Free Dispatch by Bentley Little Page B

laughed, and I realized at that moment just how much I hated my brother. It was my mom who broke things up—though of course she sided with my dad. She made him stop hitting me, but then she started yelling, too, the both of them coming at me in stereo. I took it, but inside I was glad I'd written that letter, and I felt proud of myself for being able to upset them so. My words had power.
    In the next issue of the paper, the editorial page was filled with letters denouncing me. One from the mayor, one from the city manager, two from members of the public. The paper itself printed an editorial siding with the city, calling my ideas "inflammatory and counterproductive." I hadn't realized that my opinions would be taken so seriously—I was just a high school kid!—and I'd had no idea that I would hit such a nerve. Of course, racists didn't like to be called racists, and maybe my blunt talk had hit them where it hurt.
    I knew I had to defend myself, but that night as I sat at my desk crafting a response, I thought that it would be much more effective if other people defended me.
    I stopped writing as an idea occurred to me.
    I could invent a fake name and fake address, pretend to be someone else, pretend I was just a normal reader who had heard both sides of the argument and thought that Jason Hanford had made a lot of very valid points.
    Or I could create a fake organization.
    That was even bigger; that was even better. I stared at the blank paper rolled in my typewriter. It had to be something that sounded legitimate but was not the name of an actual group. Hispanic Action Coalition? That sounded good, but I couldn't be sure I hadn't heard that name somewhere else before. Latino Watchdog Association ... Chicano Rights Watch ... Mexican American Defense League? The trouble was, they all sounded real.
    So what if they were?
    That was a legitimate point. Even if a representative from one of those organizations complained about the appropriation of their name and wrote a rebuttal stating that I did not accurately reflect their views, it would be after the fact. I would still get my message out there.
    I started writing.
    It took me a long time to compose the letter. I worked on it until I started falling asleep, then finished it after school the next day, typing it quickly before my dad came home. I called myself "Carlos Sandoval," after Carlos Santana and Arturo Sandoval, two musicians whose albums I had seen the other day at the Goodwill store, and I claimed to be president of the Hispanic Action Coalition. I stated that the land-grab by the city on behalf of developers, under the guise of eminent domain, was an attempt to legislate away the Mexican population. They were using politics to change the demographics of the city, to make it more white, and it was part of a pattern of discrimination.
    To buttress my position, I wrote a quick little letter ostensibly from an outraged citizen. I made her an old lady who'd been born in Acacia and lived here all her life. She said that it was disgusting to see such blatant bigotry finding its way into the policies of our elected officials and driving apart the citizens of the city she loved.
    Both letters were printed in the Ledger (did they publish everything they received?), and the controversy kicked into high gear. Right next to my letters was a dissenting opinion penned by an avowed white supremacist—support that I'm sure city hall could have done without.
    The alterna-press jumped into the debate: one of Orange County's two underground newspapers ran a completely erroneous story stating that "Carlos Sandoval" had attended a meeting of local Latino leaders, stealing a quote from my letter; the other published an unsigned staff-written editorial echoing everything that I had said. I was flattered and excited to be at the center of this conflict, but I knew I needed to keep the momentum going, so I wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times , this time pretending to be a businessman from