Life in a Small California Farm Town in the 50s and 60s
I was born in a copper-mining town in Arizona in 1945, about a week before the Hiroshima bomb. My mother had just turned 21, and my father was flying B-17s in some of the last missions of WWII. Mostly, he was transporting people on their way home. He came back when I was just a few weeks old.
They immediately packed up and moved to a small town in Southern California, where someone they knew mentioned a job for my father. He worked as an auto mechanic at that job until the late 1960s, and then opened his own shop. I grew up in a variety of houses in that tiny little town, population 4800, for the first 18 years of my life.
When I was six years old, and started first grade, I was in the first class of kids in the newly integrated elementary school not far from my home. Integrated. The town, which was about 1/3 Hispanic, had segregated the "Mexican" kids in elementary school in an old school building. In 1951, that was the school I was assigned to. At the time, it was about 80% Hispanic.
Not "integrated" in terms of black and white students. There were no black students. My little home town still had a "Sundown Law" and covenants against property ownership by "negroes." But, we had a substantial Hispanic population, and there I was in a school where most of the children had Hispanic names. Since I was only six years old, that meant nothing to me. My friends were all kids with names like Hope Reyes and Manuel Romero.
They lived even closer to the school than I did, so I often played at their houses. The neighborhoods around that school were called "Mexican Town." Their parents didn't speak English, so I learned Spanish. My friends ate different things than I ate at home, so I learned to eat tortillas and beans and other foods in their homes. There were grocery stores and other businesses in that area that sold different things than were sold in the other stores in town. I remember a meat market that always had things like whole sheep heads in the display window. It all seemed normal to me, but not to my parents or the other people in town. They never went there.
I had to learn different words and stuff, but Abuela Reyes, Hope's mother, was a nice old lady who started making snacks the moment we came through the door. They were my friends. They remained my friends all the way through school, dozens of people I first met in first grade. I didn't learn about the prejudices in my small town until junior high and high school. I spend six years in that barely integrated elementary school, learning Spanish and visiting with my friends.
I discovered that the "Mexicans" weren't the people you were supposed to hang out with in junior high and high school. The kids called them names, like "beaners" and "wetbacks." But, they were my friends! So, I stuck up for them and scolded others who treated them badly. I was a very smart kid, who got straight As in school and could sing and play music and got along with just about everyone. Most of my friends, though, were the same kids I started first grade with.
I never understood the raw animosity some people had for my friends. It made no sense. But there it was - blind, mindless prejudice. Some of the other Anglo kids who had also attended the "integrated" school were like me and had mostly friends they had gone to that school with. A general culture of acceptance and equality never developed in junior high and high school. There were the "Anglo" kids and the one-third of Hispanic kids. Just a few of us got along with everyone.
The prejudice extended into how the school treated the students, too. There were zero Hispanic students in the college prep track, until a couple of parents demanded that their very bright children be allowed in that track. The High School Band and Chorus were seas of Anglo faces. I graduated from high school in 1963, and nothing had changed by then.
Today, that town has grown to about 14,000, and it's now about 60% Hispanic. The tables have turned in the schools. City government, which once had no Hispanics elected to office is now almost totally Hispanic. The town has changed, reversing its nature from when I was a kid living there. Some of my elementary school friends still live there, and are now in their 70s, like I am, and have great-grandchildren. I see them when I visit. We're still friends. But they're not on Facebook. They didn't make the technology transition when they were in their 20s and 30s.
The town has changed. I still like visiting. My parents still live there, at age 94. They're in an assisted living facility, where the entire staff is Hispanic. They never learned any Spanish, which means that they can't understand the conversations among the staffers. A couple of my high school friends also live in that facility, which is pretty sobering. Others who were my friends in school are still around, too, and I make a point of visiting with them when I'm in town. The prejudices have eased a little, but are certainly far from gone.
The point of all this is that prejudice is very, very difficult to get rid of. I'm very glad that I went to that elementary school, as part of the very first group of Anglo kids to attend the new "integrated" school. That experience has served me well all my life. It's a pity not everyone had such an opportunity, I think.
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