More Proof Santa Ana is Racist at its Core: Jefferson Davis Pie!

My one vice in life is buying books related to Orange County, and our fair land's numerous social organizations have gathered and published their recipes over the years. The oldest cookbook in my collection is one compiled by the Ebell Society of the Santa Ana Valley located in SanTana. It dates from the 1920s and has hilarious recipes for tamale pies, jellied this, and other culinary relics.

But the most telling recipe included is for Jeff Davis pie–as in Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Now, why would a club of good, God-fearing women in Southern California include a food named for the leader of traitors? Because SanTana was filled with advocates for the Stars N Bars, honey child! As I've documented before, SanTana is the type of city that didn't blink when its United Daughters of Confederacy chapter dedicated a tree outside the Bowers Museum to the savior of the man who founded the Ku Klux Klan, a place with authors who knowingly hide the Klukker past of its founding fathers, where neighborhoods hold segregated Halloweens and display “Tara” on wrought-iron gates with little shame, whose captains of industry strung up a Mexican and faced no charges. The author of the first history of SanTana's Ebell Society was the wife of Victor Montgomery, personal scout to the founder of the Klan. Know Nothings always attack wabs for their allegiance to Mexico, but why don't you ever see the same criticism leveled at those who expressed pride in the nation's greatest batch of homegrown terrorists?

Gustavo Arellano