The Wild One

It's now Latinos who dictate the terms upon which Santa Ana will become the leading edge of Orange County's future. It's these Latinos who dare to dream of a county that rises higher than three stories, a region ready to establish itself as one of the world's great metropolitan areas. With the battle over One Broadway Plaza, Latinos finally join the county political mainstream and, in fact, are acting more American than their mostly white opponents.

There's little surprise in that, really, especially if you know anything about the 1893 Chicago Columbian World's Fair, where historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." In what has become known as the Frontier Thesis, Turner asserted that the frontier was a place of assimilation, transforming otherwise feudal immigrants into self-sufficient Americans ready to practice the peculiar craft of democracy. Hacking farms out of forests hundreds, even thousands of miles from governments, the hardy pioneers became democrats.

"The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization," Turner proclaimed. "As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area, the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics."

Today, the frontier is the declining city. It was white flight that led to Santa Ana's demise and Orange County's suburbanization; now it's the Latinos of Santa Ana who will establish this county anew.

"There is a renaissance in Santa Ana," Alvarez happily announced before casting the final aye vote on One Broadway Plaza. When Mayor Pro Tem Lisa Bist announced that One Broadway Plaza had passed, the chambers erupted in cheers. And Mike Harrah just sat there, the big boy whose Christmas wish came true thanks to the unstoppable forces of what makes America great.