I am a proud daughter of Orange County, a chaparral child of scouring Santannas, fire, rattlesnakes and burritos. A wannabe beach-babe, I had too much fun as a feral teenager and squeaked my way through El Modena High School with the help of diligent teachers. I am also the first citizen in my family. My parents emigrated from the war zone of Northern Ireland in 1958. Every December 26 until she died at 90 years old in St. Joseph’s Hospital, my mother relived that journey. On a cold, miserable Boxing Day morning in Belfast, she and my father climbed the gangplank of a massive ship; her father and brother stood on the dock in gray suits, sharing an umbrella, as “sheets of rain” fell. My mother did not want to leave Ireland. She still called it “home” after six decades in this country. But “have-to is a grand master,” she said.
My parents were headed to jobs on an orange ranch on Chapman Avenue, where El Modena High School stands today, my father to manage the farm and my mother to manage the ranch owners’ mansion. They got a shock when they saw their new living quarters–an apartment of sorts in a barn. They did not know if they would stay. But then I arrived, unexpectedly, four years later. My parents signed up immediately for citizenship classes, attending every Tuesday and Thursday night for nine months. One year later, they both scored 100% on their exams and holding a two-year-old me in their arms, took their oath.
“We were born again,” my mother said.
Our immigrant clan grew quickly as three of my mother’s sisters arrived from Belfast. Family photo albums show pages of Laguna Beach picnics, pool parties with cavorting cousins and every holiday celebrated in a different auntie’s home. It was a childhood of sunburnt noses, coyotes howling from the red hill at night, enormous cacti surrounding our scruffy yard, my mother running the Sunday School at La Purisima with me as her surly assistant, and summer nights outside with my brother scanning the heavens with our beloved telescope. We were determined to discover a UFO.
This southern California childhood also gave me the gift of growing up in a Mexican town. Inside our home, my fresh-off-the-boat parents had strong brogues, played creaky 45s of Irish laments about British tyranny, and used strange expressions my siblings and I could only guess at. Outside our family, we were immersed in the soft melodies of Spanish. I can’t remember when I realized I was living in two languages and cultures and finally heard the difference between harsh, guttural English and the Spanish names of the streets and my schools–Panorama, Santiago, El Modena. Our church was La Purisima, where we went to mass every morning at 6:30 am during Lent and often to Spanish mass on Saturday afternoons. Mexican also meant Catholic, a powerful cultural bridge.
Decades later, when we buried my mother during the pandemic I realized how strong that cultural bridge was. I was standing with my brothers in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery before the funeral began when the Mexican-American deacon counseled us privately. He’d just watched the family cortege arrive, every car flying a huge Irish tricolor flag. He’d just heard the bagpipe’s mournful wail. And he saw how my brothers and I stood like fierce Celts, facing our tiny mother’s enormous coffin, as we waited for the funeral to begin. She was the matriarch, the “bangaiscedach,” or “she-warrior,” daughter of a guerrilla fighter.
“Hold on tightly to your culture,” he told us, taking our hands and looking deeply into our eyes. “It will give you strength.”
Thanks to this semi-Mexican childhood with a lot of privilege and none of the racism many Mexican kids faced, I grew up learning Spanish. My parent’s Peruvian employer, Harold Gimeno, sat me down when I was a child with two lists of words on a page: avocado-aguacate, potato-patata, tomato-tomate. And because of a series of patient Spanish teachers in excellent public schools, I was nearly bilingual by the time I graduated from college. These language skills led to a career as a human rights investigative journalist in Central America. If I hadn’t grown up in Orange County, I wouldn’t have been hired by a Spanish Jesuit right out of college to work at his Managua research center, which led to a job interpreting for former President Jimmy Carter when he visited Nicaragua. And I probably would never have worked for TIME magazine or other major media, which led to a gig with the United Nations in the Guatemalan highlands investigating massacres perpetrated by the US-trained and financed Guatemalan military.
All this is why when I saw the horrific and now internationally infamous video of Narciso Barranco lying face down on the pavement in Santa Ana, crying out while burly fisted ICE agents pummeled his head and neck, I was filled with a deep sorrow. The video reminded me of the old black and white newsreels of beefy white southern police beating black protesters in Alabama in the 1960s. Then I read with horror in the Voice of OC how the Santa Ana police department is firing rubber bullets at protesters and that people with brown skin are being snatched–Guatemala death-squad style–right off the streets around my high school and church. I was also struck by the irony that 67 years after my parents left Northern Ireland, formerly the land of rubber bullets and detention without trial, police are firing rubber bullets in the neighborhood of my birth, which has become a war zone for immigrants of color. Meanwhile, Belfast is peaceful and prosperous, the occupying British troops and hated checkpoints relegated to the history books.
Narciso Barranco raised his three U.S. Marine sons to work very hard and give back to their country. This was also my parents’ credo. Above all, we were raised to be grateful. I’ll never forget that while my father was dying of stomach cancer, he asked me to help him write a thank you letter to his very first employer in Ireland, a quarry owner who hired him as a “rock-smasher,” then promoted him to drive the heavy machinery that helped him land a job driving a tractor on a California ranch, 5000 miles away.
We were also raised to honor our family’s history fighting injustice in Northern Ireland. I probably became a human rights journalist because I grew up with my parents shouting at TV newscasters during The Troubles because they weren’t telling “our family’s side of the story,” and why my parents grew up as second-class citizens.
I am very grateful that my parents had the courage to cross an ocean and become citizens of this country. But the reason they were able to do it in just six years is because of racist quotas favoring white Europeans. Narciso Barranco was born next door in Mexico, has worked here for 31 years, has three sons in the military and still does not have a path to citizenship. This is grossly unfair and un-American. I call on the good people of my hometown–loving neighbors, teachers, former playmates and classmates, especially anyone descended from immigrants who fled war, oppression, famine, disaster or religious persecution–to raise your voices. Please call or write your representatives, immediately. Support republican and democratic legislators who are begging President Trump to stop persecuting the hardest working people in this country and to stick to his initial policy of targeting dangerous criminals. And ask President Trump to follow in the footsteps of President Ronald Reagan who created a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, 39 years ago, in 1986. Tell President Trump to call this legislation the Narciso Barranco Act.
Trish O’Kane, PhD – Trish O’Kane was born and raised in Orange. Author of Birding to Change the World: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2025), she is an ornithologist who teaches at the University of Vermont.
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