NEWCOMERS INCREDULOUS OF RACISM, DISCRIMINATION AGAINST LOCAL HISPANICS

By Juan Montoya
Just the other day Son Numero Uno was telling me that his high school teacher (a recent arrival from the Midwest) didn't believe that Hispanics suffered discrimination in South Texas in recent years.

As he was telling me this, we were on our way to visit his grandparents along FM 802 on Weslaco Road. We had just gone under the overpass of US 77-83. There is a new digital billboard at that corner and coincidentally, it had been displaying an ad for the breakfast tacos (at 99 cents) sold at local Stripes stores. The billboards are state-of-the-art (locally anyway) and the photo showed the business end of a bacon-potato-and-egg taco pointed right at the viewer.

I smiled to myself at his remarks and couldn't help but break out in a little laugh. He, of course, in his best high school teacher style, remarked: "What's so funny? Why don't you share your joke with us so we can all laugh?"

I told him about when I had first attended the first grade in Olmito elementary. My dad was a foreman and also drove a tractor for one of the large cotton farms which at the time dominated local agriculture. When it came time for me to go to school, I jumped on a bus with my two older sisters and we traveled four or five miles to Olmito.

I didn't speak a word of English, and neither did many of the first-time students whose parents also worked on the farms. At the time, cotton was still picked by hand as was the thinning of the rows. It was hard, back-breaking work and the only labor I ever saw in the fields were local Hispanics and Mexican nationals who were picked up by my Dad at the Lopez Supermarket in downtown Brownsville next to the Vally Transit terminal.  In those days, the Border Patrol was very lenient with local farmers and would turn a blind eye to their use of illegal workers.

If you think the picking of cotton in the hot sun was hard, the thinning was even harder. The men would wear leather knee pads and literally crawl down half a mile rows pulling two-inch plants to give the others room to grow so a crop could be picked later. The men would straighten up at the end of the day and walk half-bent to drink water or crawl back up onto the truck awaiting them to take them back to town where they would make their way back to Matamoros.

When we went to school, my Mom sent us with flour tacos stuffed with our favorite filling. Carne guisada with beans was my favorite. My sisters also took their tacos with them. But soon there arose a problem, or rather, various problems.

Spanish was prohibited in school and I was literally incommunicado for the better part of first grade. I didn't speak English and my teacher was in her 70s and didn't speak a lick of Spanish. To make matters worse, the white kids and the "townie" Hispanics in school laughed at us at lunchtime when we took out our tacos from our brown paper lunch bags to eat. They had sandwiches.

When my Mom found out, she had our Dad buy us baloney and sliced bread, something we never ate at home. She did it to make the girls' social life a bit more bearable. I, who didn't understand, wasn't bothered.

The other kids aboard the bus with us were also Mexican farm kids. They, too, took tacos their mothers sent for lunch. As soon as they found out I had baloney sandwiches we did what kids from time immemorial have done: we traded. The kid whom I traded with had a Mom who was a culinary artist and made soft flour tacos that wrapped exquisitely around a core of soft fried diced potatoes mixed with bacon bits and drippings. They were to kill for.

And to make sure that there was no one laughing at us as we ate, we found a mesquite tree by the railroad tracks at the east side of the school yard to eat. There, in the shade of the tree, we ate and spoke Spanish in safety. That tree still stands today just inside the fence by the rialroad tracks.

In the classroom, it was another story. Since I couldn't speak English, I sat at the rear of the reading groups. I didn't fit in the A group, the B group, the C, or for that matter, any group. When I spoke with other students and Miss Stroman (Mis Trompas) caught me, it meant standing facing a corner or with a penny pressed to my nose as punishment. Talk about "immersion."

After a few months of this routine, I asked one of my mesquite lunchtime friends how to ask permission to use the bathroom. He told me something that sounded like "Maybescuz." 

That afternoon I tried it. I raised my hand and Miss Stroman looked up from reading to the A group and motioned me to approach. I uttered: "Maybescuz?"

The poor woman nearly had a heart attack and the reading group fell silent. She motioned with her right hand to the hallway and I walked in the bath. All the kids in there, of course, were chattering away in Spanish and wanted to know how I had done it. From there on, a conspiracy of Spanish developed and I went on to the second grade.

On the way to my parents house off 802 we also passed by a Taco Bell off Old Highway 77. I remember a joke told to me by a fellow Hispanic student in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, that a white friend of his was congratulating him for Hispanics having finally come on their own and achieving success by having their own phone company now: Taco Bell.

It took a while for the kids to catch on to that one. But as for me, every time I go by that restaurant, I can't help but remember lunchtimes at Olmito elementary under that old mesquite tree and I break into the smile that makes my kids suspicious that I'm up to something.