How Journalism Helped Me Fight Against the White-Washed Texas I Grew up In

[douglas9]

I still remember my last high school football game on the Red Oak Hawkette drill team.

I was 17, and our dance group had spent hours rehearsing in our maroon leotards and bright white ankle boots with mini silver bolo ties on the side. We wore nude dance tights and white hats with matching maroon lipstick. Big white smiles, rosy cheeks, and fake eyelashes.

That was my favorite uniform.

I loved the way I could swing my hips side to side and feel the fringe on my legs during high kicks to rival any Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleader. The sequins and sparkles refracted the glow from the Friday night lights.

That last game of the season, our varsity boys played at the old Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium in Irving. It was the first time our varsity football team had made it to playoffs in at least a decade, and it seemed like the whole of Red Oak — then population 7,000 — was in the stands. We lost the game, but those memories stayed with me.

As a Latina and a child of immigrants, I didn’t always feel like I belonged in my small, mostly white town. But in that uniform, I did.

I grew up just south of Dallas, and my parents — who were originally from Mexico and Guatemala — turned to assimilation for survival. My mom and (step) dad taught me to blend in and to embrace being Texan. Not Mexican. That was hard for a brown-skinned girl who didn’t look white passing at all.

I remember the look on my parents’ faces when I told them I was dating a Mexican kid from band class instead of a white church boy like my sister.

Now I see that they were trying their best to protect me: It was normal to see confederate flags on lifted pickups in the high school senior parking lot. At lunchtime, the kids at school self-segregated. Just last week, the Supreme Court made it legal to discriminate against people who speak Spanish or look brown.

In grade school, kids are taught that Texas rebels stood their ground at the Alamo. But not that Mexico invited Texas settlers onto their land under the promise that the colonists wouldn’t enslave people — a promise they broke. Despite the myth that Alamo defenders valiantly fought to the death (to defend the right to own slaves), historians now agree that many, including Davy Crockett, probably surrendered and were executed.

https://thebarbedwire.com/2025/09/16/journalism-helped-me-fight-against-the-white-washed-texas/

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Truth

From the article…

It wasn’t until I left the dome of life in Red Oak that I realized that there was more to the story of Texas.

That assimilation veil was lifted the moment I set foot in Dr. Maggie Rivas Rodriguez’s Latino Media and Policy class at the University of Texas. There, I learned our state is home to generations of Latinos who’ve molded our culture — George I. Sánchez, who helped end Texas’ segregated schools for Latinos; the Hispanic golf team that won the Texas state championship in 1957 — despite the fact that they weren’t even allowed into the local golf course; and the Chicana cheerleaders in Crystal City who were denied spots on the high school squad and helped start the Latino Civil Rights movement in 1969.

Rodriguez is an associate professor of journalism, associate professor at the center for Mexican American studies, and the director of the Voces Oral History Center, which is dedicated to recording, preserving and disseminating the stories of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Her class is where I learned about the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights volunteer-based organization. She also taught me about MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which also champions civil rights.

Her class is where I learned about La Matanza, or the “The Massacre,” a brutal period of sustained violence against Mexicans in Texas from 1910 to 1920. Cattlemen, U.S. Army soldiers, and the Texas Rangers lynched hundreds Mexicans during La Matanza. Some, like migrant worker Antonio Rodríguez, were burned alive. Other mobs hanged, shot, or whipped Latino U.S. citizens who just also happened to be Mexican, The New York Times has reported.

In the Porvenir Massacre in 1918, Texas Rangers woke landowners and farmers in the middle of the night and executed 15 men and boys, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

Continues…

[Paladin]

2. Any of the rest of you Texan old-timers recall...

...getting bussed from class to a free showing of John Wayne's piece-of-shit Alamo movie? It damn sure happened in Austin---I was one of those schoolchildren, and I remember it well. Not one of the AISD's prouder moments...