Growing up Mendoza: hand-​me-​downs and a close-​knit family

A study published in the journal Memory in 2021 suggests that most people can retrieve memories from the time they are about 2.5 years old.ⁱⁱⁱ This seems about right for me. I have long tried to recall my earliest memory and the handful I come up with are a vague memory of my Uncle David calling me to come to him at a family picnic in a park. I recall being very small, and I have always felt I was around two at the time. The second memory I have is hiding behind the skirts of Grandma Martinez when my parents came to pick me up after they had been on a trip. I clung to her because I was mad and hurt at having been left behind. In her firm, but gentle and loving way, she reconnected me with my parents. Later on, I would learn that they had taken a trip to Mexico together to heal from the loss of a stillborn child and had also left my siblings with other family members. I also have early memories of playing underneath the banana trees on the side of their house; it was a place that, along with the magnolia trees, provided cool shade in the heat of the summer. I recall spending weekends at Grandma and Grandpa Mendoza’s house with my cousin Jesse. We played and always obeyed their commands to do this or that chore, and we always felt safe. I also recall my parents saying goodbye as they left our house to go to the hospital for my mother to give birth. My five older siblings and I were in the den of our home watching TV on the evening of Tuesday June 4, 1963 and I remember pleading with my mom, “Please, please bring me a little brother!” My sister Cindy was born the next morning. When I next saw my mother, she said: “I’m sorry son, but they were all out of boys.” In addition to faint memories of spending time at home with my mom before starting school, using a chair to stand at the sink and wash dishes, and hanging clothes on the line outside to dry, I have a vivid memory of watching President John F. Kennedy’s funeral on television. I recall everyone being sad, my mother crying, and JFK Jr’s salute to his father. Having also been born in 1960, I related to this little boy and recall feeling sorry for him.

My parents raised us to believe in the power of education to transform our lives. They asked us to imagine what we wanted to be and told us that an education would help us achieve that goal. Thus, school was always deemed important, as was homework. I recall when I was a youngster my father leaving each morning with a car full of my siblings to drop them off at school. The oldest, Rosemary, was seven years older than me, with Mary Ann being five years older, Bobby, four, Beabee, two, and Margie one year older.

Life in our household was structured, routine, and consistent. Each morning our father woke us up with an energetic call to “rise and shine!” We ate breakfast together just as we did for dinner each night. Most mornings oatmeal and toast were served, though on weekends we occasionally had cereal, eggs, or pancakes. Brownbag lunches of bologna and cheese were routine, although occasionally we received peanut butter and jelly. These, along with fruit, were made in haste each morning. Saturday mornings (after breakfast and some cartoon watching) were all about fulfilling a list of routine and special chores created by my father. Clothes and linens were washed, floors swept and mopped, bedrooms cleaned and organized, the yard raked, the driveway swept, and the cars washed. Only after our assigned tasks had been completed could we go about our day playing games with each other or neighbors or participating in activities out of the house. Each Sunday was structured around attending church and then picking up pan dulce and visiting our grandparents.

These visits were as regular as church. We tumbled out of the station wagon and paid homage to our grandparents, whose small houses smelled like the inside of a cedar chest and were as neat and clean as they were dark and cool. The visits always started off formally with a ritual hug, kiss, and pinch of the cheek followed by a survey of our appearance. We marveled at how these small two-​bedroom wood-​frame houses had managed to hold our parents’ larger families of six and nine children respectively. Invariably, after our grandparents asked us how school was going in their halting English, the conversation between grandma and grandpa and mom and dad would take place almost exclusively in Spanish. Sometimes we stayed listening in amazement at how they could understand each other when it seemed everyone was talking as fast as they could all at the same time. You didn’t hear that kind of simultaneous exchange among English speakers. Why was it that the English in our house required that only one person at a time speak? Usually, we drifted off and wandered outside to play in the yard or sit on the porch. Sometimes one or more of us stayed around and let the conversation wash over us like a cool summer breeze hypnotizing us with its rich cadence and often lulling us to sleep because, in truth, though there was something nice about witnessing the exchange of familial intimacies and intricacies of life between the generations, we understood almost nothing being said.

While we did not have a lot of extras in our life, we were not wanting. Hand-​me-​down clothes within family and between extended family was common. I remember once when one of mother’s sisters brought some recently washed used clothes over, I put them up to my nose and breathed deeply because I liked the lingering scent of their laundry soap. My mother thought I was being rude and chastised me. They laughed when I explained why I had smelled them with such vigor. I also remember going with my mother to a warehouse on Old Clinton Drive to pick up government-​issued powdered milk, huge blocks of cheese, and sometimes bags of rice. Rice and beans were the staple of most evening meals, as were fresh flour tortillas. My sisters were tasked with helping to make meals and, later when my mother went back to work, taking charge of putting dinner on the table. I do recall fondly the times we formed a production line to make tortillas—​one person in charge of the dough, two to roll out the uncooked dough, and another to stand at the grill and cook them. My mother was a home economist extraordinaire. Not only did she diligently shop with coupons at several local grocery stores, mostly Weingarten’s and Rice Super Market, but sometimes Trahan’s, she managed to provide tasty meals that often contained very little meat. We all noticed that my dad was always served a larger portion of meat than us, but mom explained this as he needed the food because he worked all day. Haircuts were mostly a home affair until we got jobs and could afford to go to the local barber’s or salon.

My family called me by my middle name of Jerry. It was not until I was about to start kindergarten that my father sat me down and told me that they might call me Louis at school because that was the name I was registered under. I was confused and said, “Why?” My father explained that my full name was Louis Gerard Mendoza. It was not until I attended high school that I began to be called Louis by teachers and fellow students alike. Until this day, I know that if someone calls me Jerry it is a family member or someone from my childhood in Denver Harbor.

Denver Harbor: The interplay of spaces, institutions, and identity

One Sunday in the spring of 1966, before I started elementary school at Resurrection, my father walked me to church, a rare event as I recall it because we usually went as a family. To get there we walked south a block and a half down Zoe St. and walked over the as yet unopened I-​10 freeway. I recall him lifting me over the fence dividing the east and west bound lanes, and he said this would be the last time we should ever walk on the highway because it was scheduled to be opened soon. This interstate highway had been a long time coming. It both connected and divided us from the rest of the world. While we had two exits into Denver Harbor, one at Kress and Lathrop Streets and one at Wayside, the freeway went right through the middle of our neighborhood which was bordered by Liberty Road to the North and Buffalo Bayou just south of Old Clinton Road. Because we were already bordered by railroad tracks on all four sides, which were strategically connected to industrial plants, warehouses, and the water treatment facility, many residents of Denver Harbor were already exposed to intense air pollution. The opening of I-​10 only intensified this exposure. As was true throughout the USA, the expressways built in Houston after World War II disproportionately affected communities of color. While it is the case that new “…interstate highways increase mobility in urban areas by reducing travel times for cars, buses, and trucks, while lessening traffic congestion on non-​interstate roads, and the addition of the interstate also allowed cities to expand their physical size,”^iv it is also the case that “these projects have invariably destroyed and displaced whole communities, devastated the tax base of cities while subsidizing suburban commuters, and created unseemly moats of high-​speed traffic and polluted air that ruined the urban fabric of city neighborhoods for a generation or more.”^v Members of my family tend to disagree on whether or not the freeway caused a sense of division among residents of Denver Harbor or made us more isolated from the rest of the city. I always thought it did a little of both as the sheer presence of the freeway reminded us that we were part of a much larger city and many neighborhoods had house, parks, stores, and restaurants that were much nicer than ours.

I loved going to church on Sundays where I would see my school and neighborhood friends all dressed up. Like my dad, I was enthralled with the mysticism of the church, and I liked the formality of the rituals and ceremony. Unlike him, as a student at Resurrection Elementary Catholic School I was given the opportunity to be an altar boy. It was a duty I relished into my early teen years. I loved how important wearing a cassock and surplice made me feel, that I was at the center of the action with all eyes watching as I carried the cross down the aisle, held the platter underneath those receiving the Eucharist, rang the bells at just the right moment marking the transubstantiation of wine and host to the body and blood of Christ, lit and put out the candles, and swung the incense during special ceremonies for the dead such as at funerals or Easter.

I was such a reliable altar boy that in sixth grade the parish priest, Father Robert Carlson, asked me to be the lead altar boy, an offer I gladly accepted. What this entailed was making the weekly schedule for all the altar boys on Saturdays and Sundays. I also trained new altar boys and was tasked with ensuring that unblessed host and bottles of red wine were kept in stock in the sacristy. So adept was I at doing this that in June 1973 I was named altar boy of the year for our parish and received recognition at a ceremony at the diocese. My parents bought me a new suit for the occasion. That same day, my sister Mary Ann was honored as the best actress in the Galveston-​Houston diocese through the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO). We are shown in the picture here with Bishop Morkovsky following the ceremony.

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    The Mendoza kids with mother outside of Zoe St. home.

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    Mary Ann and I with Bishop Morkovsky at diocesan award ceremony, circa 1973. Louis Mendoza personal collection.

While I was a devoted altar boy, I was not necessarily the most devout Catholic. I attended Resurrection Elementary School in Denver Harbor and received a strong educational foundation, but I was not always a fan of the nuns or the priests stationed at our church. The principal of the school was usually a nun, and teachers consisted of other nuns and some lay people. Discipline was strict and failure to abide by rules came at a price. Sister Dolores, my first-​grade teacher, would walk around the room and did not hesitate to conk you on the head with her wooden clicker if you spoke out of turn, chewed gum, or seemed otherwise distracted. Boys and girls received different consequences for misbehavior, but they all involved humiliation and/​or some form of corporal punishment. In addition to being conked on the head, boys might be paddled. Principal Sister Devota seemed particularly fond of having boys raise their pant legs so she could swat our calves multiple times with a wooden yardstick. Sister Jo Anne Bifano had boys kneel in front of class, place their arms in front of them, and hold ten encyclopedias for half an hour. Of course, they also practiced the age-​old punishment of having us repeatedly write a rule we had broken on the chalkboard or a sheet of paper. This was in addition to wearing a dunce hat or drawing a circle on the chalkboard and requiring the students being punished to stick their nose in it for 15 minutes.

I was a good student. By that I mean that I performed well and was often one of the best students in class when it came to learning even if, at the same time, I was not always well-​behaved. Excelling in academics gave me confidence that transferred to the playground, playing organized sports, and socializing. Although short in stature, in elementary school I walked and talked with an ease that demonstrated a comfort in my skin. There were times when being a middle child in a big family meant that one craved attention, but I also took advantage of that to explore my inner world, one enhanced by avid reading. I recall that I would get so absorbed in reading that my parents would yell at me to stop because I did not hear their calls for me. On hot summer days, I would find a place to hide, the shaded part of the top of the garage roof or my favorite spot, underneath our raised house. The sides of the house were covered, but there were vents and there was soft, cool sand. I would lay by a vent and while away the time lost in books. Sometime in middle school, when I was still an altar boy and I had not quite yet outgrown my comfort with the role, I started helping myself to small portions of money donated to the church via the poor box or the collection basket. I did not take large sums of money, but enough to supplement my weekly allowance and provide for some spending money to treat my friends to malts or the movies. I rationalized that it was money meant to help poor parishioners, and I was personally poor, although even then I knew our family was not one that needed a handout from the church.

To be fair, every one of my five siblings, excluding the eldest and the youngest, has often talked about growing up with a craving for more affection, attention, and intimacy. My parents were not physically affectionate, nor were they all that vocal about telling us that they loved us, though their every action seemed intent on keeping us safe and secure. Although we children could be loud if left to our own devices, there was an unwritten rule in our household that excesses of any sort would not be tolerated. We could not whine, speak too loudly, laugh too loudly, or even be too quiet without drawing negative attention from our parents. I look back now and it appears that there was an economy of emotion at play in our family in which keeping an even keel was the ideal, and emotional excess threw things off balance in our household.

My mother dealt with minor disciplinary transgressions, but it was my father who addressed those issues that deserved more sustained attention or discipline. The familiar adage of “wait until your father gets home!” was a common refrain in our house, and we often waited with dread for his arrival home from work. Depending on the infraction, we might face a stern lecture, a grounding, or corporal punishment, which was meted out swiftly and in a no-​nonsense manner. From my perspective, I recall that it was the boys who were more likely to receive a spanking with a belt, a board selected from wood kept in the garage, or a switch taken from a branch of a nearby tree. Though firm and delivered without hesitation, I never felt as if my father enjoyed doling out corporal punishment. Some time when I was around 13, he took me aside and told me I would no longer be spanked—​that we would talk, and I would receive denials of privileges befitting my behavior. This was a great relief to me. Unlike my brother, I never challenged my father directly. My brother was more overt in his defiance of household rules about staying out at night, being present for dinner meals, not speaking back to our parents, and yelling at our sisters. Consequently, he and my father developed a very tense relationship in his teen years, one that often seemed on the brink of erupting into physical confrontation and Bobby began threatening to run away. These very loud arguments frightened me. I saw little evidence of being able to win such a fight, so although I broke plenty of rules when I was a teen, I did not draw attention to my defiance in the way my brother did. I knew from listening to neighbors that some parents lost control when disciplining their children or when arguing with a spouse. I would occasionally hear yelling accompanied by the thud or thwack of skin-​to-​skin physical confrontation, and I was always thankful that those instances were rare in our house.

Our parents were not our friends. I did not confide in them, nor did I express my fears, desires, or feelings with them. Nevertheless, I grew up a reasonably happy and extrovert boy, and I had no problem asserting myself and getting my needs met in the world, despite the fact that my parents had lots to worry about and often too little energy, time, and emotional and material resources to share with us. We looked to our siblings or outside the home for connection, companionship, and affirmation. I recall playing games with my sisters, everything from jump rope, jacks, or Ring around the Rosie. My brother and cousins and I played army with the plastic soldier figures and the little statuettes of presidents given out at the grocery stores. Later, when our father put a basketball goal on the roof of the garage, our driveway was converted into a neighborhood basketball court where games were held sometimes for days and into the night.

As I noted before, my parents stressed the importance of education and they took the time to make sure we did our homework, discussed report cards with us, asked us to explain why we were not doing better if our grades were low, and rewarded us when we did well. To support their aspirations for us, my father regularly purchased books. He subscribed to Reader’s Digest condensed books, he purchased sets of encyclopedias every few years, and he bought an entire set (with bookshelf) of Great Books of the Western World. While most of us did not read these on a regular basis, I explored works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and a number of philosophers. Although these were well over my head, I plowed through them with a dictionary in hand. Even then, my comprehension as a middle schooler was wanting; I did read many of these later, but the fact that we owned them signaled that our parents aspired for us to lead literate lives that transcended our sense of place and time in the world.

My father also found secondary uses for the books on our family shelves as well. While my grades were consistently strong in academics, my conduct was sometimes wanting as was my penmanship. Both of my parents had beautiful handwriting. My mother’s penmanship was flowing and fancy. One could almost say it was very feminine. In contrast, my dad’s penmanship was also very beautiful but highly masculine. You could tell he pressed hard on the paper and used a combination of print and handwriting. It was firm, decisive, and legible. To this day, my handwriting and signature are barely legible, even to me. Several times a year when we received report cards in elementary school and I received a “U” for Unsatisfactory in penmanship, my father would require that I copy a full page out of an encyclopedia or great book for a week, handing them over to him for inspection. Following the principle that practice makes perfect, he thought that writing more often would improve it. It did not. But it did expose me to books and ideas that were heretofore unknown to me.

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    3rd Grade report card. Louis Mendoza personal collection

Despite wanting to expose us to the world through literature, my parents were not always good communicators about sensitive topics. There were certain subjects they actively avoided or only made huge proclamations about that sounded wise but were devoid of a deeper explanation. Sex was one such topic. If sex education remains a hot topic today, it was shrouded in secrecy in the late 1960s, despite the sexual revolution occurring at that time. In sixth grade, Sister Joanne Bifano delivered a unit on the birds and the bees to us. It was done without any direct reference to people or human anatomy, but like much sex education of the time it was a curriculum that focused on species reproduction in the natural world. To be honest, it was not clear at all what we were to take from the lesson about human reproduction, which included an animated film on bees pollinating flowers. In fact, as I recall, mostly what we learned was about plant reproduction with some parallels to animal reproduction with no discussion of human procreation or any anatomical lessons. We were led to believe that we should see parallels in human behavior, but most of us remained mystified and we were too ignorant or embarrassed to ask direct questions because no one seemed to really want to talk about it, especially not the teacher or our parents. One fellow student, Pilar Avalos, asked Sister Joanne how procreation occurred when a man and woman slept with one another since, of course, they were unconscious. Sister Joanne’s faced turned beet red, she closed her eyes, and after a few seconds whispered, “God makes it happen.” When Pilar asked “How?” Sister replied, “Discuss this with your parents.” The evening after our lesson my parents attended a meeting at the school to be informed about what we had been taught, and they were told to come home and ask us if we had any questions. I waited with anxiety thinking that they might come home and have “the” talk with me. When they arrived, they came straight to my room with their coats still on and asked: “do you have any questions about what you learned in school today?” I said, “Hmmm, no?” They both breathed a sigh of relief and said, “well, OK, don’t stay up too late,” and left the room quickly.

Years later, my oldest sister Rosemary would ask my dad about how he learned the facts of life and he said, “through observation.” Although I don’t think he meant that literally, I suppose my reality was not too much further from that. In the often overgrown alleyway behind our house, which we boys often took for a shortcut if we were headed to Lyons Street, one or more than one of the neighborhood boys kept stashes of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, which I often found and perused rather frantically. In the pages of these magazines, I learned more about the human body, male desire, and male heterosexuality than I ever did in a classroom. This is not to say that what I was exposed to wasn’t fraught with problems, revolving around the male gaze as it was, I just didn’t know any better or have any other options to discuss sex. One day, in the sixth grade, I took one of these magazines to school to share with my male classmates. I stashed it in my desk when we went out to recess and then returned it to its hiding place in the alley on the way home. Later that week, my girlfriend told me that Sister Joanne had pulled her aside and told her to stay away from me because I was a “bad, bad boy!” She did not say why, but I suspect she had found my contraband magazine and was too anxious to confront me or my parents about it.

Denver Harbor in the 1960s was a mixed-​race neighborhood, and a very young one. Our street was chock full of young kids our age. Between that and relatives that lived in the neighborhood, we all had plenty of connections outside of our immediate family. Denver Harbor Park and, later, Cliff Tuttle Park, were the focal points of recreation. I started playing baseball in the Pee Wee league of six and under and played Little League and later Pony League, thus baseball was my sport of choice from the age of five through 17. I was not as good as my brother but did well enough to regularly make the All-​Star team as a pitcher, catcher, or outfielder. I was inspired by the likes of Pete Rose, Roberto Clemente, and several players in the Houston Astros who I idolized, such as Joe Morgan, Doug Radar, Jimmy Wynn, Cesar Cedeno, and others. Bobby and I were in the first cadre of Astros Buddies when they started in the late 1960s and we would go to games religiously, sometime riding to and from the game on the bus. Sometimes we even walked the ten plus miles home with a group of friends. One time we wandered into the old Colt 45s stadium storage building near the Astrodome and rifled through tossed away memorabilia. We took a circular wooden sign with the Colts’ logo of crisscrossed six shooters on it as a souvenir.

Our love for baseball was intense and we developed strong arms and tanned bodies playing in leagues and in pickup games of football and baseball. On Good Friday in April of 1972, Bobby and I were playing armies with our cousin Jamie at our house. It was not unusual for the older guys to pick on me, but back then I was fearless and would take them on to “prove” myself. From across the yard they had me cornered against a chain-​link in the backyard and were throwing mud rocks at me. I was crouched down with a tin garbage can cover as my shield letting them bang away at it, happy that I was small enough to fully hide behind the top so my body was not being hit. During a lull in the barrage, I peeked over the top of the lid and was immediately hit in the left eye. I screamed and they came running over. My eye was numb and I was not yet hurting, but I could not see out of it and that scared me. We went into the car to look in the mirror; it was bruised and yellowing. Jamie said it was time to go home when Bobby determined that he needed to let my dad know. We knew we would be in trouble because, of course, we were repeatedly warned not to throw rocks at each other because we might knock an eye out! By this time, I had snuck up to our bedroom. Our dad took one look at it and said, “we need to go to the hospital.” He took me to St. Joseph’s. Bobby came along. We waited for what seemed like hours while they tried to locate a doctor. It turned out that they had to page an eye specialist, Dr Keats, who was attending an Astros baseball game. While we waited, a nun was going around the room offering comfort to patients who had yet to be seen. When she came to us and my father told her what had happened, she gave my brother a disapproving look, wagged a finger at him, and said, “God will punish you for that! You should pray for your brother!” While we would look back at this and laugh, at the time he was really worried about the certainty that punishment was forthcoming. When Dr Keats arrived, I was taken to be examined and by this time I was nauseous and dizzy. When he asked me to place my chin on the retinal camera I promptly projectile vomited all over him. Fortunately, he was good-​natured about it. My retina was detached and the next morning I had emergency surgery. I shared a room with a young African American about my age who had been shot in the leg. He had been in for several days and was in good spirits. After my surgery I was required to have both of my eyes bandaged for several days, so Bobby was assigned to spend most of those days with me. Although the retina was reattached, I had scar tissue directly across my cornea so since that time I’ve never been able to see clearly out of that eye and have had several surgeries since then to deal with long-​term complications. We never did get punished for disobeying dad’s warning about throwing rocks; I think he believed that the aftermath was punishment enough.

My father was wise in ways that I did not come to fully appreciate for years. For instance, when I was in high school my mother and I had a big argument when she thought I had arrived home very late from my after-​school job because I was at my girlfriend’s house. My mother, and she was not alone in this, had an extensive network of friends who would call her to report sightings of us all over the neighborhood. I am not exaggerating when I say that one afternoon I was just about to get into a fight with several boys who had been taunting me and we were sizing each other up when my mother pulls up and brakes the station wagon and tells me to get in the car! How she arrived that fast, I’ll never know, but it is clear that ethnic Mexican families in Denver Harbor functioned like a family, continuing the deep meaningful connections among actual relatives and new friends to support one another—​that Treviño noted in Segundo Barrio in the early part of the twentieth century (Treviño, 2006, p. 31). My after-​school job at Brookline Rental Company ended at 6:00 p.m. and then I had to run a mile to catch a bus at 6:12 or take another one into downtown and then to Denver Harbor, which took one and a half hours. My other option was to run the six miles home, which I preferred to the slow bus ride. It is true that I would often walk by Cindy’s house to see if she was outside so I could say hi. I did so that night but was only there a few minutes. My mother was upset that I was late and began yelling at me. I tried to explain to her that I had run home and she didn’t believe me. She was upset and slapped me. I put up my hand to defend myself. She then said I was trying to hit her. This accusation offended me very much. Feeling completely misunderstood, I decided to run away. Of course, I had no money and no real plans. I went to the park and stayed out until about 10:30 that night. I called home and my dad answered. Before I could go into great detail, he said, “tell me where you are and I’ll go pick you up. I really need your help; the car has broken down and I need you to help me go get it.” We retrieved the car and when we got home, he said, “grab something to eat and go to bed, it’s late.” Not a word was said about the altercation with my mother, though two weeks later when she and I continued to give each other the silent treatment, he told me to go into their bedroom where she was taking a nap and to not come out until we had spoken with each other. I did as I was told and after several long minutes we did speak to each other and I told her why I was so hurt and upset. She apologized and told me that she loved me. With my voice cracking and tears in my eyes, I did the same. In many respects, I believe that I am more emotionally similar to my mother and this meant that we suffered in silence until it erupted because although we were both highly sensitive, we were not good at expressing our emotions.

Urban renewal, neighborhood warfare, and developing resilience

In the 1960s and 1970s, neighborhood parks were focal points for recreation and urban renewal. Youth summer programs grew out of the Community Action Agencies (CAAs) created by President Johnson’s War on Poverty initiative. These programs were designed “to help and encourage children and youth.” With names like “Operation Glo” and “Operation PAL (Police Activity League),” the aim of these programs was to develop our minds and bodies through reading clubs and sports activities.^vi I recall that one summer a local television station did a report on these programs in our neighborhood, and they asked my brother to walk into a portable toilet. I didn’t quite understand the concept of him acting for the camera and I tried to follow him. He pushed me back, but they didn’t edit that out when it showed on the news and that night everyone got a laugh as they saw it as proof of how much I strived to emulate my older brother. Participation in these programs garnered us T-​shirts, free lunch, and a variety of activities and games. At the experiential level, we reveled in the opportunity. But the large-​scale urban renewal programs implemented during the 1960s and 1970s, after the departure of the rich and the middle class for America’s suburbs, left many inner city neighborhoods more blighted than before as they were part of a larger plan to refine housing segregation practices that supported the development of working-​class neighborhoods in proximity to industries that polluted neighborhoods and exposed residents to toxins that stimulated asthma and other respiratory problems.

I realize now that many of those urban renewal public programs I benefited from as a youth were part of the War on Poverty. That was a good war. That was a necessary war, one that still needs to be fought aggressively. As a second-​generation Mexican American whose grandparents migrated to avoid the ravages of war in Mexico, I am the product of an ongoing war. As peace activists tried to point out then, and need to point out now, the weapons of mass destruction we faced were to be found here at home in underdeveloped neighborhoods, underfunded schools, the lack of affordable health care for people of all ages, and the list goes on. Born in 1960, my entire life has been marked by conflict at home and abroad. In addition to domestic social movements and rebellions, there were US-​led wars and interventions from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Viet Nam Conflict, the US military interventions in Latin American, the war against Iraq, the war in Afghanistan—​the United States has been deploying troops all over the world from Latin America to Asia, to Africa, to south eastern Europe.

I can’t help but believe that in my pre-​school years I was at least partly bilingual. I don’t recall having any communication problems with my grandparents during our visits, even when I occasionally spent several consecutive days there. At home, we spoke English almost exclusively, though my parents spoke Spanish among themselves, particularly when they wanted to hold a private conversation. In our minds, Spanish was a secret language and I think we felt deprived, left out of an inner circle. Though our parents taught us phrases and occasional words here and there, they abided by their purposeful decision to neither teach nor encourage us to speak Spanish, especially once we started school. Many years later, some time in my mid-​twenties when I began taking Mexican American Studies courses at the university, I asked them about this rather indignantly. At the time, I was angry at having to, once again, take Spanish in school to recuperate something I felt I should have had as an inheritance if not a birthright. How could they do this to me, I wondered? Didn’t they have any idea how embarrassing it was to have to learn Spanish from a gringa, especially when I was surrounded by other Anglos who somehow seemed to have a better grasp of my “native” tongue than me? Though my siblings and I had raised the question before, it was only when we were adults that they gave us some insight into the painful experiences that had shaped their decision. Once we heard their stories, we understood and were able to accept their decision and direct our anger and frustration elsewhere.

I think my parents viewed English language facility, like formal education, as a vehicle of social and economic empowerment. They knew too well from first-​hand experience the difficulty and shame that came with trying to unlearn a language and could not see how to create or negotiate an alternative. But our immediate world, defined as it was by the residents of our barrio, was inundated with Spanish in a number of other ways. The little Spanish I knew as an adolescent was more appropriate for street talk, Tex-​Mex slang, cuss words, vernacular expressions that expressed our in-​group solidarity when needed and which we thought were cool. By and large my youthful world was defined by the boundaries of my neighborhood.

Denver Harbor had experienced an intense case of white flight, but still had many poor Anglo families and elders who were unable to take advantage of suburbanization programs. My brother and I cut the yards of many Anglo widows in our neighborhood, including Mrs. King who lived down the street and gave piano lessons to several of my sisters. I still recall a bully, an Anglo boy a few years older and much taller than me, pushing me around as I walked home from church one day when I was about nine. He knocked me down and kept kicking me, laughing, and taunting me, calling me “meskin” and asking for any money I had. I eventually got up, surrendered the few coins I had, and ran home, too afraid and ashamed to tell my parents what had happened. Despite experiences like this, by and large, this world was ours. Most of us had Anglo friends in the neighborhood with whom we were really close. Bordered by African American neighborhoods, our distinct worlds commingled in limited ways at the park and school.

I will never forget the day that a neighbor across the street David White, his real name, went ballistic for reasons unknown to us, and knocked out a front windowpane and began shooting his pellet gun at anyone in the street, cursing all of us meskins. David was the older brother of Rusty and Lucy, who were good friends with many of us on the block. Some of us lined up down the street from the house to warn others, but none of us thought of calling the police. Instead, someone went to get Joe Yzaguirre. Joe was older than most of us but still in his early 20s. His younger sister Vivian and his little brother Jason often came around to play with the other kids on the block. Joe had a quiet strength and calm about him that made him a natural leader to many of us. Earlier that summer, when Blackie, a neighborhood dog that no one owned but many of us fed scraps to, was hit by a police car speeding down the street that couldn’t be bothered to stop and was left fatally injured but still yelping in pain in the street, Joe was the one who came and with sadness but decisiveness finished Blackie off to put him out of his misery. There was no possibility of taking Blackie to a veterinarian. Who would pay? We were all thankful for his mercy and the strength it took to suffocate Blackie. A bunch of us dug a hole in the alleyway to bury our communal pet and Joe gently carried him over and placed him in it so he was not left in the street.

So, when Joe was called on to deal with David, we watched in giddy excitement as he tried speaking to him at a distance, then, when he was met with David’s pellet gun and a racist tirade, Joe charged the door at full speed, broke the door in with a kick, and took the gun away from David in a matter of seconds. He dragged him outside and called the police who took a report and arrested David. The Whites moved away soon after that incident and many of us were disappointed to lose Rusty and Lucy as friends.

Interpellation, internalization, and negotiation

In East Texas, perhaps in any part but South Texas where Mexicans have long been a majority and proximity to the border means that Anglos know it’s in their economic and political interests to let Spanish and English, Anglos and Mexicans, coexist, if not in harmony, at least in an uneasy truce, whites turned the word Mexican into a dirty word. The purposeful and snide distortion of Mexican into “meskin” was ubiquitous, circulated as it was in movies like John Wayne’s Alamo. We were the enemy, the inferior, the inarticulate or mute and insignificant others. Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I think back now of the creative ways in which this linguistic distortion of our identity was deflected. Foremost in my mind is Larry Juarez’s reappropriation of this word in public places outside of Denver Harbor where we were a visible minority. Be it in a store, at the Astrodome, or in school, or elsewhere, Larry had a way, embarrassing as it was, of anticipating and taking away the force of this perversion of our identity. In these situations, he would talk loudly and use more Spanish than normal, which always made Anglos nervous, as if we were plotting against them. Most of all he used to like to call out to us, his friends, in an extraordinarily loud voice, “Hey meskin, what you want to do now?” or “Hey meskin, what you want to eat?” It was his way of preempting the sting when it came from them and proclaiming, “yeah we’re here” on our own terms. But those terms weren’t always under our control.

One Sunday, walking my girlfriend home along the sidewalk after church, an elderly woman began spraying me with her water hose saying, “Get away, get away from my sidewalk, boy.” Shocked, I just stayed there, staring at her as Cindy ran out of the way. When I got home, I was soaking wet, and I could not hide my indignity from my parents. I was forced to tell them what had happened. My very angry father drove me back to this house where he threatened to call the police if they dared to do it again. Though they threatened to spray him too, his refusal to tolerate this was an important lesson in self-​defense and righteous indignation.

After attending public middle school, I went to a fairly exclusive all-​boys Catholic college preparatory school, St Thomas, which was on the other side of town, far from our barrio and bordering River Oaks, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Houston. Life got more complicated there. Operated by the Basilian fathers, St Thomas’s motto was: “Teach me goodness, discipline, and knowledge.” I learned, or should I say earned, a lot of discipline and knowledge, but not a lot of goodness. A school comprised of what seemed to be more mostly wealthy Anglos at the time, I and the few other boys of color, experienced a lot of hostility and were subjected to lots of humiliation due to racism. Most of the time we suffered in silence. Every once in a while, the violence erupted into a physical confrontation, but most of the time we faced psychological, emotional, and spiritual warfare. And most often we faced it alone as we had little recourse but to internalize it. To be sure, there were times when we projected it onto each other rather than face the force of the majority group’s wrath and power.

I’ll never forget the first day of high school, my freshman year, when Román Pérez and I were standing next to one another in gym and two guys on each side of us kept pushing us into one another. Scared, not knowing how to speak out or disrupt what was happening, we turned to what was familiar, each other, and started fighting. It was just what these guys wanted—​for the two “meskins” to make a spectacle of one another. We had no language to express what was happening to us. We had no social power to leverage our place in this exclusive school; most of us were there on some form of scholarship. So, we internalized this and many other indignities. High school turned me into an introvert. I experienced a profound sense of loss of identity and alienation because I came to despise myself. I became ashamed of my parents, my community, my heritage. I lost my voice.

One day in sophomore year of high school, as we were returning from an off-​campus excursion, one of my classmates, a would-​be bully by the name of Rocky Mountain, kept pushing me from behind and hurling the word “meskin” over and over, intended as an insult. Afraid of standing up to him because of the school’s zero tolerance policy for fights, and cognizant of how angry and humiliated my parents would be if I was expelled, I took his taunts all the way back to the classroom where we received instructions for the next class and were dismissed. As we left the classroom, he did it again, and without thinking, I turned around and, to everyone’s shock, including my own, I punched him in the mouth. He immediately started to bleed and looked to the teacher for help. Mr Z, our teacher, who I suspect had seen and heard his taunting, just nodded at us as if to say, go on. Needless to say, we did. But this incident of self-​defense did little to alleviate the day-​to-​day internalization of cultural self-​hate.

Being at an all-​boys school increased rather than decreased displays of toxic masculinity be this in sports or in the ways discipline was meted out by teachers and coaches. Although it stopped during my time as a student, up until about 1976 school culture allowed one to challenge someone to a fistfight in the gym after school, one that was sanctioned by school officials and often refereed by sports coaches. Those in a duel were required to wear 16-​ounce boxing gloves and the rule was that the fight continued until someone gave up. Bloody noses and lips were not uncommon and were accompanied by lots of cheering and jeering from dozens of spectators to this gladiator-​like spectacle. Not all fights were official. Some of the more serious fights took place after school off campus without gloves and were equally, if not more, bloody. Somehow, I’m not sure I understand how, this policy of sanctioned fights was permitted to stand alongside a no-​fighting rule in which students could be suspended or kicked out of school for fighting others in the hallways or classrooms. It was complemented by intense corporal punishment for infractions perceived by a teacher or coach. These were delivered either on the spot or at a “line-​up” after school in which coaches delivered pops to offenders one after the other in a line. Often there was more than one line, and coaches liked to joke about who could make the recipient yelp the loudest when hit. It was, of course, a test of one’s manhood to “take it like a man” and not yell when hit. One retired priest, Father Reilly, often served as a substitute teacher. Barrel-​chested with a stare that was foreboding and a man of few words, he was known for beginning each class by writing on the board “Time or Meat.” In this way, he was democratic and gave you a choice if you misbehaved, either receive pops right then and there or spend time after school in detention. He was legendary for how hard he hit and the small smile this would produce on his face when he did so.

Despite many incidents of racial hostility, I also had several very good Anglo friends. High school was a weird and wonderful time as my world expanded in unforeseen ways. Two of my best friends in high school, Anthony Reilly and Ken Schuler, were steadfast and loyal, often inviting me to their homes. I suppose in some ways we all felt we didn’t really fit the mold of the typical St Thomas student. Ken was an athlete, tall and with model looks, and his dad was an agent with A&M records. His parents were divorced, and he could have easily fit in with the obnoxious and elite students at the school, but he was sensitive, open-​minded, and curious in ways that they were not. His dad provided a limousine for us to dinner and the prom our senior year. Anthony lived with his oldest sister Liz, who had adopted Anthony as a young teenager when he ran away from home after his mother died. He had come from a large family of 14 and he was also open-​minded, and a great storyteller with the most outrageous sense of humor of anyone I had ever known. Anthony and I were roommates for several years after high school, and we shared the experience of putting ourselves through college part-​time. He was an actor and through him I got involved in stage productions a few times whenever an extra hand was needed.

High school was also complicated by the typical adolescent growing pains of emotional and sexual maturation. To say these were typical is not meant to undermine mine or anyone else’s experiences. Perhaps from reading so much and so widely, or perhaps from my perspective and experiences as a child of a large family, I often embraced a naively idealistic notion of romantic love. From 6th grade until my junior year of high school I had the same “girlfriend.” This meant a lot to me, and it filled a need in me to be cared for and be noticed—​to matter. Cindy had arrived at Resurrection as a 5th grader, and I immediately found her attractive. I cannot recall how we came to “go together,” but I do know that even when I moved on to McReynolds Junior High, I would run the few blocks from there to Resurrection several times a week to carry her books and walk her home one block. We spoke on the phone a lot though in my house a single wall phone made private conversations very difficult, and we would hang out at the park where I played baseball, and she played softball. I tried to be a good, doting, and devoted boyfriend and took her out and gave her gifts when I could, but as we progressed through high school, she began receiving advice from an older cousin of hers that she should date other boys. Despite our adolescent fantasies of a future together, it was not a relationship meant to last. She took her cousin’s advice seriously and did end our relationship so she could date other boys. This made me very sad, and in true hopelessly romantic and naive fashion, I wore that sadness as testimony to my depth of feeling for her. In my eyes, love was supposed to last forever, even if it was unrequited and, to my detriment, I tried to prove that I could still remain devoted to her even if she was dating others. Although there were times when we reunited over the next few years, she accepted a marriage proposal when she returned to Houston after graduating from college in San Antonio. Although I wanted us to remain friends, her future husband was jealous and possessive, so we parted ways. Years later when she divorced him, we did reconnect as friends and remain so to this day. While I had convinced myself that genuine love for someone else required self-​sacrifice and even sadness, this idealized romantic notion of love was not healthy for me and it was only much later in life that I realized that one must first love oneself in order to receive and reciprocate a healthy love. I would inadvertently undermine a number of relationships in my life because I expected them to leave me, and I accepted and expected relationships to involve heartbreak.

Work and flying the nest

Following my freshmen year of high school in the summer of 1975, I got my first job at the age of 14. Being at St Thomas’s made me self-​conscious of how little money I had, so a job seemed like a practical solution. One of my classmates, David Rodriguez, learned that I wanted to work and told me that I might be able to get work at Brookline Rental Company, near his house in South Houston off I-​45 and Griggs Road. Brookline rented homeowner and contractor equipment, including everything from lawnmowers, floors sanders, sewer cleaning equipment to tractors. I was interviewed very briefly by Pete Hullum, the owner, and given the job on the spot starting at $2.10 an hour. I started there loading equipment and doing basic service and maintenance that involved cleaning and preparing equipment upon return to ready it for the next customer. Pete was only about 30 when I went to work with him, and we got along very well despite the fact that he was something of a country boy having grown up in the small north Texas town of Teague. He liked skimming money off the books, and he would let us work as many hours as we wanted so long as he didn’t have to pay us overtime. We would tease each other about race, and I constantly reminded him that he was only successful because most of his customers were non-​white and it was they who filled his bank account and lined his pockets with money. In the end, he was good humored and was willing to have his ideas challenged. I worked at Brookline for the next 14 years, initially only on weekends, often in the summer sometimes as much as 66 hours per week, and when I decided not to go to college, a year later at the age of 19, I was made manager of a new store he bought just three miles away from Brookline, Action Rentals, at the intersection of Old Spanish Trail and Griggs Road. Work at either location was hot and dirty, as the buildings were made of sheet metal and only had fans to blow hot air in the shop area. I eventually acquired mechanic skills and drove large gooseneck trailers on tandem trucks as well as a lift bed to deliver backhoes, front end loaders, ditch diggers, and graders.

Having a job that occupied my weekends, including Sundays, meant that I could no longer serve as an altar boy. Having money in my pocket gave me a newfound sense of power. With it, I treated my friends to local restaurants, bought new clothes so I wouldn’t have to wear my brother’s second-​hand clothes, which had been really hard when I was a freshman and he was a senior. A great many of St Thomas’s students were very well-​off and drove their own cars to school, or were dropped off in BMWs, Mercedes Benzs, Cadillacs, and the like. I was very self-​conscious of my dad’s mid-​70s Pontiac Ventura and often offered to get off the car a block or two away from school, ostensibly so he could save time by avoiding the drop-​off line, but really to minimize the embarrassment associated with being in this small economy car. Despite the fact that Denver Harbor was “mixed” with ethnic Mexicans, Anglos, and a few African Americans, I had never felt so self-​conscious of my class and race until I went to high school. It was an excellent school for college academic preparation, and I excelled, graduating in the top ten of my class. But in many respects, it was a brutal time for me as I had to deal with overt and covert racial hostility from peers, teachers, and coaches. For instance, I was not allowed to participate in an Advanced Masterworks of Literature class in the eleventh grade despite having better grades than many other students in the class. When I inquired about this, I was told I didn’t need it. My parents tried to inquire and were not given a response that made any sense. Coaches would often direct anti-​Mexican jokes at students, making us the laughingstock of the class. Despite being an All-​Star baseball player and having succeeded so well in the first few weeks of a baseball season in my freshman year that the interim coach kept me on the varsity team, when the regular coach assumed control after basketball season, he eliminated me from not only the varsity team but the junior varsity team too. He told me to not bother trying out the following year. This followed my attempt to play football. To be sure, I was small-​framed, but I was fast and a good kicker. Despite this, the coaches assigned me to a guard position, one that required size and strength that was beyond me and predetermined that I would fail. I played the bench the entire year. The football coach was so harsh, racially demeaning, and physically abusive to one of my classmates, David Cavazos, a tall, muscular guy from the Northside who played defensive end, that he hit the coach back one day and a fistfight ensued in which he held his own. He was never seen on campus again. My cousin Paul Hernandez was a student there and excelled in basketball. He was benched and rarely played so he transferred to a public school where he became a starting guard.

While Ken, Anthony, and a few others, like Mr Z (Zarantanello) my cool tenth grade hippie English teacher, did make life at school bearable, I internalized much of what I experienced, and I went from being a confident extrovert to someone who was shy and tried to avoid attention. This inward turn thwarted my dreams and I struggled to imagine a successful career for myself. I did okay at school and graduated well enough to receive scholarships, but in an unexpressed protest against my family, against the educational system, against myself, I refused to go to college. My antagonistic relationship with many peers in high school is substantiated by the Aquinas, the yearbook. Editors of the yearbook decided to insert nicknames for each student, and if a nickname didn’t exist, they made one up—​often one that was degrading. All of the Latino kids who lived in Houston barrios in the north and east end of the city (there were 19 Latino-​surnamed boys in all, but about half of those had come from the wealthier Catholic middle schools that served as feeders into St Thomas’s) were assigned ridiculous names that mocked their ethnicity like, Amigo, Jack Burrito, El Patio, Viva el Taco, Monteray House (sic), San Antonio, and Padre. Me? I was assigned the name of Slob. To be sure, I was not the best-​dressed kid, but I don’t believe this assigned slur was about my sense of fashion or comportment. I don’t know if the school had faculty or administrator oversight of the student editors, but why they would not or why they chose to allow this, is beyond comprehension. In addition to this slight, in the “official” class group photo my image was blurred. This only exemplified for me how I felt erased and undervalued at St Thomas’s. So, at the end of my experience at this elite college preparatory school, all I could ask was, “If this was supposed to be preparing me for college, why would I want to go?” When I received my yearbook post-​graduation, I threw it away because it was a stinging reminder of all that I wanted to leave behind.

Image 29

    Senior yearbook photo. 1978 Aquinas Yearbook.

Image 30

    Graduating class of 1978, St. Thomas High School. I am sitting on bottom row fifth from right. Author’s personal collection.

When I graduated from high school, a small group of us, including Anthony, decided to move into a fabulous, constructed house in the Fourth Ward. This was a three-​story brick house that had 11 fireplaces, 22 rooms, and a front room so large one could play handball at either end. It had tennis and basketball courts. Rumors had it that it was Frank Lloyd Wright inspired, but its location in what at the time was an underdeveloped and neglected African American neighborhood meant that few people wanted to live there. We imagined that anywhere from 10 to 15 of us could live there comfortably. I asked my parents if I could move out of our house and this idea was rejected outright. I was told I needed to remain living at home until I was at least 21. I was dismayed with their response. I had finished high school. I had a full-​time job. And I wanted nothing more than to be independent. A month later, when my parents and two younger sisters were away from the house on a Sunday, I gathered my clothes and moved out. I was still 17. My parents were upset, especially my father. He spoke with a number of friends and family to try to convince me to go back home. Most of them told him to let me go because I was sensible and mature enough. He went to where I worked and confronted me. He eventually found out where I was living and showed up there. I could not explain it clearly, but I simply no longer wanted to live at home. I was full of rage, sadness, and frustration, and simply wanted to be unfettered. My father did eventually accept my decision and a few months later I received an invitation to lunch at their house. I went and we slowly repaired our relationship.

They may not have expected me to leave the house without going to college or getting married; after all, my dad’s brothers were in their 40s and still living with their parents! But they did respect my decision eventually. A few years later when I tried to go to the University of Houston–​Downtown for night school, I became very frustrated when my work obligations caused me to miss two midterms in one evening. I stopped going to school and received an “F” in each of those classes because I didn’t know about drop/​withdrawal policies, and I did not think the teachers would understand. By then, I wanted to get a degree and I was looking for alternatives that would help me achieve this. I explored joining the military and took a test and a physical exam to enlist in the Marines. Two complications arose in that process—​one of which saved me from joining. One was that when I received a chest X-​ray I was asked if I had ever been shot in the chest. I had to think and finally I remembered being shot in the chest with a pellet gun by Bobby one Saturday afternoon. It had hurt and I had bled a little, but until then I had no idea that the pellet remained within me. Second, I could not successfully pass a vision test because of my earlier eye injury. My inability to do this meant that they could not give me my chosen assignment to work in avionics. When they promised that they would try to accommodate me in something similar after I joined, I declined. Before I learned that I would not join, I went to my parents and told them about my interest in enlisting. They listened and told me that they would support me in whatever I chose to do—​that I was my own man. It wasn’t until this moment that I truly felt independent. Although I went looking for permission from them, their response made me realize that my life was truly mine. I respected their ability to let me go; they had done their job in giving me as much guidance as possible, and letting me go was a sign of respect and love.

As the manager of Action Rentals, I was responsible for hiring, bank deposits, scheduling workers, and running the front desk. I was also responsible for security after hours. We were located in a higher-​than-​average crime region of the city and we had an electronic alarm on the building that called the security firm and the police. The security firm would then call me. Pete had armed me with a gun, a .44 Magnum to be exact, so I would be ready to protect his property. Initially, I accepted this charge without hesitation. However, after a number of middle-​of-​the-​night trips to the store where I patrolled the grounds with a gun in my hand knowing that the police might show up any moment and mistake me for a thief with a gun, I told Pete that risking my life was not worth whatever equipment might be stolen. Nor did I think that confronting someone with a gun was the best idea. What was I supposed to do? Shoot someone or hold them captive until the police arrived? We agreed that from that point on I would park nearby and wait for the police to arrive.

I have never been an admirer of guns. I felt that too often the easy access of guns led to shootings and killings that would not have happened otherwise. One incident drives this home for me. Sometime in the early 1980s when I was taking a day off from work and Cindy was home from college, she asked me if I would drive her old Pontiac Sunbird to the dealership so she could trade it in. It was a small sedan, and the dealership was near the Astrodome so I went down Old Spanish Trail to get there. At an intersection near the upper end of downtown, I came to a traffic light stop behind a late model Corvette Stingray that was jacked up in the back. Perhaps the driver thought I almost hit him because with his rear raised I appeared closer than I was, but he shot out of his car yelling at me for being too close to his rear end. I protested and he and his passenger, another big Anglo, came to the side of my car. He quickly punched me in the face several times and began yelling racist epithets at me as his friend tried to open my door, which was locked. I screamed at him that I was going to ram his car, and he ran back to his car and took off. I was so mad, I chased him and gave him the finger. He then let me go around him and began following me. I took off to my place of work and he followed. We pulled into the large driveway, and I ran in and got the .44 Magnum out of the office and ran outside. When he saw me coming out the door with a gun, he sped off. If he hadn’t left, I think I would have shot him so full of anger and rage was I at the unjustifiable beating they had given me. I put the gun back up, wrote his license plate number down, and cleaned up my bloody face so I could finish what I had started to do and deliver the car to the dealership. We had a system for obtaining license plate information at work. I located his address and later that night found his car parked outside his apartment. I tossed a bag of sulfuric acid we sold to clean out pipes on his pristine car and left. I am not proud of doing that, but it felt good at the time, and I didn’t go to prison for shooting him!

To be sure, as a young man, I did not always know how to channel my frustration and rage with racial aggression and social inequity. My friends and I, like lots of young people of the era, looked for means of escape. Sometimes it was a camping trip where we could let nature decompress us from the stresses of the city life, which often included everyday harassment by police and teachers. Other times, we escaped by simply driving around Loop 610, the highway encircling the inner city, which we called a 610 party. It was not uncommon to drink contraband beer and smoke a few joints. Sometimes our excursions involved driving through River Oaks or Bellaire to see how the wealthy people lived. I recall two specific incidents of class rebellion on our part directed toward those who were better off than us. One time in high school on a Friday night during the Christmas season, Larry, Doug, and I were spontaneously looking at Christmas lights in a well-​to-​do neighborhood and someone came up with the idea of tying a rope to the outdoor lights decorating the yard to our bumper and taking off. We did it. Another time, we went by a bowling alley in a well-​to-​do neighborhood and everyone except the driver ran across the tops of an entire row of cars, denting hoods along the way. I don’t look back on these incidents with pride; rather it makes me sad that we all had a shared need to act out.

We acted out in other ways as well. This included rolling tires down a tire heap into the path of oncoming cars on Lyons Street then running. When we were younger, my brother and our cousin Jesse used to forage around the neighborhood for aluminum cans or soda bottles to recycle. Soda bottles were like gold because we could get five cents per bottle at the local grocery store. We would work extra hard on Thursday because the local hamburger joint, Dixie Maid, had a two-​for-​one hamburger and malt special that only required about 50 cents to buy. Movie matinees at the neighborhood theaters, The Venus or The Globe, cost only 50 cents. We often worked very hard to scrape up enough coins to treat ourselves, but we hit on a scheme that took a shortcut. One of the local grocery stores, Trahan’s, stored recycled bottles in a narrowly fenced area behind the store. If we were feeling brave, one of us would be the lookout while one or two of us climbed over the fence and took a case of 24 bottles. Just like that we would have $1.20! We pulled the same move at a Shamrock gas station down the street one afternoon, but we got greedy and were taking turns grabbing cases from behind the station and stashing them in a car wash stall next door when Bobby and Jesse got caught by the owner. I waited for a long time and when they did not come out, I took one case for redemption and went home. It turns out the owner was a retired policeman. He lectured Bobby and Jesse for quite a while and learned why we were stealing empty bottles. He told them that he would give them a dollar whenever they needed it but that if he ever caught them again, he would call the police to have them arrested. Our clever scheme ended that day.

As teens in the 1970s, experimenting with recreational drugs like marijuana, quaaludes, or even LSD was not that unusual. Of course, such behavior was neither condoned nor tolerated by our parents, so we did our best to hide it from them. One Saturday when I was in high school, I came home from work and my father called me into the dining room where he had a joint neatly sliced open on a plate. He asked me if I knew what it was, and I said, “I think it’s a marijuana cigarette, dad.” To which he replied, “how do you know that?” I said, “well, I’ve seen it in the movies, and I have seen people smoking in the park.” He then proceeded to accuse me of having lost this particular joint. The truth was that there was no way I could have lost it because I didn’t have any, and when I did, I rarely took any home. If I did have some, I would often stash it in the garage so as not to take it into the house. He kept insisting that it must be mine, and I protested. He said, “Well, if it’s not yours, whose could it be?” I remember rolling my eyes and saying, “How am I supposed to know that? Where exactly did you find it anyway?” “On the sidewalk,” was his reply. Well, I said, it could be anyone’s! Maybe it was the mailman, or someone just walking down the street.” He scoffed in disbelief, and I said, “Look, I know you don’t believe me, but that cigarette is not mine. If you were asking me if I have ever smoked marijuana I would have to say yes, but you want me to admit to something that is simply not true, and that’s not fair or right, is it?” He raised his eyebrows, gave a smirk, and said, “Ok, I’ll let this go but let’s be clear that there should be no drugs in this house under any circumstances!” I said, “Ok, I understand.” While it was not unfair of him to assume that it might be mine, it was unfair to insist that it was, so I felt like I won the argument that day based on what was and was not fair. Years later when I was a student in a Chicano Drama class taught by Denise Chavez at the University of Houston, I dramatized this incident in a skit for the class.

My relationship with the church did not end when I stopped being an altar boy. Most of the kids in my family were very active in the CYO (Catholic Youth Organization)—​be it playing sports, participating in the choir, talent shows, or recreation camps, the activities and fellowship offered were enthusiastically embraced by all of us. Our parents were more likely to allow us to go to events sponsored by the CYO because of the church affiliation. This, of course, provided us adolescents with good cover to sow our oats in plain sight as there were many co-​ed activities. The priests at Resurrection did pay special attention to youth, especially boys, in an effort to keep us out of trouble. We appreciated this but the results were mixed. Father Jack McGinnis was a young priest who hosted a group for boys in which he would sponsor camping trips that often included a broad range of ages, including a number of boys who had already been in trouble with the law. I remember one camping trip to the woods north of Houston where the older guys not only smoked and drank but a few of them went to a nearby house and stole a pig to eat! By the time Father McGinnis found out, the pig was already dead. He reluctantly allowed them to string it up, get it, and cook portions of it, and take the rest home. I don’t think these older guys were the role models for us younger ones that he planned on. Another priest, Father Patrick McDonald, left the priesthood to marry one of the teachers at the school. All of the young people liked going to masses held by Father Pat because not only were the songs accompanied by a guitar and tambourines, he would say the mass so fast the service would be over in half the time it usually took. His brother, George, was very influential to a number of family members because of his intense involvement in youth activities and as a music teacher, church pianist, and choir leader. He became my choice as sponsor for my confirmation in sixth grade. Another priest, Father Jim, held sessions with young men in the church rectory. After a while, he would send us to get bottles of wine which he openly shared with us. He taught me how to drive in his light blue VW beetle, and eventually it was he who first introduced me, and a number of others, to marijuana, which he thought got a bad rap from society. He often took us to see midnight movies at the River Oaks Theatre. This was the latest we were ever allowed to stay out since we didn’t get home until after 2:00 a.m. or later. I remember one time when I was driving, and we were all partying with beer and weed when a cop pulled me over for a wrong turn. Father Jim immediately put on his priest collar and said we should let him do the talking. I didn’t have a license yet, but he managed to talk us out of trouble by explaining that he was spending time with these poor inner-​city youth who needed guidance and structure to their lives. They let us go and we left with him at the driver’s wheel. Later that summer, he left the church when he was suspended for including a diatribe during a church service in opposition to legal restrictions against marijuana when it did no real harm. I never heard from him again. I am fortunate that despite these hippie priests and others like Fr Wendland who were stern and severe (grumpy), I was not aware of ever interacting with a priest who sexually abused children in our parish. I do know that Houston-​Galveston diocese was not immune from these incidents but neither I nor anyone I know, as far as I am aware, ever encountered this.

When we were young, my siblings and I listened to the Top 40 hit parade together on Saturday mornings. Mary Ann, Bobby, and Beabee used to practice dance steps together while Margie and I pranced around. I remember us teaching each other dances like “The Hitch Hike,” “The Swim,” The Locomotion,” and “The Hustle.” In high school in the late 1970s, I often felt you had to choose your social circle by the music you liked. For us, it was a hard and fast choice between disco music or rock and roll. I was rock and roll all the way! We also learned to dance Tejano to cumbia, polkas, and ranchera music. My mother loved listening to rancheras and boleros but mostly on her own. We danced to Tejano music at quinceñeras, weddings, and anniversary celebrations where we learned by trial and error and watching others.

We were not afraid to work. Bobby had a job as a dishwasher, a newspaper route, and he excelled at selling garden seeds. In high school he worked as a delivery boy at a posh high-​rise off San Felipe Drive. It was a job I inherited from him when he graduated from high school. In addition to working at Brookline, I also worked at Weiner’s Department Stores as a stocker. One summer in high school I was working three jobs at a time. My parents required that we give them some money that went toward paying tuition at St. Thomas’s. If we did not do this, we would have been obliged to answer phones at the priest rectory after school to pay for a portion of our tuition. I also worked as a grocery bagger and loader at Jamail’s luxury supermarket off Kirby Drive. It was owned by the uncle of one of my classmates. I was fired one day for supposedly talking too much to him while we waited for customers to come through the line. My friend protested but was promptly told to go take a break while they made sure I left the store immediately.

Police confrontations: compliance and resistance

In May 1977, near the end of my junior year in high school, Houston was riven by news of the death of José Campos Torres, a Viet Nam veteran, at the hands of Houston police. His body was found floating in Buffalo Bayou on 8th May where he was thrown after a severe beating on 5th May by police, following an arrest at a local bar on drunk and disorderly conduct. He was so severely beaten that the jail intake sergeant refused to admit him. Officers were told to take him to a hospital for medical care but that was the last time he was seen. As Veronica Guzmán Hays and other scholars have shown, violence at the hands of law enforcement is part of a pattern that goes back to the beginnings of the Texas Republic (1995).^vii Growing up non-​white in Texas one learned, especially men of color, that every interaction with a police officer was potentially dangerous, so while I, like many, was appalled to hear of the brutality of Campos’s killing, I was not surprised. What was most surprising was to think that the police might actually be held accountable for their egregious violation of Campos’s rights.

Being stopped, frisked, and verbally harassed by police was routine. This was true not only in Houston but anywhere in Texas, and it was probably true throughout the South. I recall drives to West Texas in the ’60s where we stopped at restaurants where we could only buy food to go. We were stopped by police on the highway for no reason other than a state trooper wanting to check my father’s driver’s license. My father was always highly deferential to police, saying “Yes, officer” and never questioning why he was stopped. Within Houston the stops were intense everywhere throughout the city. If you dared asked what was wrong, the typical answer was, “There has been a report of a stolen car just like this one in the area.” I once expressed my experiences through a poem.

Between two worlds: searching for a meaningful life

Our parents wanted us to be safe, self-​sufficient, and protected from racial hostility. Despite this, they could not protect us from the animus we experienced based on the color of our skin and our last name. These made us visible targets for unwanted attention and gave rise to a whole host of conflicted feelings about ourselves, our culture, and our place in the world. Don’t get me wrong here. Our parents were not ashamed of being mexicano, nor did they teach us to be. Their social, political, and cultural outlooks were formulated in a period now characterized as the Mexican American generation.^viii They believed in self-​advocacy and self-​reliance. They believed they could simultaneously be proud of their Mexican heritage and be good US citizens. In this way they negotiated the terms of their daily existence as they sought to improve the quality of their lives and create opportunities for their children that they never had. Our culture, as everyone’s, was integrated into our daily lives in our religion, music, food, extended familial relations, the way we were taught to honor the living and the dead, and many other customs we practiced. And this culture was integrated within, not apart from, baseball, hotdogs, rock ‘n’ roll, the fascination with the exploration of space, in a time when the world around us was changing rapidly in the context of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the assassination of brave leaders of change. During these years of transition following high school, I embraced short-​term fulfillment and sought escape even though I felt a need to find a larger purpose for my life.

Following high school, my late teens and early 20s were all about working hard and partying harder. In my initial effort to discover myself, drinking and drugs were an everyday occurrence. No doubt there was pleasure, but it also became routine and unfulfilling as I realized I was biding time in the hope that life would somehow take a turn for the better. My life was divided by the work and recreation with my friends from Denver Harbor, and my small circle of Anglo friends from St. Thomas’s. It was often disorienting to attend theater performances or concerts in the early part of the evening and then go and party hard with my friends in Denver Harbor. I loved both sets of friends, but they were like oil and water and I could not envision a future in which they would intermingle. In a two-​year period between the ages of 19 and 21, I was arrested twice for public intoxication, one time while driving home from my cousin Jesse’s wedding and once on 4th July 1980 when a group of us were fishing overnight on a drawbridge between the mainland and Galveston, Texas when the police suspected one of us of obstructing train traffic but without knowing who, arrested all six of us. It was then that I began to think seriously about what options getting a degree might provide.

I recall explicitly one weekend night, after I had been hanging out with Anthony and Ken and other friends, going to catch up with a group of my other friends and, as I was late to the party, I realized that they were all high on acid and they were having a bad trip. There was ugly sniping at each other and the threat of violence lingered. I left because there was no joy in being there. I also told myself that I needed to find a way to give my life more meaning and coherence. It wasn’t until several years later when I began taking a small engine mechanics class at a local community college that I remembered how much I liked to read and learn. It took me almost seven years going to school part-​time and working 50 plus hours a week to get my BA, perhaps because I was a part-​time student, but also because I couldn’t decide on a major. Finally, when I was 25, my life was profoundly impacted by the first Chicano literature class I ever took. Here, for the first time in 1985, did I realize “we” had a literature and began to contextualize and connect our struggle for survival and cultural preservation.

Although I started and stopped taking college courses several times at Houston Community College, UH-​Downtown, and San Jacinto College, it wasn’t until my rejection from the Marines that I decided I needed to change my life—​and that meant prioritizing school over work. In 1985 I resigned my position as manager of Action Rentals and agreed to work only part-​time, 36 hours a week. I had been attending school without focus and kept exploring different majors—​I initially tried courses in Computer Science, Accounting, Business, because I thought I should pursue courses that would lead to a lucrative career, but I found the subject matter boring. I finally allowed myself to prioritize what gave me pleasure and fulfillment, which was reading and writing, so I decided to major in English. One semester I signed up for a Mexican American literature class with Tomás Vallejo and I was hooked. I could not believe how easily I related to the stories, novels, and poems of Evangelina Vigil Pinon, Raúl Salinas, Tomás Rivera, Rodolpho Anaya, and others. Writing about them was an opportunity to discover who I really was and where I came from. It validated my life experience.

My ultimate decision to study English and Mexican American Studies was guided by imagination and passion. Reading literature had always offered me a way to broaden my basis of experience, to free myself from constraints and limitations of the real world, and to understand that the world was much bigger than my family, and neighborhood. In short, it both broadened my horizons and served as a form of escapism. But in Chicano literature I saw ways to understand the grandeur and the human struggle for existence that made my life, our lives, equally important, equally provocative, and rich with philosophy, metaphysical quests for meaning, as well as love, pain, and desire.

I transferred from UH-​Downtown to UH-​Central because after this Chicano literature class I was hungry for similar courses. I found them in the Mexican American Studies program at the Central campus. In my first class with Lorenzo Cano called “The Barrio” I found a framework to understand where Denver Harbor fitted in with Houston’s political economy. In Mexican American sociology and history classes, taught by Tatcho Mindiola and Emilio Zamora, I read scholarship by Mexican Americans that reordered my worldview and began to give me the tools and knowledge to regain my voice so I could speak back. Faculty in those classes showed me that education could be personally and socially empowering. They helped me develop as a human being who felt he had something to say and something meaningful to offer others. My Chicana/​o professors treated me like I was important, like my life story and my dreams and ideas were worth listening to. I began to feel less insignificant and more responsible for making a difference. Critical thinking, literature, and writing gave shape to my emerging cultural, social, and political awareness. An early credo I learned was the idea that “the more you know, the more you owe.” This emerging sense of social obligation that goes hand in hand with knowledge made me even more thirsty to find a way to make a difference.

I met a number of peers who became lifelong friends and who would eventually also become powerful scholars and teachers. Among these are Sandy Soto (from South Houston), Ben Olguin (from Magnolia Park), Freddy Porras (North Houston), Tom Carrizal (East End), and Hector Gonzalez, to name but a few. While there was one student organization at the time, MASO (Mexican American Student organization), which was mostly a support and social group. When I started going to school full-​time, I loved the interaction with peers outside of class, but I wanted more, so I started a Chicano student discussion group, which was intended to bring students together to identify and discuss what we considered the most pressing issues impacting the well-​being of the Mexican American community. We held several successful discussions but wanting to do more, this served as a catalyst for launching an organization we initially called Hijos del Sol out of respect for our pre-​Colombian heritage. A strong feminist, Sandy steadfastly challenged this until we changed it to Hijas and Hijos del Sol and then to MEChA. Under the group we began printing our own newspaper addressing what we considered pressing social issues. Chief among these was police harassment and immigrant justice. We sponsored rallies, developed coalitions, and went on the local public radio station to magnify our message. During this time, The United Farmworkers Union launched a second national campaign to boycott grapes. Through Texas UFW organizer, Rebecca Flores, we joined that cause and had the opportunity to meet César Chávez. As an activist and advocate for a number of causes, I worked to transform my sense of self by speaking at public rallies, attending marches, and expanding my knowledge of Chicano Studies, public policy, and various forms of leadership and advocacy. In other words, I reclaimed my lost voice.

Image 31

    Grape Boycott Campaign workers, Cesár Chávez, Sandy Soto, myself and others,. circa 1986. Author personal collection.

When I completed my BA in the winter of 1987, I had no clear idea where I was going. I gave serious consideration to joining the Peace Corps in the spring of 1988. I thought that if I joined and went to Latin America, it might give me a chance to immerse myself in Spanish and finally become fluent. I drove to Dallas, took a test, and received an interview. During the interview I expressed my interest in being assigned to Latin America but when I received an offer it was only for places in the Middle East. I declined and when I asked why I wasn’t given my top choice, I was told that they were concerned that I might have too much interest in the region because of my background. This was the late 1980s and there was political unrest in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. I have to admit that I did care, and I knew enough to be critical of US policy in Latin America. After my failed attempt to join the Marines, I had been relieved that I did not do so because I later learned that unlike the Peace Corps the military sought to recruit more Latinos to join to assist in their Central American intervention efforts. It was after this failed attempt that I began seriously exploring options like teaching in high school or pursuing an MA After exploring the Peace Corps and considering an application to a high school English teacher position, one of my former English professors at UH, Erving Rothman, encouraged me to apply to graduate school. Ignorant about the dynamics of admission, I sought letters from faculty and drove to the University of Texas in Austin in mid-​March to hand deliver my application. It was the only school to which I applied. I was fortunate to get accepted in late May.

Sandy decided to continue her undergraduate degree at UT-​Austin, where her mother had been a student. So together we headed out to Austin. At the age of 28, all I knew was that I carried within me a love for Chicano literature that had begun to help me understand my life in relationship to others. In many respects my pursuit of a graduate degree was a continuation of my effort to discover myself and to find, not a profession, but an authentic and meaningful purpose for my life that would allow me to not only self-​advocate but to contribute to building a better world.

There is, of course, more to my story, including the continuation of my education and growth as an activist, and my role as a professor. But that story will be continued elsewhere.