Varrio Southwest Side
"Because my school district was desegregated."
"What's that mean?"
"You know, Brown v. Board of Education? The end of Separate But Equal? That kind of thing."
"But I thought that was all like 1960s civil rights stuff?"
"Um, well, Lubbock was a little slow."
And so, once again I realized what a strange backward childhood world I take for granted having lived in, but is always so foreign to my wife and friends.
I wasn't sure how far back the whole desegregation thing went, so I had to do some basic research. It turns out it was supreme court case US v. Lubbock Independent School District which finally forced Lubbock to do something about its racial divisions in 1970. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself.
Lubbock, TX, at least for the bit of its history which I experienced, was always a city of sides. Like slicing a peach, you could pare apart the racial makeup of the city by cutting in various areas around downtown, which was like the pit in the middle. Everything in the west and southwest directions from downtown composed "Lubbock proper," as some people called it. Southwest Lubbock was the primarily white part of the city, and contained the vast majority of the commercial properties as well: the mall, grocery stores, chain restaurants, business offices, and so on. I even knew lots of people (especially in university) who honestly had no idea that Lubbock didn't simply turn to cotton fields immediately outside the "white" parts of town.
Like some kind of slightly surreal mirror image was the "Lubbock East Side," the primarily black part of town. East Lubbock, with the marked exception of the fairgrounds and some small agriculture-oriented business here and there, consisted mostly of little run-down houses hemmed in by high chain link fences, vast lots of undeveloped or long-ago-demolished space, and the occasional lonely church, burger stand, or independent grocery. The sheer emptiness of it is what impressed me most as a kid, as if it used to be a busy place, but everyone just up and left. East Lubbock even today has more than its fair share of abandoned factories and food processing plants, vaguely functional cinderblock buildings, and the creepiest overgrown miniature golf course on the planet. The Lubbock tornado of 1970 may be partly to blame for all this emptiness, but it was still eerie in the way that in all the decades which followed, nothing seemed ever to have grown back over there.
Likewise, towards the northeast of town was the less official "North side," the traditional territory of Lubbock's hispanic community. The North side at least seemed a little less of an economic wasteland, its heavy industrial areas sharing space with a number of cafes, flea markets, night clubs, pawn shops, and bingo halls, but was certainly still cut from a different cloth than areas a mile or two farther south.
Even the local gang activity aligned itself strictly along geographic lines. VNS (Varrio North Side), VSS (Varrio South Side, following a peninsula of hispanic domain which traced through downtown to the south), and VES (Varrio East Side) . . . all spawning the inevitable white parody gang VSWS (Varrio Southwest Side). When I saw a VES tag somewhere in the north side, I always wondered to what degree its creator risked life and limb to spraypaint it there.
Lubbock, as you'd expect from any city of 200,000 or so, had multiple (five) high schools, ten or so junior high schools, and about forty elementary schools, all distributed geographically around town. The high schools, because of their small number, were particularly polarized. Monterey High School in the south, and Coronado High School in the west, both the traditionally "white" schools. Dunbar High School in the east, with predominantly African American students. Estacado High School in the northeast, with mostly Mexican American students (the school also directly adjoined Lubbock's youth offender detention center, whatever that means). And Lubbock High School, the oldest of the five, directly in the city center a little ways from downtown, and with an interesting mix of all of them.
In fact, it bears mentioning that when I was attending Lubbock High School, I remember it earning some kind of national recognition for being "the nation's most integrated school," which, upon clarification meant that the ethnic profile of the school most closely mirrored the ethnic makeup (based on enrollment data) of the entire school district. Presumably, based on the numbers I can find for 1990, that equated to 46% "non-hispanic white", 14% "non-hispanic black", and 38% "hispanic." I'm still not sure what the bizarre "non-hispanic black" terminology is about.
At any rate, the statistics may give you some kind of mental picture of all of us high school students standing in a big rainbow-like circle holding hands, with inspirational music playing overhead and a strident voiceover of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, but hold off on that judgment until you've heard what it was like, at least in the later grades.
As a result of US v. Lubbock Independent School district, Lubbock became an officially "desegregated" district in the 1970s. But there are really only a few ways to accomplish that kind of thing, and Lubbock wound up with two.
The first I'll mention was the Magnet School Program. This was the kind of happy side of desegregation. Schools in economically depressed neighborhoods (but not too dodgy, mind you — mostly around downtown — I'm sure that was no accident) were designated "magnet schools" and offered special academic, arts, or athletic opportunities which schools elsewhere didn't provide. This meant that both my junior high and high school had racial mixes far more diverse than most schools, or that they would have had without the program, but the mix stopped as soon as the starting bell rang each morning. Most of the white (and the Asian, for that matter) students filed off to the special academic Honors courses, while black, hispanic, and lower socio-economic whites wandered towards the "regular" courses. We were like two schools sharing the same campus, united only by school colors and the occasional pep rally, sporting event, or homeroom class, the few gatherings exempt from self-selection bias. In some ways, the school was like a little microcosm of the adult career world, where rich white lawyers and bankers march into the downtown core at 8am, ride the elevators up to their sparkling glass towers, and then march out again in the afternoon, leaving the neighborhood once more to its permanent residents — everyone was in the same geographic space, but they were as far apart as they could be.
I loved the magnet program for the academic opportunities it afforded me, some of which were world class in the case of my high school, but in terms of any true goals of racial integration, the program was, ironically, quite the flop. I certainly had a diverse ethnic array of close friends in high school, but they were all the Chinese, Indian, Turkish, and other university-professor-progeny whom I would have gone to school with anyway because they lived in the same neighborhoods I did. The few African Americans and Mexican Americans in my classes were usually people from affluent families and with highly educated parents as well.
The district's other desegregation strategy, the one which perplexed my wife so, was forced busing, which was an artifact more of my early education as it occurred primarily at the elementary school level.
It occurred to me recently that all my best friends in grades 2 and 3 had last names in the second half of the alphabet. It was no coincidence. You see, if your last name began with A-L, you were bused off to a school deep in the North Side in grade 2, and in grade 3, the A-Ls returned while those of us in M-Z took their place. By the time we reunited in fourth grade, we barely recognized each other. Originally fourth grade also would have included a small number of students bused in from an East side school, but for inexplicable reasons, that half of the busing equation disappeared by the time I reached that age.
Regardless, during those mid-elementary years, we all took turns seeing how the other half lived, so to speak. The bus picked us up outside our home school at 7:45am, or so, and arrived at our adopted school at 8:30 (because of a strange circuitous route to get there, which even today I don't at all understand – school buses in general all seem to go the longest possible route to their destinations even when there are no intermediate stops along the way which would dictate such a detour). By the time we got there, it was always about 15 minutes after the local kids had started homeroom class. We felt like the perennial latecomers and early departers (also packing up and rushing out slightly before the other kids were done).
The classes, unlike what I experienced later in junior high and high school, were indeed equally mixed, and as weird as the whole thing seems looking back on it now, it was still one of the most positive experiences of my grade school years.
The school itself was actually much newer than my home school (I wonder if the busing program had anything to do with that, because there were certainly some very run-down schools in the area as well) and was blessed with some truly fantastic teachers. The school did seem to get sort of the second string of textbooks (often we just used handouts instead) and library books, but the school's ample collection of tremendously outdated educational and safety films from the 1950s and 1960s remain some of my fondest "art film" memories (there was one safety film in particular whose gut-wrenchingly gory imagery stays with me even now — I so wish I could find it again in all its dismembered thumb and fishhooked ear glory, just to prove to contemporaries that it really existed).
And the ad-hoc friendships: I think parents and administrators often talked of worries of whether the "privileged kids" would treat the "underprivileged kids" right, but our concern was more about whether they, the rightful members of the school, would be accepting of us, the strangers who invaded their home territory ever weekday from 8 to 3, dragging along our shiny Trapper Keepers and puffy stickers and expensive Eraser Mate pens our parents had equipped us with. We looking at some of the bruises and scrapes the neighborhood kids had inflicted upon each other and wondered silently if our injuries were on their way at some point. But no, what happened, surprisingly, is that these kids welcomed us with open arms, and couldn't stop telling us every single thing they knew, about their friends, their families, their lives. It was as if they thought maybe they could charm us into whisking them away wherever it was we came from where the pencils were always new and always regulation #2 grade.
I listened to their stories of after-school urban exploration, hiding places in the drainage pipes under the cities with sewer rats as big as cats, and who accepted the double-dog-dares to walk across the rickety wooden railroad trestle crossing the small canyon near the school. I learned most of my total Spanish vocabulary there, along with a fair amount about real Mexican food ("Tamales for Christmas dinner? Are you serious?!? Can I come to your house, that's awesome!") and Spanish songs, and even a good deal of those things that boys and girls in third grade weren't supposed to talk to each other about, but since it already felt so much like we weren't supposed to be around each other in general, little things like boy-girl propriety suddenly seemed so . . . irrelevant.
On the very last day of third grade I literally cried during the whole bus ride home, because I knew I was losing something, even though, being that young, I wasn't quite sure what it was.
I know now.
That year, in an artificial environment where some distant policy handed down all the way from the Supreme Court in Washington forced us all to coexist, we were all victims together. We shared the good classroom supplies, the good teachers, and the first picks in kickball. We waged war in food fights along boundaries created only by who was on what side of the long, bench-like lunch tables. All our lives were equally disrupted by this strange desegregation arrangement, and it seemed best for us to make the most of it together. And, if we got along, we weren't sacrificing any pride, because we felt like we were proving something to the adults who expected us not to get along at all.
So I know now, the reason I was crying is that I somehow foresaw that the magic I'd felt all that year was only temporary.
My experiences at the magnet junior high and high schools only a few years later only confirmed that my inter-ethnic friendship license had been brutally revoked. I was now an invader, only showing up for the cool classes which got the good funding and great instructors, while the other students languished in classrooms in the darkest corners of the schools, under apathetic third-tier teachers assigned from the athletic coaches with the least academic enthusiasm.
Sensing my exclusion, and fearing the aggression I felt from those suspicious of my pale skin, I searched for any of my old third grade friends. Larry? Raphael? Ann-Marie? I would have even settled for Monica the booger-eater. I wanted a way in, a way to score a little legitimacy, to once again be accepted. But my old schoolmates were nowhere to be found, replaced by new and untrusting faces which seemed always to accompany grunts of, "Who do you think you're looking at?" and suggesting I go back where I belonged.
To bring an end to a long story, periodic statistical reports eventually showed that Lubbock was as integrated as it needed to be (whatever that meant), and sometime in the late 80s the busing system was dismantled, and in the mid-90s the integration-motivated magnet school program was quietly morphed into the more nationally familiar Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, which were now offered at all schools equally. I'd gone on to university, and eventually moved away. Desegregation programs are probably nothing more than a childhood war story to kids today.
I still sometimes hear the echoes of those taunts to "Go back where you belong." And, you know, after that old third grade year, one part of me was never again sure where I did belong.
And the funny thing is, however reluctantly it was that the school district agreed to the busing mandate in the first place, and however inconsistently they implemented it, however artificial it seemed to students and teachers at the time, and however many rich white parents filed legal action to prevent their kids from having to participate (there were at least a few each year), and however many people treated it in the end as if it had been sort of a half-hearted failure as it was being dismantled, perhaps messing with our sense of belonging was the whole point in the first place. You treat people a lot differently when you're not the one who "belongs" — I know that much.
And I know one more thing. I'll still take tamales over turkey any day, even on Christmas. I know that.
"What's that mean?"
"You know, Brown v. Board of Education? The end of Separate But Equal? That kind of thing."
"But I thought that was all like 1960s civil rights stuff?"
"Um, well, Lubbock was a little slow."
And so, once again I realized what a strange backward childhood world I take for granted having lived in, but is always so foreign to my wife and friends.
I wasn't sure how far back the whole desegregation thing went, so I had to do some basic research. It turns out it was supreme court case US v. Lubbock Independent School District which finally forced Lubbock to do something about its racial divisions in 1970. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself.
Lubbock, TX, at least for the bit of its history which I experienced, was always a city of sides. Like slicing a peach, you could pare apart the racial makeup of the city by cutting in various areas around downtown, which was like the pit in the middle. Everything in the west and southwest directions from downtown composed "Lubbock proper," as some people called it. Southwest Lubbock was the primarily white part of the city, and contained the vast majority of the commercial properties as well: the mall, grocery stores, chain restaurants, business offices, and so on. I even knew lots of people (especially in university) who honestly had no idea that Lubbock didn't simply turn to cotton fields immediately outside the "white" parts of town.
Like some kind of slightly surreal mirror image was the "Lubbock East Side," the primarily black part of town. East Lubbock, with the marked exception of the fairgrounds and some small agriculture-oriented business here and there, consisted mostly of little run-down houses hemmed in by high chain link fences, vast lots of undeveloped or long-ago-demolished space, and the occasional lonely church, burger stand, or independent grocery. The sheer emptiness of it is what impressed me most as a kid, as if it used to be a busy place, but everyone just up and left. East Lubbock even today has more than its fair share of abandoned factories and food processing plants, vaguely functional cinderblock buildings, and the creepiest overgrown miniature golf course on the planet. The Lubbock tornado of 1970 may be partly to blame for all this emptiness, but it was still eerie in the way that in all the decades which followed, nothing seemed ever to have grown back over there.
Likewise, towards the northeast of town was the less official "North side," the traditional territory of Lubbock's hispanic community. The North side at least seemed a little less of an economic wasteland, its heavy industrial areas sharing space with a number of cafes, flea markets, night clubs, pawn shops, and bingo halls, but was certainly still cut from a different cloth than areas a mile or two farther south.
Even the local gang activity aligned itself strictly along geographic lines. VNS (Varrio North Side), VSS (Varrio South Side, following a peninsula of hispanic domain which traced through downtown to the south), and VES (Varrio East Side) . . . all spawning the inevitable white parody gang VSWS (Varrio Southwest Side). When I saw a VES tag somewhere in the north side, I always wondered to what degree its creator risked life and limb to spraypaint it there.
Lubbock, as you'd expect from any city of 200,000 or so, had multiple (five) high schools, ten or so junior high schools, and about forty elementary schools, all distributed geographically around town. The high schools, because of their small number, were particularly polarized. Monterey High School in the south, and Coronado High School in the west, both the traditionally "white" schools. Dunbar High School in the east, with predominantly African American students. Estacado High School in the northeast, with mostly Mexican American students (the school also directly adjoined Lubbock's youth offender detention center, whatever that means). And Lubbock High School, the oldest of the five, directly in the city center a little ways from downtown, and with an interesting mix of all of them.
In fact, it bears mentioning that when I was attending Lubbock High School, I remember it earning some kind of national recognition for being "the nation's most integrated school," which, upon clarification meant that the ethnic profile of the school most closely mirrored the ethnic makeup (based on enrollment data) of the entire school district. Presumably, based on the numbers I can find for 1990, that equated to 46% "non-hispanic white", 14% "non-hispanic black", and 38% "hispanic." I'm still not sure what the bizarre "non-hispanic black" terminology is about.
At any rate, the statistics may give you some kind of mental picture of all of us high school students standing in a big rainbow-like circle holding hands, with inspirational music playing overhead and a strident voiceover of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, but hold off on that judgment until you've heard what it was like, at least in the later grades.
As a result of US v. Lubbock Independent School district, Lubbock became an officially "desegregated" district in the 1970s. But there are really only a few ways to accomplish that kind of thing, and Lubbock wound up with two.
The first I'll mention was the Magnet School Program. This was the kind of happy side of desegregation. Schools in economically depressed neighborhoods (but not too dodgy, mind you — mostly around downtown — I'm sure that was no accident) were designated "magnet schools" and offered special academic, arts, or athletic opportunities which schools elsewhere didn't provide. This meant that both my junior high and high school had racial mixes far more diverse than most schools, or that they would have had without the program, but the mix stopped as soon as the starting bell rang each morning. Most of the white (and the Asian, for that matter) students filed off to the special academic Honors courses, while black, hispanic, and lower socio-economic whites wandered towards the "regular" courses. We were like two schools sharing the same campus, united only by school colors and the occasional pep rally, sporting event, or homeroom class, the few gatherings exempt from self-selection bias. In some ways, the school was like a little microcosm of the adult career world, where rich white lawyers and bankers march into the downtown core at 8am, ride the elevators up to their sparkling glass towers, and then march out again in the afternoon, leaving the neighborhood once more to its permanent residents — everyone was in the same geographic space, but they were as far apart as they could be.
I loved the magnet program for the academic opportunities it afforded me, some of which were world class in the case of my high school, but in terms of any true goals of racial integration, the program was, ironically, quite the flop. I certainly had a diverse ethnic array of close friends in high school, but they were all the Chinese, Indian, Turkish, and other university-professor-progeny whom I would have gone to school with anyway because they lived in the same neighborhoods I did. The few African Americans and Mexican Americans in my classes were usually people from affluent families and with highly educated parents as well.
The district's other desegregation strategy, the one which perplexed my wife so, was forced busing, which was an artifact more of my early education as it occurred primarily at the elementary school level.
It occurred to me recently that all my best friends in grades 2 and 3 had last names in the second half of the alphabet. It was no coincidence. You see, if your last name began with A-L, you were bused off to a school deep in the North Side in grade 2, and in grade 3, the A-Ls returned while those of us in M-Z took their place. By the time we reunited in fourth grade, we barely recognized each other. Originally fourth grade also would have included a small number of students bused in from an East side school, but for inexplicable reasons, that half of the busing equation disappeared by the time I reached that age.
Regardless, during those mid-elementary years, we all took turns seeing how the other half lived, so to speak. The bus picked us up outside our home school at 7:45am, or so, and arrived at our adopted school at 8:30 (because of a strange circuitous route to get there, which even today I don't at all understand – school buses in general all seem to go the longest possible route to their destinations even when there are no intermediate stops along the way which would dictate such a detour). By the time we got there, it was always about 15 minutes after the local kids had started homeroom class. We felt like the perennial latecomers and early departers (also packing up and rushing out slightly before the other kids were done).
The classes, unlike what I experienced later in junior high and high school, were indeed equally mixed, and as weird as the whole thing seems looking back on it now, it was still one of the most positive experiences of my grade school years.
The school itself was actually much newer than my home school (I wonder if the busing program had anything to do with that, because there were certainly some very run-down schools in the area as well) and was blessed with some truly fantastic teachers. The school did seem to get sort of the second string of textbooks (often we just used handouts instead) and library books, but the school's ample collection of tremendously outdated educational and safety films from the 1950s and 1960s remain some of my fondest "art film" memories (there was one safety film in particular whose gut-wrenchingly gory imagery stays with me even now — I so wish I could find it again in all its dismembered thumb and fishhooked ear glory, just to prove to contemporaries that it really existed).
And the ad-hoc friendships: I think parents and administrators often talked of worries of whether the "privileged kids" would treat the "underprivileged kids" right, but our concern was more about whether they, the rightful members of the school, would be accepting of us, the strangers who invaded their home territory ever weekday from 8 to 3, dragging along our shiny Trapper Keepers and puffy stickers and expensive Eraser Mate pens our parents had equipped us with. We looking at some of the bruises and scrapes the neighborhood kids had inflicted upon each other and wondered silently if our injuries were on their way at some point. But no, what happened, surprisingly, is that these kids welcomed us with open arms, and couldn't stop telling us every single thing they knew, about their friends, their families, their lives. It was as if they thought maybe they could charm us into whisking them away wherever it was we came from where the pencils were always new and always regulation #2 grade.
I listened to their stories of after-school urban exploration, hiding places in the drainage pipes under the cities with sewer rats as big as cats, and who accepted the double-dog-dares to walk across the rickety wooden railroad trestle crossing the small canyon near the school. I learned most of my total Spanish vocabulary there, along with a fair amount about real Mexican food ("Tamales for Christmas dinner? Are you serious?!? Can I come to your house, that's awesome!") and Spanish songs, and even a good deal of those things that boys and girls in third grade weren't supposed to talk to each other about, but since it already felt so much like we weren't supposed to be around each other in general, little things like boy-girl propriety suddenly seemed so . . . irrelevant.
On the very last day of third grade I literally cried during the whole bus ride home, because I knew I was losing something, even though, being that young, I wasn't quite sure what it was.
I know now.
That year, in an artificial environment where some distant policy handed down all the way from the Supreme Court in Washington forced us all to coexist, we were all victims together. We shared the good classroom supplies, the good teachers, and the first picks in kickball. We waged war in food fights along boundaries created only by who was on what side of the long, bench-like lunch tables. All our lives were equally disrupted by this strange desegregation arrangement, and it seemed best for us to make the most of it together. And, if we got along, we weren't sacrificing any pride, because we felt like we were proving something to the adults who expected us not to get along at all.
So I know now, the reason I was crying is that I somehow foresaw that the magic I'd felt all that year was only temporary.
My experiences at the magnet junior high and high schools only a few years later only confirmed that my inter-ethnic friendship license had been brutally revoked. I was now an invader, only showing up for the cool classes which got the good funding and great instructors, while the other students languished in classrooms in the darkest corners of the schools, under apathetic third-tier teachers assigned from the athletic coaches with the least academic enthusiasm.
Sensing my exclusion, and fearing the aggression I felt from those suspicious of my pale skin, I searched for any of my old third grade friends. Larry? Raphael? Ann-Marie? I would have even settled for Monica the booger-eater. I wanted a way in, a way to score a little legitimacy, to once again be accepted. But my old schoolmates were nowhere to be found, replaced by new and untrusting faces which seemed always to accompany grunts of, "Who do you think you're looking at?" and suggesting I go back where I belonged.
To bring an end to a long story, periodic statistical reports eventually showed that Lubbock was as integrated as it needed to be (whatever that meant), and sometime in the late 80s the busing system was dismantled, and in the mid-90s the integration-motivated magnet school program was quietly morphed into the more nationally familiar Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, which were now offered at all schools equally. I'd gone on to university, and eventually moved away. Desegregation programs are probably nothing more than a childhood war story to kids today.
I still sometimes hear the echoes of those taunts to "Go back where you belong." And, you know, after that old third grade year, one part of me was never again sure where I did belong.
And the funny thing is, however reluctantly it was that the school district agreed to the busing mandate in the first place, and however inconsistently they implemented it, however artificial it seemed to students and teachers at the time, and however many rich white parents filed legal action to prevent their kids from having to participate (there were at least a few each year), and however many people treated it in the end as if it had been sort of a half-hearted failure as it was being dismantled, perhaps messing with our sense of belonging was the whole point in the first place. You treat people a lot differently when you're not the one who "belongs" — I know that much.
And I know one more thing. I'll still take tamales over turkey any day, even on Christmas. I know that.