Spying on the South: Travels With Frederick Law Olmsted in a Fractured Land by Horwitz Tony

Author:Horwitz, Tony [Horwitz, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Travel, Biography, Politics
ISBN: 9781984888648
Amazon: 1984888641
Goodreads: 41874059
Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks
Published: 2019-05-14T07:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

The directions Roger gave me were confusing, and I wandered for some time before reaching a low wooden building at a rural crossroads, about all that remained of a community known as Cotton Patch. The building, formerly a general store and dance hall, displayed the US and Texas flags and a sign reading, “cold beer.”

The interior was likewise plain, with an unpainted wood floor and bar, plank ceiling, and patrons drinking two-dollar beers from cans and bottles. I found Roger setting up on a stage outside, and he introduced me to Esther Puente, who ran the place with her husband. She brought out a file of newspaper clips from the 1940s, when Cotton Patch catered to a large population of farmers and sharecroppers.

“Look how skinny and well dressed they are!” she said, showing me photographs of women in white dresses and men in white shirts crowded on the dance floor.

The only person of color in any of the photographs was a black waiter. Blacks were otherwise barred from the dance hall, as were locals of Mexican descent. In the Texas of that day, laws and customs known as Juan Crow subjected Hispanics to discrimination and segregation similar to that inflicted on African Americans.

“My parents couldn’t have afforded a night out here anyway,” Esther said. They were migrant farmworkers, picking cotton in this area and other crops as far north as Michigan. Esther grew up in a shack without running water and showered under a hose her father hooked up inside a phone booth at a junkyard. She entered school late, speaking only Spanish.

“I learned quickly and looked white, so in second grade they put me with the white class,” she said. “But when the teacher found out my Mexican heritage, she persecuted me the rest of the year.” Things didn’t improve much in later grades, “and there was no way a white boy would date me. There were black families we got along with, but whites treated them even worse than they treated us.”

Her own children, raised in the 1980s and ’90s, had a very different experience. They spoke little Spanish, “didn’t feel much discrimination,” and one became, in his twenties, a school board member and city manager in the nearby town of Yorktown.

“I tease my grandkids, telling them they’re Mexican, and they say, ‘No we’re not!’ They don’t associate with it at all and can’t imagine the life we lived.”

Esther had mixed feelings about the dramatic change she’d seen over six decades. Despite the segregation of her youth, and to a degree because of it, “we were a big happy family, lots of cousins and elders, looking out for each other and caring for the little ones while their parents worked,” she said. “Today, if someone’s raising grandkids, it’s because their own children are up to no good.”

She believed life was healthier then, too, with the vigorous work and a diet of beans, green vegetables, and a little meat. “Soda and other stuff people consume all day now, that was a special treat.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.