Essays
Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero
Hurtful stories of cultural conflict
September 10, 2003
A person interprets their experiences based on their personal and cultural perceptions. One person sees a group of people and worries about “that gang of drunks,” while another person glances at the same group and smiles and says, “that family reunion looks like fun.” Opinions and beliefs based on fear and prejudice is what separates people.
A while back Frank Valles and I were time-tripping (yet another form of daytripping), telling each other stories of growing up in Midland in the 1940s (Frank) and 1950s (me). Frank was raised in the “Flats” near DeZavala Elementary. His dad had a backyard boxing ring and coached Golden Gloves fighters, so the Valles home was somewhat of a community center for the east side. The cultural apartheid of the “pre-Civil Rights Era” created a monstrous division between people at the time – Frank told of a store on Highway 80 (just a few blocks from his house) with a sign that read “No dirty Mexicans allowed!”
Frank related the following. “Scharbauer Draw was the north edge of our neighborhood. One of the toughest kids that fought in our backyard boxing ring had an encounter with a spectre at that ditch. One night, as this kid rode his bicycle swooping down into the ditch at the crossing just south of what is now Lee Freshman School, he felt something colder than ice on his back. He turned and saw the grinning face of death sitting on his shoulder, -- a skull with long hair -- and then his bicycle hit a rock. He went flying over the handlebars and got badly scratched and bruised from hitting the ground so hard. This totally upset him, and he came running out of the ditch, carrying the bike and crying and cursing. After he told the story, other people repeated the story. Similar in effect as to the la Llorona story, it helped to keep us kids confined to our segregated neighborhood.”
Hurtful stories originating in fear and ignorance once grew up about my family – I can remember sitting on the playground at Rusk Elementary and hearing an older and bigger kid telling a group of kids about the “gang clubhouse” on our property. Within ten years of my birth, Midland grew to surround my once rural home on Neely Street (the Unitarian Universalist Church and Our Savior’s Lutheran Church are there now.) Our house was almost invisible, hidden well by not only old sanddunes along the road that dated back to the duststorms of the 1950s, but also by mesquite thickets and by the native and adapted trees and shrubs used to landscape the immediate area around the house. Its unusual setting seemed out-of-place to many of the oil-boom newcomers to Midland.
My brother and some highschool friends built an astronomical observatory with a revolving dome and spent weekend nights hanging out until the wee hours of the morning. Some of the group fancied themselves as beatniks, and almost all were in “the history of western thought” philosophy class at Lee High School. The observatory may have been the first place in Midland where the music of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles was heard.
The big kid told the following story; “Don’t go near that clubhouse! Devil-worshippers gather there at night, and you hear screaming coming from inside. I snuck up real close last week, and I heard someone chanting “I can’t get no satisfaction” over and over, and right after that I saw this one-legged man on crutches pounding on the door of the clubhouse with a crutch. One of the gang members came out, dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans and penny loafers, with his hair slicked back. He had a gun in his hand – and the one-legged man took one look at him, said something, and then went hopping off into the bushes.”
As I listened, I realized the kid was talking about my dad telling my brother (holding a small telescope) to call it a night. I tried to tell everybody it was just my brother looking at stars, but the big kid pushed me down and called me a devil-worshipper, and other kids joined in, chanting in unison. Luckily for me, another big kid (who knew my brother and me) got the chanting to quit by pushing the storytelling kid down and making him cry.
Three weeks ago I reported on the fact that the image of “la virgen de Guadalupe” is commonplace in west Texas. At least two dozen people told me in the succeeding weeks that they liked the story – some thanking me for the respect I offered to the subject, and others appreciated the chance to learn a little bit about the icon and its history. I did receive a letter, however, that included the following; “the Mary worshipped by Catholics is not the virgin mother of Jesus Christ… but a very wicked woman named Semiramis. The traditions of the Roman Catholic Church are the works of sinful mortal men.” He mistakenly believed that I was actively proselytizing for “la virgen de Guadalupe,” and in his letter, sought to “save my soul.”
The gentleman has a right to his opinion, but as an American, I was deeply offended. His proselytizing by condemnation struck me as hateful and arrogant. I am a firm believer in the rights of Americans to follow the religion of their upbringing or choice. To condemn other people for their beliefs is un-American, in my opinion. I wrote the article as a celebration of cultural diversity within the United States, because we Americans are a model for the world. Among our citizens are people from every country and every religion of the world, living together peaceably, 99.99 percent of the time.
Each of us create a “patria chica,” our personal perception of the world. We develop strong feelings when faced with things not normally found in our personal “patria chica.” The stories that originate in our fears and prejudices unfortunately define us. The constructions our fear invents for ourselves bind us. It is often hard for us humans to overcome self-imposed or culturally imposed limitations based on fear – but I am so thankful that we can, otherwise Frank and I would not have worked together for the last three years on the same city advisory board.