her at a church in San Clemente. ¡Qué mujer! Her speech: short and to the point. Her attitude: arty and defiant, como siempre. A tall, big mexicana, she waltzed past our local, do-nothing consul as if he wasn’t there! Ha! From his very first glimpse of her running in that footage shot under the electric transmission lines in Huntington Park, Giovanni saw in Araceli a symbol of mexicana hipsterhood victimized. This vision of her was only strengthened by the details he found buried in the news accounts of her two arrests and double jailing, including the revelation, reported near the end of a story by Cynthia Villarreal in the Times, that police had found “disturbing art” in Araceli’s room. Giovanni had understood, instinctively, that Araceli was being victimized not only for being a mexicana, but also for being an individualist and a rebel. He had studied the photo essay on the web that accompanied the Times story on the rearrest, and drew his readers’ attention to the tiny silver studs Araceli wore on her earlobes, the too-tight leggings, and the wide blouse with the wide-open neck and small embroidered fringe that was tastefully Oaxacan without being too folksy.
Araceli’s presence was an antidote, somehow, to all those sad stories of workplace raids and deportations; she stood for the sophisticated place he and his mostly American-born readers imagined deeper, urban Mexico to be. She was an event of history that had been dropped into Giovanni Lozano’s provincial corner of the planet, a force with the potential to separate the Spanish-surnamed masses from their complacency and denial. People like his immigrant mother, who tended to her roses in their home in Garden Grove, telling Giovanni that she felt the Holy Spirit in the faint breeze that blew between the flowers. His mother pretended not to care when he told her how she and her people were being belittled on the radio and on television, in the courts and in the supermarkets, by the racists who attached that slur “illegal” to anyone and everyone with Mesoamerican blood in their veins. Don’t you see, Mother? he wanted to say. They want to destroy us! Deport us all! It’s a war against our culture!
No, my people don’t understand shouting. They understand victims and heroes, he thought. So he would give them an icon. He would take one of those photographs of Araceli from the newspaper website, and he would make a work of art, a portrait-poster. He would take Araceli’s face and multiply it, so that many Aracelis floated above the marching crowd at the next rally, in a Warholian statement about the power of her ordinariness and her celebrity. He would paste her to the walls, and put some text underneath her. Perhaps Araceli’s own statement from the newspaper. “¡No les tengo miedo!” And why not in English too? A Mexican woman with her mouth open to the words: “I am not afraid!”
“I don’t know what I know anymore,” Maureen said fifteen minutes into the interview with Deputy District Attorney Arnold Chang. Maureen and Scott were confused and evasive about time and their own actions during the disappearance of the children, and they were unwilling or unable to say anything about the defendant that would bolster