Not My President: Second Installment

After Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

This unintentional collection of micro-essays is dedicated to my Spring 2026 Ethnofiction Through Contemporary students in Orange County, California (OC). Without their weekly discussions and their willingness to put their opinions and stories on the page, I would never have started this series of notes. Muchas gracias to my partner, Dr. Manny, also known as mi guapo. He not only listened to my readings aloud each week but also helped me select the footnotes and consented to having his life made public.

 You can read the first installment as well.

A Note on Methods

This series prompted me to set my own guidelines, non-negotiables, and experimental style, which helped me avoid giving these U.S. presidents more time than they deserved. The process also enabled me to evolve as a human, writer, and social critic.

Here are my guidelines and non-negotiables:

• No more than 1 single-spaced page.

• No more than 3 footnotes, but at least 2 are required.

• Include something personal and/or regional (OC-based) with some national information.

• Footnotes are sourced from open sources, such as me, internet searches, or books.

• No more than 2 days per note, but editing is allowed until publication.

• Grammarly is allowed for line edits and shortening when necessary. Humans too.

• Always, always bring forward a woman’s issue.

• Also, my life counts as a “woman’s issue.”

Note 3: What do you know about Gerald Ford?

Before 2026, the only thing I knew about Gerald Ford was that he was not part of the Ford family that makes cars. I knew Ford was a president, but until now, I didn’t know where he fit on the U.S. presidents list. Instead of Googling, I conducted an informal inquiry. I asked my husband first:

“I really don’t remember who he is. If he was before I came to the U.S., I don’t remember him. I don’t even know who Mexico’s president was when I left in ‘87.^[1]”

I planned to ask different people while I poured beer at the brewery. Wait, I think I need to preface this, too. I don’t know how to sit still in life. This began after mi Papi died unexpectedly in early 1988. He had an aneurysm while working in the print room at The Orange County Register for 10 years. As the firstborn in the U.S., I faced many familial expectations. At 13, I planned Papi’s funeral. I went from a rebellious 13-year-old with her first boyfriend and bad grades to head of the household simply because my English was better and I was born in this country. Because of the grades, Papi wrote me a letter a month before his death. It said many life things, ending with, “I don’t want you to drive an old car like me when you are 36.” I have been driving a 2007 Toyota Yaris since 2015. I’m 52. Days after writing that letter, he sold his 1966 Ford Mustang to buy a 1988 Dodge Daytona. The look on his face when I said I preferred the old Mustang is still etched in my memory.

Before Papi passed away, I began babysitting to earn my own money. After he died, I sought more work. I have been working 2 to 3 jobs since I was 15. That brings me back to working at a brewery for the last 18 months, as a part-time lecturer for 6 years, and as the volunteer bookstore director for a decade. After the only independent bookstore in Santa Ana closed in 2015, I started my bookstore 6 months before Trump took office in 2017. The cooperative bookstore counters everything THAT administration stands for. On my way to the brewery, I encountered unexpected traffic, and Google Maps rerouted me onto side streets. I sat in a slow-moving lane and noticed a Tesla behind me. The older person in the driver's seat was asleep, while the teen in the passenger seat was avoiding looking at the driver. The Tesla kept driving, and the driver kept sleeping. I thought about Papi and how his death gave me my first car, the brand-new Dodge Daytona, which I never preferred to him.

As soon as I arrived at the brewery, I asked two brewers about the self-driving Tesla. They scoffed, explaining that Tesla’s system relies on an app with a paid autopilot service, that accidents remain the owner’s responsibility, and that Elon Musk sucks.^[2] This, indirectly, led me back to Ford.

“Hey, so what do you know about President Gerald Ford?”

“Didn’t he replace Nixon?” “Yeah, he’s the guy who replaced Nixon.”

“But he’s not part of the Ford with cars, right?”

“Noooo, not at all.” “Honestly, I don’t know.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“Wow, I guess nothing.” “Yeah, not a damn thing.”

Note 4: Busshu-suru, or the President Before I Started Voting

The phrase busshu-suru, or “to do the Bush thing,” was a coined term in Japan. On January 8, 1992, during a diplomatic trip, President George H. W. Bush vomited on Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. It was my senior year of high school, and I saw it on the news. It made me laugh. I got to know Bush Dad (a term some use to differentiate between the Bush eras) through my Tío Ruben, who served 20 years in the military. I spent my junior year of high school with him.

I remember Operation Desert Storm, or the Gulf War, because I worried my Tío Ruben would be sent to war. He joined the military in the mid-70s to gain U.S. citizenship,^[3] first the Marines, then later transferred to the Air Force. Tío Ruben’s military career is why I grew up in Santa Ana. He secured family housing on the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro base^[4] in ‘78. He called my parents and said something like: “Compadre, me dieron una casa en el sur de California con los Marines. Deben llegar aquí con nosotros — sí, algo mejor para nuestras hijas. Claro, se pueden quedar con nosotros.” Within months, my parents packed their three daughters into a pickup truck from Brownsville, Texas, and drove to Southern California to live on a U.S. base as legal residents. Within months, we were forced to leave for lacking military status and permission. My uncle temporarily lost his military housing. Together, both my families rented a house in Santa Ana.

After my father’s passing in 1988, my mom moved us to Rancho Santa Margarita. I served as the adult in my family for a couple of years, and I began to spiral downward at 15. In my sophomore year, I was sent to the alternative high school and, at times, ran away to avoid my mother’s new boyfriend. It was my then-boyfriend’s mother who allowed me to stay with her in Santa Ana on weekends to avoid being groomed by my mom’s boyfriend and to keep her son home rather than out on the streets. One day, when she caught me sneaking into her son’s bedroom, she said something like, “Eres más que esto, tienes que cambiar algo.” So when my mom said I had to go live with her brother, my military Tío, back in Texas once again, I didn’t put up a fight. I’d be away from her pervy boyfriend and have an excuse not to be with mine during the gang wars in Santa Ana.^[5]

I was dropped off in Del Valle, Texas, during the summer heat of 1990. My mom drove my sisters and me in the Dodge Daytona. We all pretended it was a summer vacation, but after a couple of weeks, the Daytona stayed with me while my family returned to Southern California via airplane. And that’s how I came to know Bush Dad, the extended war on drugs, and the wars against the people of Iraq and Panama. I spent that year with the news radio on in the mornings, the news on TV in the evenings, and sneaking letters and calls to my boyfriend to make sure he was alive. I had to attend Catholic Mass every Sunday at Bergstrom Air Force Base. Even there, I learned about the wars’ daily casualties, which led me to track the weekly shootings in Southern California. When I was tired of hearing about wars, I changed the subject by asking about the fall of the Berlin Wall because my Tío had been stationed in Germany years earlier. I wasn’t sure I liked church or the president, but I knew I didn’t like the military. And I didn’t like any kind of war. I didn’t like busshu-suru.

^[1] From Wikipedia: Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado was a Mexican politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as the 59th president of Mexico from 1982 to 1988. His legacy includes the implementation of economic neoliberal reforms in Mexico and beginning mass privatization of state-run companies. He was also the first of the so-called Technocrats to become president.

^[2] From Wikipedia: Tesla, Inc. is facing criminal and civil investigations into its self-driving claims. There have been reports of sudden unintended acceleration, brake failures, among other issues. Elon Musk is the CEO and product architect of Tesla and the former Senior Advisor to the 47^th President of the U.S., Donald Trump, through May 2025.

^[3] From Google AI: The 1970s marked a transition period to an all-volunteer force (1973) following the Vietnam War. During this era, thousands of non-citizens continued to serve and naturalize, with 13% of all naturalized citizens in the U.S. (approx. 2.5 million people) naturalizing between 1970-1979.

^[4] Paraphrased from A People’s Guide to Orange County by Lewinnek, Arellano, and Vo Dang, page 105 in eBook: Servicemen, who created networks to survive and even thrive in Orange County, brought diversity to the region.

^[5] From LA Times Sept. 20, 1990: In Santa Ana alone, there were 104 violent gang crimes--including 11 homicides--during the first four months of 1990, Police Department records show. From May through August, however, police reported 62 violent gang crimes, only one of which was a homicide.

*Cover Image credit: An adaptation of the Presidential Portraits created in Canva by Sarah Rafael García.

Original Image source: “Presidential Portraits: Library of Congress Free to Use and Reuse: Library of Congress.” The Library

of Congress, www.loc.gov/free-to-use/presidential-portraits/. Accessed 16 Apr. 2026.

Sarah Rafael García is an author, community educator, curator, and performance ethnographer born in Brownsville, Tejas and raised in Santa Ana, California. She’s the founder of Barrio Writers, LibroMobile and Crear Studio — all art programs initiated as a response to build cultural relevance and equity for BIPOC folks in Orange County.